Even by their literal definitions, gamesmanship and cheating are not the same.
There’s a difference between bending the rules and breaking the rules.
There’s a difference between doing something in plain sight of the authorities to deal with and doing something that you have to hope goes undetected to pay off.
If you want to take drugs, you have to hope no-one finds out for them to be of any use to you. If you want to dive, you have to hope no-one notices for it to work.
But if you want to kick a ball away to waste time, you’ll get punished there and then for affecting the game by whatever amount of seconds you affected the game. If you want to drag someone down, you will – at least you should – be given the appropriate card colour and the other team given the free because of it.
Whatever you make of the black card, it means that systematic, consistent cynical fouling is not possible. After the third black card, players cannot be replaced for deliberate offences. After the sixth sub you’ve made in the whole game, players cannot be replaced. It can’t be a structured, 70-minute tactic because the rules are there to stop that.
Even looking at that isolated incident at the very end of the All-Ireland final – and it has to be isolated because it can’t be sustained – Dublin didn’t get away with dragging Mayo players down and wrestling with them. Ciaran Kilkenny got sent to the line, Cormac Costello was given a yellow and they didn’t waste any time anyway. The ref added on two more minutes on top of the six that were already added on and the kicker of it all is that, after all that nonsense, Mayo still had the ball and they had it for the beginning of all that time Joe McQuillan was about to add on.
But then David Clarke kicks it out of play and Dublin keep possession for the rest of the match and the referee is eventually forced to blow it up. They didn’t win by dragging them down. In the end, they actually won by playing football.
But there’s a difference anyway that exists between pulling or grappling and cheating. The latter is out of control of the authorities because it must be stealth and it is out of control of the opposition. What Dublin did was not only there to be punished but it was there to be dealt with by Mayo themselves too.
If you become so loose with your labels that you’re actually putting a pull of a jersey into the same bracket as performance enhancing drugs, then suddenly you’re towing a line between tackling and cheating and you’re only doing it because you’re unhappy that Dublin won the All-Ireland again.
Had Mayo wrestled a few Dublin players to ground to finally get over the line, it would’ve been excused. They did what they had to do, we would’ve said. How could you blame them after all those years of hurt?
If they had done that, it not only would’ve been accepted as a cynical approach to doing what it takes to win like we all would’ve done, but it also wouldn’t have completely dismissed the other 76 minutes that took them into that position in the first place. And it wouldn’t have ignored the two more minutes that were added as extra because of those offences anyway.
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