Hurling needs to tackle red flags before they become bigger issues
By Kevin Egan
It’s the calm before the storm for Offaly football and hurling, with huge quarter-final fixtures coming in each of the next two weekends. The Leinster and Munster hurling finals will take centre stage on Saturday and Sunday, but aside from the obvious interest Offaly will have in the Munster decider and whether it’s Cork or Limerick that will be the county’s opposition in a fortnight’s time, it’ll be relaxed rather than emotionally involved viewing for Offaly GAA people over the weekend.
It’s also an interesting time for the sport of hurling, in that the GAA has opened the floor to public submissions in the form of a Hurling Review Public Survey, which will feed into the small-ball sport’s equivalent of the Football Review Committee (FRC).
Former Cork senior manager John Meyler is the chairperson of the Hurling Advisory Committee (HAC) who will receive and parse these survey results. Highly qualified statisticians might question the survey’s structure as there are several sections which are leading in nature, but there is also ample scope for people to put in their own unfettered thoughts and views.
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it hasn’t been a vintage year for intercounty hurling so far.
The Leinster championship was competitive, though 60 per cent of all games played (9/15) were decided by a winning margin of eight points of more. The Munster championship had more underwhelming games than usual, the Joe McDonagh Cup was arguably even worse with just three games out of 15 decided by less than two clear goals, and there have been rumblings of disquiet at New York winning a second consecutive championship (the Nickey Rackard Cup) after just joining the competition at the semi-final stage.
At this stage, nearly 95 per cent of all intercounty hurling matches for the year have been played, and outside of Offaly and Dublin, who have enjoyed a wonderful summer so far, it feels like things have yet to get going.
For several years, any issues in hurling were masked by Gaelic football becoming a very tough watch for a lot of people. But now that football has entered a golden era on foot of the work of the FRC, suddenly people are more likely to question if what we see at the top level is as entertaining as it is impressive.
The essence of the sport of hurling is still the physical contest, and the ability to execute the skills of the game under serious pressure.
No-one can doubt however that the evolution of the sport has seen players and coaches work towards a situation where skill levels are higher than ever before, but it’s equally undeniable that quite often, those skills are used in order to try and avoid the physical contest aspect.
Nobody could deny the talent level of Olympic level ice skaters, gymnasts, golfers and other stars of individual disciplines, but that’s hardly the direction that anyone wants hurling to go.
But if a goalkeeper takes a quick puckout, placing it right in the hand of a player 40 metres away, and two or three more inch-perfect passes ultimately yield an uncontested shot at the posts from 80 metres out, then perhaps we are going a little bit too close to performance art, and a little bit too far away from competitive sport.
The sport of hurling is still in rude health overall but surely the right thing to do would be to address the red flags in their infancy, rather than to wait until the sport is in a real slump before taking remedial action. Whether that means adjusting the sliotar (ideally increasing the size of the ridges rather than the weight of the ball, for safety reasons), restricting the modern handpass, or even looking at different ways of enforcing the existing rules around steps and charging, the more hurling people that have their say on these matters, the better.