I listened to a good podcast over the summer called Against The Rules, it was by the fella who wrote The Blind Side and Moneyball. He did one of the episodes about referees in the NBA. The NBA invested millions upskilling referees, increasing their pay and also setting up a TV referees hub in New Jersey so that the referees in the stadiums could consult with a TV ref within seconds to make sure the correct call was made. All the surveys they conducted before and after have shown the referees have improved and a higher percentage of correct calls are made in every game, but the abuse towards referees has gotten worse and is being committed by more high profile players. His point was that people don't really want the correct call made by the referee, they only want calls made that suit them.
I would say this is heightened in the GAA because of the personal investment and parochialism involved with clubs. One thing that has struck me in recent years is the amount of abuse thrown at referees by teams who have been awarded a free, never mind the team that the free was given against. I'm not here to defend referees, but people can't expect to treat a group of fellas like dirt, fail to meaningfully invest in recruiting decent numbers, and then give out that the standard isn't high enough.
There's a major accountability problem when it comes to discipline in the GAA and I think that's one of the biggest problems with refereeing. Too many people in the GAA think punishments are only for other people and other clubs, and not their own, even when they are blatantly in the wrong. That comes back to the convoluted nature of the disciplinary process, and the only way to fix that is to streamline the whole thing, do away with appeals to the Leinster Council and DRA and all that oul sh*te. One avenue of appeal would be enough. Increase penalties on behaviour you don't want, anything less is tacit approval of that behaviour. Most senior championship games are played in O'Moore Park, the county board could easily set up a camera system in there to make sure there is video evidence from every game played there. It wouldn't take a huge investment to stretch that down to getting lads to video games at intermediate level or senior b in hurling. They could even offset the costs by selling the videos to the clubs to use for their own analysis, as most clubs now seem to video their games anyway.
If we want referees to be better, we need to increase the numbers doing it, attract the right people, retain them, and the put the right sort of pressure on them as well. Not pressure from abuse, but pressure from that fact they have been properly trained and certain standard is expected, and if they're not meeting it then there's lads there to take their place.
Mind you, I don't envisage any of that ever happening.
