How the development of the modern sliotar changed the game of hurling

How do you start a revolution? In May 2011, on the same day that Queen Elizabeth visited Croke Park, the late Mossy Mullins and Rory Williams had an audience with the Hurling Development Committee (HDC).

Under the banner of their young company, Greenfields Digital Sports Technology (GDST), they made an ingenuous presentation about how sliotars could be digitised and how, among other things, this could bring order to a wild, unregulated market.

Back then they were miles from proof of concept, or the strenuous testing that has brought the digital sliotar to where it is now, but to demonstrate what was possible they used their imagination. Mullins acquired a dog tag from a vet he knew and embedded it in a sliotar; when a dog tag reader was held close to the ball it emitted a beep.

The challenge was to develop technology that could withstand the day-to-day life of a working sliotar and to establish a sustainable relationship with a simple mobile reading device. The other challenge was to make people understand why it was important.

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In golf, technology has generated anguished debate about how far the ball travels, and in hurling there are plenty of traditionalists who believe the modern ball travels too far. But these complaints ignore a couple of critical points.

If hitting the ball long distances was such an advantage, why is there more short striking now than at any time in the history of the game? The radical, transformative impact of the modern sliotar was not that it enabled long striking, but that it stimulated strategy. The game suddenly had a new imagination.

In every other field sport passing the ball was a fundamental plank of how to play; in hurling, for generations, passing was optional, sometimes admired and sometimes seen as heretical, but it was never regarded as necessary. Smart teams played the ball into space, or in ways that gave the forward an advantage, but there was no suggestion that the ball could be micromanaged. It was like a cocker spaniel: it might do what it was told.

The end-to-end goal that Ballygunner scored in the Munster final a fortnight ago was a spectacular exposition of where the modern ball has taken hurling.

In a nine-pass move the ball touched the ground just twice, only two passes were made with the hand, and only two passes were longer than 20 metres. Everything in that move was the outcome of hurling’s accelerated evolution over the last 10 or 15 years. The face of the game changed before our eyes.

The old sliotars, with their thick rims and unstable cores and propensity to lose their shape, were not designed for precision plays. More than that, if you tried to play a driven pass at short range those sliotars were nakedly hostile to the receiver. In that world, the Ballygunner goal would have been unimaginable.

Long before Mullins and Williams started work on the digital sliotar, Pat Daly in Croke Park had recognised the need for standardisation. The marketplace was teeming with all kinds of everything. Some of it was execrable.

The initial step was a research project that Daly commissioned in UCG 25 years ago. After that, there were many years of exhaustive testing in DCU, led by Dr Kieran Moran. Once a definition was reached on the desirable properties of a modern ball the urgent necessity was regulation.

Only sliotars that met the standards in DCU were approved for use in matches, but the GAA needed to come up with a system of verification that was beyond meddling. To that end, Mullins and Williams started work on a near field communication tag, the piece of technology that allows your credit card to function.

The challenge was to store information on the tag that could be read by an app on a mobile phone, and because there was no power in the tag the phone would also need to be its energy source. This piece of technology was no bigger than a five cent coin but it would need to sit close to the surface of the ball, which meant that durability was clearly an issue.

To come up with sustainable solutions Mullins and Williams went into partnership with Dr Siobhán Matthews. At a time when the GAA had finally opened its mind to the integrity of the ball, these people were innovators. On a parallel track Mullins and Williams started producing yellow sliotars, and at the Super 11s tournament in Boston, 10 years ago, an early prototype was put into play.

In a fascinating presentation at the GAA coaching conference a few months later, Valerie Kennelly outlined the science of why yellow balls were easier to see than white balls. The essential point was “contrast sensitivity”. Tennis had come to this conclusion about yellow balls in the early 1970s, even though Wimbledon stubbornly refused to abandon white balls until 1986.

In the GAA, there was resistance too. When yellow sliotars were approved for the 2020 Liam MacCarthy Cup there was a chorus of disapproval; John Kiely, whose team has changed how the game is played, was among the sceptics.

Everybody had forgotten that for the first half of the GAA’s existence sliotars had been brown; why should the white ball be sacrosanct now when everything else about the modern game had been exposed to fresh thinking?

The yellow ball is here to stay. Beginning in the new year, every match from minor upwards, at club and county level, must be played with a yellow ball. Over the next couple of years, white sliotars will be phased out completely.

The smart sliotar, that Mullins, Williams and Matthews invented, is only in use at inter county level for now, but that will have a greater roll-out over time. The potential other uses for the digital chip in the ball are a blank page for fertile minds.

The massive breakthrough was standardisation. For decades, the Cummins All-Star had been the most beautiful ball on the market: it was lively and sympathetic, and with its shallow rims, it rewarded good striking. By a long, adversarial process, that is where the sliotar has ended up: sympathetic to the players.

In September Mossy was laid to rest in Killenaule. The revolution in how the game has come to be played is inseparable from the ball, and how it was reimagined. In that process, Mossy moved the dial.