GAA not using TV to pursue a 'witch hunt'

GAELIC GAMES/TRIAL BY TELEVISION:THE GAA has defended the apparent anomaly of "trial by television" whereby some games in the Allianz National Football Leagues are facing greater disciplinary scrutiny simply because they're played in front of television cameras.

Tyrone and Derry have already fallen victim to it, with players suspended after the Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) reviewed video footage of their opening game, but GAA president Christy Cooney says it is no “witch hunt” – and “if players misbehave, the onus is on the association to deal with that.”

Tyrone manager Mickey Harte said yesterday it wasn’t a level playing field and was backed, to some extent, by Mayo manager John O’Mahony. Mayo beat Tyrone in Omagh on Sunday, but the CCCC may well be looking at footage at that game, particularly an incident late on where Tyrone’s Joe McMahon was red-carded, somewhat harshly, it could be argued, while Mayo’s Mark Ronaldson seemed lucky to escape with just a yellow.

“It’s not a fair system,” said Harte. “If it’s selective, it’s not fair. I’m not condoning people who do things wrong, but it’s clear that they are being disadvantaged because they happen to be on live television. That’s wrong, the system is wrong.

“If you are going to scrutinise every game in the Allianz league and go through it in fine detail and come with all these after effects then we’ll all live with that. But at the moment it’s not right and it’s not fair.”

O’Mahony was a little less damning of the situation but agreed there was an obvious discrepancy.

“It’s a bit like politics,” said O’Mahony, who doubles as a Fine Gael TD. “You don’t know what’s around the next corner.

“I’m all for cleaning up dirty play and so on. And as a manager I would discourage players from getting involved in situations like that. But you have to have a situation, when you think about it, where all games are videoed, if you’re going to apply that kind of set-up. Because I’m sure there were no TV cameras in the Division Four games on Sunday.

“It can’t be done single-handedly if video analysis isn’t there in every game. And I don’t think that’s possible. You have 16 games every week. It doesn’t matter how many TV stations you have around the country.”

Cooney, while admitting the system wasn’t perfect, said the onus was always on the CCCC to pursue any apparent breaches in discipline: “In fairness, because you are under the microscope of the television cameras, there are incidents spotted that the referee hasn’t seen or that the referee has made a call on, and the CCCC needs to review it.

“The CCCC took a decision to charge the people involved, for whatever the incident was within the appropriate rules. But it is not our intention to just go hunting after players. We will review evidence on an ongoing basis and, when it is appropriate to do it, it will be done.

“They are not on a witch hunt, under any circumstances, and if there is an incident involved deemed to be greater than dealt with in the referee’s report, and particularly when the referee hasn’t seen it, there is an onus on the CCCC to take a course of action. We won’t be deviating from the approach we have been taking.”

There is a motion due to come before Congress in April, submitted by the Longford club of former All-Ireland referee John Bannon, which is calling for referees to be taken out of the equation. It won’t prevent the CCCC from reviewing television footage, but it allows the CCCC to revise the penalties on their own accord, without having to ask the referee to review their original decision.

The purpose there is to take any pressure off referees, and the notion that once the CCCC ask them to revisit an incident they feel obliged to amend their original ruling.

In the meantime, Harte suggested Tyrone may need to consider whether they will allow their league games be televised in the future: “The bottom line is, and this is an unequivocal fact, if our game against Derry had not been televised, we would have had Conor Gormley, Justin McMahon and Martin Penrose playing against Mayo.

“That is an undisputable fact, so therefore we were disadvantaged by live TV. That’s not to condone what any of them did, though I think two of them weren’t red cards, as it happens. It’s also a fact in last year’s Division One league programme, there were two players cited in similar circumstances and they happened to be from Tyrone.”

On the flip side, however, players can have red cards rescinded on video evidence, which Tyrone intend pursuing in the case of Joe McMahon last Sunday. O’Mahony suggested that was part of the anomaly.

“You need to get all those things right,” he said.

“The pros and the cons. Whether it be no one is at a disadvantage or an advantage. It shouldn’t be a disadvantage that the guy can’t get cleared, because it’s a Division Four game.

“So it’s one-all, I suppose, in that regard. But you need an even-handed approach. It will be interesting to see how it evolves. It is a new development. Everyone came into the league talking about the mark, or the square ball. After two weeks everyone is talking about trial by television.”