I WAS part of the panel on Setanta Sports’ live chat show on Sunday morning called ‘iTalk Sport’.
It’s presented by Newstalk’s ‘Off the Ball’ presenter Eoin McDevitt and multiple award winning journalist Paul Kimmage and three-time All-Ireland winner Seán Cavanagh from Tyrone joined me.
Colm O’ Rourke had written a piece in his Sunday Independent column where he said that the GAA had crowd violence and referee abuse under control and the recent incidents in Tyrone and Connacht were isolated incidents.
Seán Cavanagh was very honest about some of his own experiences with crowd trouble in Tyrone and told of an incident when he was playing an under-16 championship match and an opposition fan (adult) jumped the fence just after half time and hit him a box from behind.
This led to a mass melee and the match being abandoned.
Two years ago he was playing a league match and the opposition fans invaded the pitch near the end and blocked the entrance/ exit from the pitch and Sean’s team where stuck on the pitch for more than half an hour until the situation was resolved.
Sean said that if this situation happened in the South at least the Gardaí could be called, but as the PSNI isn’t allowed to or won’t come near the GAA clubs in the North the law is irrelevant.
My take on it is, for some reason certain individuals or groups of supporters think that actions that are unacceptable on the street are ok at a sporting occasion.
The GAA say that their ‘Respect’ campaign is working and obviously see the recent incidents as a negative but I feel that they could use it as a positive and decide to make real change to how they deal with offenders, which will hopefully change the culture that currently exists.
The life bans occasionally handed out don’t seem to be a big enough deterrent as they are nigh on impossible to police.
The only way to punish is to fine the club or dock their top team points, which will make the whole club/county take the issue much more seriously.
We also spoke about the respect rugby players tend to show to referees and while it’s something that stems from a young age I feel that rugby referees are more open to communication with players than their soccer or GAA counterparts, which helps.
In rugby there is the communication channel of the captain through which you can speak to the referee. You know that he won’t change his mind but at least you can make him/her aware of illegal play for the next time.
I feel that when the players get frustrated and agitated then often the sideline gets overexcited too.
Coincidently, on the way home from the television studio I tuned into ‘Sunday Sport’ on RTE radio and they had three referees on air: Alain Rolland (rugby), Errol Sweeney (soccer) and Pat McEnaney (GAA).
It was interesting to hear Alain Rolland say that he enjoyed meeting the players in the bar after for a drink and if anyone had an issue with a decision he always tried to explain his interpretation of that law.
One of the other sports referees made the point that in his opinion, “if you are explaining, you are losing” which I feel is the wrong attitude to have towards the players.
In the Rabo Direct league, Leinster and Munster continued their good recent form with wins over Treviso and Edinburgh respectively and Connacht and Ulster had disappointing losses to the Ospreys and Glasgow.
All the Irish provinces were forced to rest players due to the International squads’ player welfare program and it was a great opportunity for younger players to play meaningful games.
I’m not convinced as to the quality of the British and Irish Cup and Fionn Carr and Eoin O’Malley did their chance of regular game-time with the senior side no harm at all with impressive performances against Treviso in Italy.
I was over in Grenoble, France again for three days last week helping them prepare for their Pro D2 match against Bourgoin, which is a big local derby match.
Grenoble won the game on Sunday 30-13 and are now three points clear at the top of the table and there is a great buzz around the city.
We have only conceded five tries in 11 games so the defence is going well thankfully.
Two of those tries conceded have resulted from blockdowns.
I better have a word with the kicking coach!