THE MIDDLE THIRD:While the Kildare captain was easily the best man on show in Portlaoise on Sunday, the game also showed the maddening differences in referee styles which left both sides frustrated. But players can be as much to blame and the time has come to give the men in black a helping hand, writes DARRAGH Ó SÉ

I STARTED my championship summer at O’Moore Park in Portlaoise on Sunday, which must have just about the most accessible ground in the country. These are the things I notice now, traffic jams and the like of that. Big difference to when I was playing.

The season is a fortnight old and already we’re stuck with the two of the same complaints as last year and every year.

Poor matches and inconsistent referees.

The double header was actually decent enough considering the serious wind there was in Portlaoise. Kildare and Laois both won without being brilliant but they both won, which is the main thing.

People get too carried away with looking for quality games at this time of year. The days of the great first-round games like Down v Derry in 1994 are gone, an unavoidable downside to the qualifiers.

The Kildare v Wicklow game was fine up until the last 20 minutes when we had a change of referee.

Marty Duffy was having an excellent game until he had to go off injured. He was letting the thing flow, not clamping down on small things. But the most important thing was he was being consistent. A free was a free no matter which team was fouling. You saw players on both sides get bottled up in traffic and be called for over-carrying. Players knew where they stood and knew what they could get away with and what they couldn’t. It felt like Marty only blew the whistle to start the half and end it.

But then he went off with 20 minutes left. Syl Doyle, who had been doing the line, replaced him. Suddenly the whole dynamic of the game changed. The free-count went up and players started getting ratty. And you couldn’t blame them. Doyle was a completely different kind of referee.

Suddenly, the smallest pull was a foul whereas it hadn’t been before. Players were getting tangled up together and Doyle would blow the whistle but the whole crowd would be waiting for the arm to go up to see which way he was giving it.

Both sets of supporters started getting annoyed with him. They were getting riled up and putting pressure on him to make decisions and that only made his life more difficult.

It was interesting to watch it all unfold because it was as if we were seeing two different games played.

It’s the best example I’ve seen in recent times of the inconsistency in refereeing. No matter whose approach is right and whose is wrong, the players deserve consistency. You’d maybe feel a bit sorry for Doyle because he came in cold.

But it just showed the difference that can be made when another style of referee is in charge of a game.

And in terms of the whole season, it shows what can make players frustrated.

The inconsistency of referees is a cancer in our game because it means that nobody knows what’s legal and what’s not from game to game.

Kildare are going to be playing again on Sunday week and they could very easily have a different style of referee again. There’s just too much of a variance between how games are refereed.

It affects your preparation as a player, nearly as much as the opposition affects it. Teams have to tailor their approach to the different styles of refereeing they’re going to get in each game.

If it’s a Joe McQuillan or a Pat McEnaney, then you’re fine. You know there’ll be no messing, you know what they’ll stand for. That’s the level we need the referees to come up to.

I remember the famous game against Clare when Paddy Russell had the book knocked out of his hand by Paul Galvin. Now Paul did what he did and got rightly punished for it but what people forget is that after Paul went off, Paddy sent off a Clare fella a few minutes later who didn’t come near to deserving the line. Standing beside him on the pitch, it looked to me like Paddy was trying to balance the whole thing out.

Players will look to get away with anything to try and win but a good referee will have your number. I was sent off once in Croke Park for an altercation with Cork’s Pearse O’Neill.

I thought I was being cute. Pearse and myself were getting to know each other and all that goes with that and I brought it a step too far, not realising that Joe McQuillan had me covered.

He just looked round at exactly the right moment and caught me at it. Red card, no questions asked. I ran into Joe at a wedding a few months later in Cavan and we had a pint and laughed about it. He knew what to look out for.

Not all of them are as alert as him though and in fairness to referees, with some of the carry-on players get up to they’d need three pairs of eyes to keep up.

To my mind the most disappointing aspect of Gaelic football at the minute – and it isn’t creeping in, it’s definitely in already – is players and managers looking to get opponents sent off.

I can say, hand on heart, never once under four different Kerry managers did I hear an instruction go out to get an opposition player booked or sent off. It’s not manly. It’s cowardly.

Referees have a tough job and in case this looks like I’m having a right go at referees for the sake of it, I’m not. In terms of the quality of our game, referees are as important as players.

Referees should be looked after a little better in general, paid good money if it will help. No player in the country would begrudge a referee getting paid, given a holiday at the end of the year for him and his family or whatever. Reward the top performers, create an elite band of referees and we’d see the whole thing improve.

Also, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be given help from the stand. In this day and age, we should be able to do what they do in rugby.

For the big games – say, from provincial finals onwards – a referee should be able to consult someone with a monitor in front of them when it comes to big calls. It wouldn’t disrupt the game any more than him jogging the length of the pitch to talk to an umpire who has his arm out. And at least the big calls would be right.

I think referees would be delighted with it. We’ve all seen a referee lose the run of a game because he was nervous about getting a big call wrong. But if you take away that danger and make it so that they know he’ll be helped out when it comes to a penalty or a sending-off that he mightn’t be sure of, he’ll relax into the game.

We’ll see better matches too. The six that were played last Sunday were good in places, patchy in others. The good players really stood out.

Nobody who watched the two matches in Portlaoise could have been in any doubt that John Doyle was easily the best player on show.

On a day when the wind held up every kick-out and made it very hard to make a clean catch at midfield, he was the one man who managed it. He kicked his frees and set up play as well.

But the one thing he did better than everyone else was make the right choices. That’s what sets the best players apart. He wasn’t taking on crazy shots, he wasn’t going on silly runs into traffic. Just doing the simple thing and doing it right.

Pádraic Joyce does it, Bernard Brogan and Michael Murphy do it. Same with the Gooch and Declan O’Sullivan, same with Ciarán Sheehan and Donncha O’Connor.

Cork and Kerry both got the job done on Sunday without an awful lot of hassle. Those games are hard to get your mind right for because you know you’re going to win.

That isn’t being disrespectful, it’s just a fact.

You know that your players are better and your preparation has been good so you’re going to pull through. You know as well that there’ll probably be plenty of off-the-ball stuff going on so you have to be ready for it and you have to ignore it.

There’s nothing worse than winning a game easy but then losing a fella for a month because he retaliated and got sent off.

Tomás Ó Sé will miss the rest of the Munster championship because of his red card. At this stage of his career, he knows he should know better than to do what he did. Knowing the man and having spoken to him in the meantime, he’ll take it on the chin and do his best to get back on the team later in the year.

Personally, the only beef I would have with the suspension is the 48-week carry-over. It’s a ridiculous rule. And I’d be saying that no matter who it was that got the suspension.

PS. Fair play to Leitrim on beating Sligo, some performance given all they’ve had to deal with over the past year with the death of Philly McGuinness. But I must say I found Mickey Moran’s interview on The Sunday Game afterwards hilarious.

If you put a Yank in front of the TV who knew nothing about the games and asked him to pick out which manager had lost that day, Mickey would have been the choice hands down!

I never saw a man look as fed-up about winning a game. It’s long road, Mickey. Lighten up and enjoy the good days.