Carton gets suspended

[INDIANA]

you're really grasping at straws mate- your  county board is the same as all the others bar Meath. Your view was that your county board didn't enter into the appeals system and I have conclusively proven in a 90 second web search of one page that they do. That was my initial point and I've been proven correct. This is a malaise that is country wide not just Dublin related.

[Lone Shark]

I'm not here trying to bleat a mantra of "suspension good, appeal bad". Obviously there is a difference between appeals - a suspension not being appealed where the player/individual is actually innocent obviously should be appealed. I'm drawing the distinction between appealing because the punishment is incorrect and appealing because a technicality can be found, or just taking a punt. I never claimed we don't appeal anything, I even pointed out one for you - the Ken Casey affair. I'm merely saying that we (and many other counties too I'm sure) don't try to get off suspensions on the grounds of technicalities.

Find me an appeal where Offaly (or indeed many other counties) appealed a clear cut offence on the grounds of "The ref dealt with it at the time", or "the video was looked at by the wrong people" or "the referees report was not signed in Irish" or any such nonsense and then I'll agree with you. Until then, I'm not saying I'll turn you around but I'd be fairly happy with what side most readers of this thread would come down on the side of. 

[the ship]

were ye not also whinging about having to play in the tommy murphy cup as well

[INDIANA]

so we've gone from not appealing at all to only appealing on non-players- with all due respect a selector trying to get off a 24 week ban is a pretty serious offence and in my view i don't make the distinction. Like i said there has only been one case (Brina Farrell) - all others are as bad.

[Lone Shark]

No, no, and a thousand times no. The issue is not that we'll only appeal non-players, but that we'll only appeal INNOCENT individuals.


I am not and never have suggested that any county board should demur when an injustice has been served on them. I've no doubt that if Brian Farrell did not do anything to warrant his red card and was sent off for no reason, then Meath would have appealed and rightly so. However his guilt was not in doubt, so he and his county accepted their punishment.

You're attempting to blur the lines here by treating all cases as identical, when for obvious reasons there is a world of difference between cases where guilt or innocence is at issue and cases where the offence is as clear as day but weasel tactics are being engaged in to find a loophole. I am of the opinion that my county has not contested JUSTIFIED bans down the years, and the best you can do against this is one case where four individuals were suspended, and two of those suspensions were appealed on the grounds of mistaken identity. I can't speak for Hughes, I didn't see him do anything, but neither did I see him not doing anything so to speak, but my own brother was part of that minor panel this year and he knows full well that Geraghty did not do anything to deserve that ban and can confirm he's being accused of the actions of another - Geraghty was only five yards from them at the time. Offaly would have been failing the lad if they did not appeal on his behalf.

Now as I've said before, if you can't see the difference between these cases and what happened in the Carton affair, there is nowhere to go with this. I know that you can see this as well as the next man but it's a classic debating technique so I can hardly blame you for engaging in it. Equally I'm not saying Dublin is unique either - far from it. But you cannot say equivocally that all others would have done exactly the same - who's to say what Sligo would have done if Mark Brehony got a four week ban in the lead up to the Connacht final this year, or Tommy Freeman of Monaghan a week before the Ulster decider - neither side have no form either way to indicate what they would have done, to my recollection anyway.

were ye not also whinging about having to play in the tommy murphy cup as well

Not to put too fine a point on it - no. A few media people might have suggested there was something wrong with it, but the county board made no representations and we dutifully fielded and phoned it in, in the true spirit of the Tommy Murphy cup.

[the ship]

if what you say is true and i have no reason to not beleive you then the calibre of the offaly county board is to be admired.

[Lone Shark]

For what it's worth, I don't think we're that remarkable. I actually think many counties, if put to the test, would actually act along the same lines - the whole point of this exercise was not to lionise the Offaly county board, merely to put to bed this notion that "every county" would do the same as the DCB did with Carton. 

[his holiness nb]

Carton deserved to be suspended for the final, the DCB should NOT have appealed.
I couldnt give a f**k what other counties would have done, two wrongs dont make a right.

DCB were morally wrong in this.

[ormondeboy]

Brennan's six-point plan tackles discipline anomalies

http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-sports/brennans-sixpoint-plan-tack
les-discipline-anomalies-1092904.html

A six-point plan of action to tackle anomalies and grey areas relating to discipline has been proposed by GAA president Nickey Brennan.

Using Saturday's Special Congress to deliver another keynote speech on attitudes towards discipline, Brennan called for much greater "respect"
for the rules that govern discipline in the GAA.

Among his proposals to be examined by the rule book task force, headed by presidential candidate Liam O'Neill, are the introduction of match instead of time bans, the institution of an independent video review panel, and the composition of a CAC with members exclusively of a legal background.

He also called for a player who is charged with an 'infraction' to be ineligible to play until his case his heard and for suspensions to show more consistency.

Brennan said it was time for GAA members and units to start living up to their responsibilities.

"When a serious wrong has been perpetrated, individuals must take personal responsibility and there is a clear onus on GAA officials to accept responsibility when one of their players or members is involved in a serious disciplinary incident," he said.

"It is regrettable and annoying that we had a number of players who committed serious offences yet sought to have the proposed punishment overturned, succeeding in a number of cases supposedly on the back of technicalities."

He said that commanding this respect for rules "remains our greatest challenge," and admitted "the culture of people speaking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time regarding discipline," would be difficult to change.

Brennan has clearly been annoyed at the lengths that some County Boards have gone to, to clear players.

He outlined the number of cases that went to hearings (just 17 out of
168) to highlight that incidents of indiscipline were "fewer by comparison with a few years ago." Of the 17 that went to hearings, seven proposed charges were dropped.

But some of the cases that were pushed clearly irked the GAA president.
"The GAA has been badly let down this year by some players, team officials and county officials who challenged penalties when there was blatantly clear evidence regarding the offences," he pointed out.

He highlighted how the resort to legal guidance was now much more prevalent and was placing far greater pressure on amateur committees not equipped to deal with such a challenge.

Under the terms of his six-point plan, Brennan envisages a new Centrals Appeals Committee would comprise people of a legal background who serve on no other committee.

"The membership of our central CAC cannot be reasonably expected any more to handle the complexities and legal arguments put forward,"
Brennan argued.

An eight-person committee was, said Brennan, "a step away" from the three-person disciplinary tribunal proposed by director general Liam Mulvihill.

The institution of a video review committee to pour over controversial incidents in a match has also been proposed. Under the present system where referees can be contacted by the CCCC to review specific incidents the referees are being placed "in a very difficult position". The situations of Cork's Noel O'Leary and Meath's Graham Geraghty come to mind.

Brennan proposes that the new committee would still contact a referee for clarification but ultimately decide themselves if a player has a case to answer.

His call for greater consistency in suspensions was backed by examples he gave of where anomalies lay.

This year, he told Congress, two players from the same club were sent off in an inter-county game one week and the pair were sent off again a week later playing for the club. Because their interest in both competitions ended with those games they won't serve any suspension.

[turk]

Fair play to Brennan