GAELIC GAMES:At the heart of the hand-pass row is that the rule has been all but ignored in recent years, writes SEAN MORAN

‘If I’d listened earlier, I wouldn’t be here. But that’s just the trouble with me. I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.” – Alice in Wonderland.

The GAA championship season began at the weekend. Well, actually it began a fortnight previously, but we can skip over the New York-Galway match – for two good reasons that disconnect it from the real championship.

One, the same rules of competition don’t apply. New York, the losers (that’s their perennial championship status rather than the result of a match), won’t be allowed back into the All-Ireland qualifier system. Two, the fixture was played under different rules.

One of the reasons we know that the championship has started is that the complaining is already under way. There’s something of the little boy who cried “wolf” about managers exaggerating the effect of rule changes – well, the odd one that they don’t succeed in strangling at birth. But on this occasion it’s perhaps possible to sympathise, as May isn’t usually the wolf season, which normally comes in January during the secondary provincial competitions.

On this occasion, the wolf isn’t that menacing. The alleged calamity – the modification of the hand-pass rule – has been presented as something that interferes with 15 years of hard-wiring players to execute a skill or function in one particular way.

It’s hard to see how that is true. The only substantive change between the hand-pass rule of last year and this year’s amended version is that there is now a requirement for a “definite underhand striking action” rather than simply a “definite striking action”.

The purpose of the amendment, proposed by the Connacht Council, was to put further distance between what’s allowed and what is a throw. It largely applies to situations in which a player has the ball in both hands, which makes the striking action extraordinarily difficult for a referee to identify.

That was the rationale behind this year’s experimental rules in the national leagues, which specified that all hand-passes in football had to be executed with the fist. It was when this proposal – together with so many others – bit the dust that opened the door for the Connacht Council version to be debated, after which it was passed comfortably.

The issue of why one proposal succeeded and the other didn’t reflects on the whole process of rule changes. The first idea had been subject to the chorus of disapproval that greets nearly every proposed reform, whereas no one paid any attention to the second until it came time to implement it.

At the heart of the concerns about the hand-pass is the unavoidable conclusion that the rule has been all but ignored in recent years – and equally in hurling, which means that the weekend reaction from the football fixtures may well be duplicated in the weeks ahead.

Mick McGrath, the former Donegal intercounty referee who sat on the football playing rules revision committee, conducted analysis of one random club match and recorded that out of the 200 hand-passes, 77 were invalid but not whistled up.

It’s a stark statistic but unsurprising. Hand-passing has been something no one pays much attention to and any attempt to referee the rule leads to expletives about the game being ruined as a spectacle.

So given that it’s a fair bet that the vast majority of hand-passes that were properly executed last year would still be acceptable this season, why the furore? Will the summer’s spectacle be destroyed?

Video review of the Derry-Armagh match in Celtic Park at the weekend reveals that there were 196 hand-passes, 118 by Derry and 78 by Armagh. Of these, six were penalised, with four frees awarded against Derry and two against Armagh for breaches of the hand-pass rule. It could be argued that one award on either side was faulty.

Out of the 67 frees awarded (a dismal enough statistic in itself), that’s less than nine per cent – hardly a seismic interference.

The main problem for the GAA isn’t that this rule slipped through but that their rules revision procedures are hopelessly out of date. Considered proposals for change are chucked out after frequently inane objections.

A standing committee is needed to review the playing rules on a regular basis. By all means there should be input from players and managers, but these elite participants shouldn’t have an effective veto, as appears to be the case at the moment.

The hand-pass provision is unusual because nearly all such rule changes have generally emerged from a series of structured deliberations, which have been extensively trialled in the national leagues. This came through congress without such trials and takes effect just before the championship.

It would be a good idea if any proposal following a similar, untested trajectory were to be parked until the following January for gradual introduction through the pre-season competitions.

Nonetheless, the insinuation that teams woke up one morning and found their gardens covered in new hand-pass rules is absurd.

The rule was passed on April 16th and all the counties in action last weekend had delegations present. In an age when we are assured that the scientific and logistical detail of team preparation have never been higher, how is it that a new rule isn’t fully absorbed until four weeks later and just days before a first championship match?

Kieran Donaghy, the Kerry full forward, said in the aftermath of his team’s match against Tipperary that he preferred the trialled hand-pass because the use of the fist was more definite than the overhand striking requirement of the modified version.

Pat McEnaney, the most senior of top-flight intercounty referees, is on the record as saying that he prefers the certainty of the fisted pass to both the old rule and the its successor. This is a logical point of view.

But congress decided it didn’t like the fisted pass and for some tenuous reason that the modified open-hand pass would be okay – just as the GAA’s management committee saw no need to persevere with disciplinary reforms despite the evident concern of members over cynical, foul play and the obvious impact of last year’s experimental rules in reducing indiscipline.

Whether it’s because of massive motions lists and the inattention to detail they induce or just a disinclination to change anything, GAA playing rules are ill-served by the current system.

The association constantly manages to engage the voluntary commitment of talented experts, who produce very good advice. But the GAA very seldom follows it.