It is a stark reflection of the depth of the disciplinary crisis in both hurling and football that so many coaches feel threatened by moves to address it

LIKE A less picturesque version of swallows announcing summer, the GAA’s playing fields have in the past couple of weekends featured various grumpy formations of intercounty managers in full denunciatory flight. If you deduced from that there were experimental disciplinary rules in the air, you’d be right.

The comments of Galway and Offaly hurling managers John McIntyre and Joe Dooley weren’t especially remarkable in that both disagreed vehemently with the rules themselves and not, interestingly, as is generally the case, with the referee’s interpretation.

With last Sunday also the starting point for the hurling season, it was equally predictable we would hear the first of the familiar choruses about discipline being primarily a problem with football, whose dark impulses were again bringing down hurling.

“They’re a joke, to be honest,” said Dooley about the experimental rule, requiring players picking up a yellow card to be replaced, which cost him the participation of two players. “I’d say they’re designed for football. Terrible – to lose Ger Oakley and David Kenny without even a bad stroke. It ruined the game for spectators, people who pay good money to come in here today and see that going on.”

McIntyre was more pointed in his criticism, accusing the GAA of gratuitously introducing the rules experiment. “I know David Kenny and Ger Oakley very well and two more honourable, honest players you couldn’t get. From where I was there was an injustice on both occasions.

“I don’t blame the referee today. I blame the legislators. There’s people up in Croke Park trying to justify their existence coming up with these rules. Maybe it’s a football problem. None of those tackles should have got a yellow card and our man Cyril Donnellan shouldn’t have either.

“These guys are working like dogs on the training ground. They put a foot out of place or a hurl out of place and are forced to watch the rest of the match through no fault of their own. It is not good enough. We all know hurling is a man’s game and the way things are going some of our players were nearly afraid to tackle by the end of the game. That’s something no one wants to see happen. Hurling should not be penalised for football’s problems.”

Both McIntyre and Dooley are great hurling enthusiasts and neither could be regarded as fielding teams with an interest in seeing foul play go unpunished so it’s all the more disheartening to hear such summary dismissal of the latest attempt to confront the cancer of indiscipline that has become the most intractable problem facing the games. First discount the obvious stuff about the character of the players involved. Rules have to be applied on the basis of the action. Referees can’t take into account previous conduct when adjudicating fouls during a match.

For the record, the three yellow cards were for two black-card offences, one trip and one body check. Whether they were merited obviously isn’t an issue given the rules rather than their application were what bothered the managers.

Dooley’s point about the injustice done to spectators is equally misplaced. Evidence from the matches played to date under the experimental provisions suggests they have featured fewer fouls and a greater number of scores, which is surely an attractive development? In fairness to both teams on Sunday they survived the yellow cards to produce a very decent contest in the conditions.

Both argued that hurling should be effectively subject to different rules than football, that it is a less unruly game. Is that contention supportable? Not if we look at the DVD that was used by the disciplinary task force to illustrate the need for its proposals. Of the 19 red-card infractions demonstrated, 11 were taken from hurling matches. Obviously a presentation of this nature requires examples from each code but there was no shortage of hurling infractions.

More devastating is the revelation that these 19 very vivid fouls yielded just three red cards and only one of the 11 hurling infractions attracted the appropriate sanction and that was in a club match.

Furthermore, of the 20 examples of the yellow-card fouls that merit dismissal, 12 related to hurling and if you remove the five examples in the exclusively hurling category of “careless use of the hurl”, the split is still effectively 50-50 (eight football and seven hurling).

McIntyre’s charge that the whole experiment was basically the end-product of an under-employed Croke Park secretariat was the most unfair of the criticisms.

The “legislators” he referred to in his criticism are the delegates from all around the country who agreed to conduct this experiment at last October’s special congress. The process itself was among the most transparent ever conducted by the association with the task force touring the provinces twice before piloting the proposals past two meetings of Central Council and the management committee.

Managers, focus groups and media were all provided with copies of the DVD.

The stated purpose of the experiment is to eliminate cynical fouling and protect skilful players in both football and hurling. It is a stark reflection of the depth of the disciplinary crisis that so many managers feel threatened by moves to address it.

Four years ago the last raft of disciplinary experiments hit the rocks after a major storm of outrage raised by intercounty managers.

Liam O’Neill, who chairs the current task force, was forthright about this at last October’s special congress, saying that the GAA had “collectively shirked our responsibility by withdrawing them because of pressure from managers” and he vowed that it wouldn’t happen again.

Acceptance of a culture of foul play has to be challenged. That may take time but the measures used to expedite this challenge may also have to be drastic. Players have to be deterred from doing what may be instinctive at this stage and the best way of doing that is to make the cost to the team of committing these infractions a lot more expensive than any benefit gained from the foul.

It’s sad to have to say that one of the great philosophical buttresses of the criminal law – that it is better for 10 guilty men to walk free than one innocent man to be imprisoned – may have to be inverted in order for the GAA to get a grip on this problem.

Anyone affronted by that prospect, however, probably needn’t worry too much. At the moment there appears every chance that the association will at next April’s congress once again turn its back on tackling this most urgent of problems.

e-mail: smoran@irishtimes.com