Cynicism

TopOfTheRight

As a Cork fan i'd like to say a big thank you to Donegal for disposing of Kerry as you couldnt count on our lads to do the job when it counts! Also fair play to Jim McGuinness for developing a system that gets the most out of the players at his disposal, i found it intriguing watching them live for the first time this season yesterday as watching them on telly doesnt do justice to their intelligence.
What they also do is push the rules to the absolute limits of what they can get away with and again i'd like to say fair play to them for this as it takes incredible discipline from them to stick to what they set out to do. Obviously a huge amount of analysis and coaching has gone into their gameplan and McGuinness and co. can take a huge amount of credit for this and it was a great victory for them yesterday (also i thought the Donegal fans were absolutely brilliant yesterday contrary to what someone had texted in to rte radio last night).

Now what Donegal did yesterday was admirable as they got the most out of the players at their disposal and limited the best forward line in the country to seven points from play but for the future of our game something needs to be done about their 'tactic' of deliberate cynical fouling.
People will argue for a rule change bringing in sin bins etc. and yes i would support something being done for next years championship but if the current rules were applied correctly yesterday this mightnt be an issue at all.
Trips and jersey pulls would have been identified as obvious bookings so instead their deliberate fouls consist of getting both arms in around the opposition players chest. What i noticed yesterday was them doing this to slow Kerry players down but releasing before the player went down so they werent even being blown for frees. When Kerry were allowed to play on there was no chance the referee was going back to book someone for what wouldnt have looked like a serious foul but each of these incidents slowed Kerry attacks significantly.

Each of these are yellow card offences even if Donegal are clever enough to make them look like theyre not. The times when players actually were pulled down were not always punished sufficiently either - correct me if i'm wrong but i saw nobody booked for the incident in which Brian Sheehan was injured trying to keep his feet when being pulled down from behind.
Until the day a brave referee gives yellow cards for all these offences - we could be looking at about 20 cards per game here, teams are just going to get better at this and it will be encouraged and adopted by other teams. Of course if a referee was to dish out 20 yellow cards fans would be calling for his head even though in the long run it would be for the good of the game.

Also Kerry and most other counties would be no strangers to cynical fouling, a lot of the time in attempts to deny goal scoring opportunities - imo this is a completely separate issue to what i witnessed yesterday and it is for cases like this that i would be in favour of a rule change for next year but basically if the current rules were applied strongly Donegal would be fouled out of the championship and a service done to the great game of gaelic football.