Westmeath v Armagh (Sat 08.07.17) Cusack Park, 7pm

Started by illdecide, June 26, 2017, 09:46:01 AM

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tonto1888

I get that mate. I do. I still don't agree with his post being of a neutral nature. I'm not gonna argue with you. I think you are an unbiased and sensible poster and as stated I don't have any issues with most of what LS said. Maybe it's just me but in the interests of fairness I think he could have mentioned the WM issues, of which there were many.
We have a lot to work on in regards to discipline and tackling. We knew that already. A better team than WM will punish us a lot more.

seafoid

Someone made the point a while ago that in GF the tackle is a mess cos the steps are not controlled coherently. Backs make a move and the timing is off. Maybe Armagh do this a bit more. Gaelic football is so Irish
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

Sandy Hill

Can anyone tell me what J Clarke got his black card for?
"Stercus accidit"

omaghjoe

Quote from: seafoid on July 09, 2017, 02:01:55 PM
Someone made the point a while ago that in GF the tackle is a mess cos the steps are not controlled coherently. Backs make a move and the timing is off. Maybe Armagh do this a bit more. Gaelic football is so Irish

??? Hmmmm

onefaircounty

Quote from: Lone Shark on July 09, 2017, 01:47:20 AM
Was covering this game as a reporter in a neutral capacity, and to be honest I felt Armagh got away with murder here. One red card, 3 black cards, 6 yellow cards and I made it 39 frees conceded, of which 3 were technical (steps, illegal handpass etc) and an incredible 36 were for physical offences.

And here's the thing - it could have been way more. The Armagh crowd went ballistic and thought that they were hard done by, it was anything but - if that game was refereed even remotely close to the rules, they'd have ended up with ten or eleven men on the field. I didn't see James Morgan's offence but Clarke didn't have a leg to stand on, and McCabe should have walked far sooner. I've never seen anything like it - the best way to describe his "performance" was he played like an offensive lineman in American Football, if Paul Sharry was a linebacker. McCabe had his back to the ball a huge amount of the time and was doing nothing only holding, pulling, dragging and blocking Sharry who was trying to make runs. He could have had five black cards of his own - it was bordering on comical.

In general Armagh's "tackling" was cat. Closed fists, obligatory (and completely needless) late hits on players who had just played the ball, rugby tackles, literally anything went. Twice Westmeath lads were running down the sideline, a fair shoulder was on, but instead, needless push in the back, followed by more bellowing from the crowd when the free was given. Madness.
Rory Grugan, Ciarán O'Hanlon and Aidan Forker are others that could have walked the line for black cards, and while there was nothing worthy of a straight red that I saw, I'd say you could have sent off four or five lads for double yellows.

The referee was strong in the early stages, albeit to some degree because of his linesman's influence, but the Armagh crowd started to get to him and he soon stopped giving out cards except where he really had to - and that was enough. Put it this way - not one player got booked for persistent fouling, and if you commit 36 personal fouls, either you rotate it perfectly or else you should have a few players getting yellow for their third offence.

The sad thing about this is that there are a lot of lads on that Armagh team that I didn't know that well as footballers, and they can play ball, much more than your average division three side. Grimley was good at midfield, Aaron McKay made a couple of crucial blocks, denying one certain goal, Campbell, Rafferty and O'Neill were real impact subs, and the Ballymacnab pair of Grugan and McParland kicked some lovely points. Conceding the kickouts didn't make sense to me as there was no doubt as to who was going to win the aerial battle, and it wasn't the home team.

Yet for all that, Armagh didn't win the game - Westmeath lost it. The final five point margin was deceptive. Westmeath missed three glorious chances for points around the 70 minute mark with the game level. They won four kickouts and failed to score, Armagh won one and O'Neill kicked a lovely point. Westmeath committed pretty much everyone forward trying to chase an equaliser and they got caught on the break twice, goal first, then the insurance point.

If any one of those three attempts went over, Westmeath would have won, because Armagh wouldn't have had the space they enjoyed at the death - and certainly I'd have backed Heslin to score that free any day. Up until that late breakaway, Westmeath had four goal chances, and took just one. Westmeath had the winning of this game, and that was on a day when only three players scored - two of them doing so once each, both capitalising from close range after a kind bounce.

The Armagh lads beside me in the press box who were doing stats were saying that they were the same against Fermanagh, but that the referee was even kinder still. It's daft stuff, and it's not going to end well.     

If you genuinely think Armagh got away with murder then you got an idea into your head and you ran with it.

The Armagh tackling was awful, but they got punished more than handsomely. Their tackling against Fermanagh was reallyhard but clean, it was a different ball game. They must have ended up with 10 yellows last night.

Sharry tried to con the officials all night, and it worked as Morgan was ran into and pulled down. Clarke, by the rules, was not a black.

The push down the sideline was also no push. Let's not even get into the other 50-50s that went against them.

Westmeath were the side that got away with a lot more over the 70 minutes, without doubt.

Armagh's tackling and discipline was atrocious, but they were seized on, and then some, by a referee and his officials.



smelmoth

Forget the ref. Forget Westmeath and forget Lone Shark.
They won't be relevant next day out.

Move on

Focus on our tackling. Where will it get us the next day? Are we happy if they are sent out to play that way again? What can be done to correct the position this week and in the longer term?

Armamike

Armagh have been throwing games away all year, getting sucker punched, so we'll take being on the right side of this one for a change and move on.  The poor tackling and ill discipline has been a theme during McGeeney's charge, which is a bit odd given his own track record as a player.  Poor and all as Armagh were yesterday it was a decent sign that in the face of adversity (losing two of their best players through black cards early on and a red later on) they managed to eke out a result and show a bit of character.
That's just, like your opinion man.

Esmarelda


tonto1888

He hit the guy with a shoulder. Shoulder to shoulder. Was just on the Sunday game

maigheo

Ah come on .A text book black card
Quote from: tonto1888 on July 09, 2017, 11:28:40 PM
He hit the guy with a shoulder. Shoulder to shoulder. Was just on the Sunday game

Esmarelda

Quote from: maigheo on July 09, 2017, 11:31:09 PM
Ah come on .A text book black card
Quote from: tonto1888 on July 09, 2017, 11:28:40 PM
He hit the guy with a shoulder. Shoulder to shoulder. Was just on the Sunday game
Yes, the ball was gone. Wasn't the worst you'll see but he definitely moved towards him knowing the ball was gone preventing him from joining in the play.

Lone Shark

To be honest, at 39 years of age, if lads want to think that I have an anti-Armagh agenda for some bizarre reason, despite the fact that Offaly have never played a senior championship game against them in my lifetime and the fact that I live over 100 miles away from the county boundary and have little or no interaction with Armagh people on a daily basis, then work away. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see, and I could not be arsed trying to convince people otherwise.

I'm well aware that in Ulster, and also in Connacht, there is a fair degree of provincial solidarity - people will stick up for other counties of their own. Rest assured Offaly (or Leinster in general) doesn't work like that. We are in a bad way at the moment, almost entirely of our own making, but we'll always have our own identity and I feel as much affinity with Westmeath as I do with the people of Donegal, Kerry, or the Isle of Man. In my teens and twenties, I'd have cheered on a team made up entirely of parking clampers if they were playing Westmeath, but now I'm just too lazy to bother expending such emotional energy, so I'm entirely ambivalent. I know Tom Cribbin personally and he's a very decent skin who is an honest and as genuine a man as you could hope to meet, so I'm disappointed for him, but not so much that I'm going to drag myself into a needless online row for the sake of it.

So just to pick up on the other points that were raised.

(1) I was not intending to write a "report". If you want that, here's one I wrote for the GAA website - http://www.gaa.ie/football/news/round-qualifier-armagh-defeat-westmeath/ I was merely looking to make an observation about what I considered to be a remarkable game, unlike anything I've ever seen before. At a guess I've seen the Armagh senior footballers play live (i.e. at the stadium) on average about once a year over the past decade, and I saw Kildare plenty of times when McGeeney was in charge there. I didn't expect anything like this. It was unprecedented in my years of match reporting, and I just felt like sharing my views on a GAA discussion board.

(2) I'm not for a minute claiming to have presented an exhaustive list of every transgression that happened from both sides. That's not what it was about - I was remarking about the fact that Armagh's fouling appeared to be deliberate, coached, utterly un-necessary in a lot of cases, and could easily have drawn a record number of cards. I am well aware that there are members of the Westmeath team that are no angels, and I've no doubt that there was other stuff going on. However as I said, I didn't observe a red card incident from either team, I didn't observe Westmeath make a load of black/yellow card fouls that went unpunished, so I didn't discuss them. Much the same as I didn't see the messing that went on between the Westmeath subs and the Armagh fans - so I won't comment on that either. My point wasn't that fouls A, B, C went unpunished, it was that every time I looked, there were more things happening. The late hits in particular was incredibly odd. A huge number of them were harmless shoves or bumps after the ball was gone, nothing that you'd bother whistling if it was a one off, but it just seemed like a policy, because it was happening every time.

(3) There can be no disputing the Clarke black card. Jamie Gonoud made a run to support the man in possession, Clarke shouldered into him and ensured he couldn't rejoin the move. And yes, a lot of journalists and commentators don't understand it. However I'm also involved in underage coaching, so I make damn sure that I do know the rules. That was certainly a "Deliberate Body Collide to take a player out of the movement of the play".

(4) On the Heslin/Grimley altercation, again the two lads ended up wrestling on the ground, and because it was a move that was likely to lead to a goal chance, so I'd have to note the build up, I was watching the ball. However I will say that the idea that Heslin would instigate when his team was mounting a dangerous attack seems counterintuitive. Now if there are others who saw a punch from Heslin, then I'm not going to say he didn't. He'd certainly be one player who has been guilty of rash outbursts in the past, but not so much in recent years.

(5) Were there some frees given against Armagh that were harsh? Absolutely - particularly late on, there were a couple of frees given under the kickout that seemed to be for little or nothing. However there are two aspects to this - firstly, that's the kind of stuff that happens in every game, you'll always have a fair number of contentious calls of that type, and secondly, when you spend the game fouling constantly, that's the kind of consequence you can expect - Refs will presume that you're going to keep transgressing. That's just human nature. 

(6) On the Fermanagh game, you'll note that I didn't say that Armagh's tactics in that game were the same as they were here. Again, I wasn't at that game, and I certainly won't judge on the basis of a lousy two minutes of Sunday Game highlights. I was merely relating what the Armagh statisticians beside me in the press box said, in terms of the approach and the number of frees. If someone who was at both games says that the nature of the fouling was completely different, then I'm not going to argue.

(7) Anyone who believes that O'Sullivan was fussy or harsh should take a look at how David Gough handled the Connacht final today. Look at some of the frees that were given for off the ball fouls, for the slightest of pulls or for very minimal contact. Note how he gave yellow cards for persistent fouling, even if it was slight in nature. O'Sullivan gave no yellows for persistent fouling, and no "off the ball" frees - and he could have gone to town. Now Gough is the other end of the scale, but if Armagh were reffed by those standards, I'm not exaggerating when I say they'd have finished the game with 10 or 11 men on the field, while there would have been a lot more 20m frees for off the ball incidents close to goal. I can say with complete certainty that if this approach is maintained, ye will meet a referee who will take a far less lenient approach than Padraig O'Sullivan did yesterday. And if your response to that is to say "Lenient?? LENIENT??" in an increasingly shrill voice, then work away. I won't be losing sleep over it.




tippabu

Quote from: tonto1888 on July 09, 2017, 11:28:40 PM
He hit the guy with a shoulder. Shoulder to shoulder. Was just on the Sunday game

It was 100% a black card

tonto1888

Quote from: maigheo on July 09, 2017, 11:31:09 PM
Ah come on .A text book black card
Quote from: tonto1888 on July 09, 2017, 11:28:40 PM
He hit the guy with a shoulder. Shoulder to shoulder. Was just on the Sunday game

I didn't say it wasn't mate. But that's what he done. After the ball had gone. I will admit the ruling of what constitutes a black or not confuses me. A lot. Also seems the refs are inconsistent when applying it

armaghniac

Quote from: Lone Shark on July 09, 2017, 11:34:51 PM
(2) I'm not for a minute claiming to have presented an exhaustive list of every transgression that happened from both sides. That's not what it was about - I was remarking about the fact that Armagh's fouling appeared to be deliberate, coached, utterly un-necessary in a lot of cases, and could easily have drawn a record number of cards.

I think there is no doubt that much of the fouling is indeed utterly un-necessary. Everyone knows that you sometimes risk a card in particular circumstances, but why on earth was Jamie Clarke taking such measures in the first minute of the game, in the middle of the field against a player who probably wouldn't have made any difference anyway?
If at first you don't succeed, then goto Plan B