The GAA presumably hoped at least to get out of January before the inevitable first disciplinary crisis of the year. But the well-flagged intention to modify the experimental disciplinary rules is just the latest depressingly familiar example of the desire for lines of least resistance when it comes to managing foul play and indiscipline.

In one way it's hard to blame the work group, which produced the trial proposals relating to the sin bin.

Scarcely a month after they had unveiled their proposals, they realised that there was zero chance of acceptance at next April's annual congress.

Since the start of the new season with the secondary provincial competitions, each weekend has produced a chorus of dissent. The Ulster Council refused even to allow the experimental rules to be implemented during the McKenna Cup.

It's a fair bet that, with the National Leagues on the near horizon, there was apprehension that once the Ulster teams found themselves subject to the imperatives of the sin bin with no preparation under their belts the whole tedious process of complaint, recrimination and relentless focus on the statistics of indiscipline would start all over again.

So it was decided to vary the terms of the punishment for players receiving a yellow card. It is expected that GAA President Seán Kelly will next week announce that the penalty for a yellow card is to be dismissal for the remainder of the match with a replacement player allowed to come in.

There has been knee-jerk condemnation of this idea but it's been around for a while. Pat Daly, the GAA's Head of Games who is also a member of the Work Group that brought forward the current proposals, has long been at the forefront of trying to develop more sensible disciplinary procedures.

In his Games Overview report to Congress three years ago, he proposed that players sent off should be replaced and subject to a range of individual suspensions. The rationale was the all too plausible: referees would feel under less pressure in showing red cards and would consequently be less inclined to spend the rest of the match compensating the depleted team.

So, aside from the irony that such sanction will now be used for a yellow rather than red card, it's not too surprising that the idea should resurface at the moment when there is an urgent need to improvise. But it's not what the GAA said it would do about foul play.

Overall it will be a bad day's work to run scared of the current rumpus. For a start the proposals are not being given a fair trial. The traditional vehicle for such experiments is the National League - and for a good reason. A series of matches within a coherent time span gives monitors an opportunity to judge whether the experiment is worth adopting on a longer-term basis.

This would have been a very useful exercise regardless of whether Congress decided to persevere with the sin bin. Discarding an experiment after a couple of weeks in the O'Byrne Cup means that there will be no opportunity to assess the impact of the rule changes.

The howls of complaint, which have been aired in recent weeks, relate to the severity of the punishment for a yellow card. They have little to do with any revision of the actual playing rules. Yet how else can the response to foul play be formulated? When the stage has been reached - as it was long ago in Gaelic football - when players are comfortable with the sanctions imposed for breaking the rules, the logical answer is to intensify those penalties. All other arguments about consistency of application and special pleading about the nature of the match or what harm was done by individual fouls are irrelevant.

A few years ago the island was full of noise when wheel clamping was introduced to combat illegal parking. The offence was the same but the punishment suddenly became considerably more inconvenient than writing a cheque to cover whatever parking summonses eventually reached you. As a result illegal parking isn't a problem anymore. Had the authorities been guided by the views of whingeing motorists stamping their feet beside immobilised cars, that idea would also have been dropped within a few weeks. Instead there was a behavioural change.

We don't have the data to judge what behavioural change there has been on the pitch over less than a month.

But there is anecdotal evidence that fewer fouls are being committed. Maybe that would prove misleading - maybe not. There should have been the evidence of a National League to help decide the issue.

There is no need to reiterate all of the problems that have been caused to the GAA by inept responses to foul play. Added to those now comes a perceived reluctance to stand by a valid experiment in the face of voluble dissent from those who find themselves inconvenienced by the crackdown.

What should have been an interesting and valuable exercise now simply sends out the latest message that the GAA aren't serious about tackling a chronically recurrent issue - one identified by Director General Liam Mulvihill as one of the biggest facing the association.