It’s almost exciting to note how highly James McGrath rates himself.
Too often you look at a GAA referee and think he’s just trying to keep his head above water and that he only wants to make everyone happy.
Games are officiated based of circumstance a lot of the time. You can get away with whatever you want in the first five minutes, for example, because this thing we call referee’s discretion is allowed to overrule the rule book and deem it “too early” for too harsh a punishment. When a team is down, you can bet your arse they’ll get every rub of every green and the opposing side will suddenly have to work twice as hard for the ref to firstly spot a foul and then blow for it because, for some reason, they’ve tasked themselves with the noble job of making the game more even.
And the general everyday issues are just a world where objectivity is judged subjectively. Where a punch in the face can be a yellow card and where the black card in football is seemingly there to be used only if you really, really, really have to and when it won’t upset the outcome of the game too much.
Refs get enough abuse at all levels but it can be hard to be too critical of them at the same time because they’re hidden away behind a sheath of volunteerism and give-the-guy-a-break-he-is-only-human.
On Monday, for instance, a piece highlighting the fact Donegal would not have been relegated if Anthony Nolan had blown for an obvious free with less that 30 seconds remaining was met with that infamous imposed self-flagellation we force others to do in the GAA.
Donegal shouldn’t have let themselves be in that position, was the jist. It’s their own fault for not sorting it out themselves.
Donegal relegated because of referee and put out of championship because of referee
That position Donegal had gotten themselves into was a place where they were safe and about to beat Mayo with less than half a minute to go and that position – the work they had done – should’ve also earned them a free and possession for the rest of injury time.
But we front up in this association and flog ourselves until we realise what we did wasn’t good enough. In the process, we don’t just absolve referees from any blame, but from performance reviews too because you’re never far away from the volunteer argument or the club referee taking indirect offence or the crowd telling you to not let yourself be in that position again, when someone will be in that position every year.
James McGrath could change all that though.
His decision to retire from inter-county refereeing in light of the All-Ireland hurling final appointments might be strange, brash and egotistic but his affront shows in plain light that he rates himself and that he ranks his colleagues.
“The general feeling among a lot of the public – friends and, indeed, members of my own club and county and community – would have said that I had a very good chance of actually refereeing the final,” he told national television.
“It’s hugely disappointing not to be involved.”
Whatever about the questionable decision to go public with those views, whatever about the apparent arrogance driving them in the first place, McGrath is threatening to take the attitude towards referees in a different direction entirely.
Accountability. If he’s happy enough to think like he thinks and appear on TV to vocalise how good him and his friends reckon he is, what’s to stop the next ref being actually held accountable – and not for mistakes, but for blatant disregard of the rules? Why didn’t you give a black card there when everyone else saw it? Why did you give the forward a yellow as well when he was being rode on the ground? What did you actually write in your notebook when you deemed a punch in the face worthy of only a caution?
Why shouldn’t they be hit with questions? Why not point out the skewed stats that helped change momentum? Why not hold these men to a higher standard if one of them at least is so competitive that he’ll retire after 18 years because he didn’t get a part in the big day?
McGrath has obviously heaped pressure onto his former colleague James Owens now too whose performance refereeing the final will be looked at with much more intent than it might’ve been now.
But he’s changing the landscape before our eyes.
Maybe referees took stick as it was but they’ve never really had to explain themselves for anything and they’ve never really been assessed – publicly at least – on their performance and in direct comparison with the rest of them.
They will be over the next few weeks to start with. And they have James McGrath to thank for that.
James McGrath speaks to RTE Sport about his decision to retire from the inter-county referee panel in the light of the appointments committee not appointing him as one the match officials for the 2018 final pic.twitter.com/eHrGrkU2wQ
— RTÉ GAA (@RTEgaa) August 8, 2018
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