Heel of the dunt: Darragh McCarthy red card may reduce pointless posturing
NOBODY COULD TELL you they had a great view of all that was going on before, during and the few seconds after the throw-in of Cork against Tipperary on Sunday.
There were confrontations all over the place. You couldn’t get a read on any one of them before the instant distraction of another getting more heated.
But the fracas that led to Darragh McCarthy getting red carded was hard to miss.
The Tipp forwards jogged into position. It was more a dash which transitioned to the charge of the light brigade for McCarthy, who crashed into Sean O’Donoghue. His marker-setting-down exercise was then augmented by jabbing a hurley into the midriff of the defender who went down to the howls of the ground, which was made up of at least 85% Cork supporters.
Referee Johnny Murphy, not overly popular on Leeside following last season’s All-Ireland final, then had a decision to make when told about what happened by his linesman. It was a clear striking action so only the ‘you can’t send someone off at the very start/Tadhg Kennelly’ rule could have saved the youngster.
Murphy did the right thing, even if it rendered the subsequent spectacle a shadow of what we’d hoped for. But that’s not the ref’s lookout. He can only deal with the situations that present themselves.
Manager Liam Cahill spoke sympathetically afterwards, saying people in Tipp would have McCarthy’s back.
It’s admirable for Cahill to publicly support his player here, the opposite has happened in similar circumstances in many sports over the years.
You’d wonder though would McCarthy even be in the situation but for the tone set which appeared to be set by Tipperary management? The numerous incidents at the start did seem to be initiated by Tipp. Cork were not passive bystanders, they became the willing partner in this ritual and slightly embarrassing tango, but it looked like Tipp were trying to unsettle their opponents early on.
“Tipp need to change the terms of engagement and bring Cork into a physical battle,” wrote Lar Corbett in the Irish Independent in advance of the game. That certainly seemed to be the mission, as it had been the previous week against Limerick when a few Tipp players wrestled their markers to the ground at the start. The fact it wasn’t just one or two doing this and the same thing happened the very next week suggests policy is at play, rather than random happenings.
Also, someone like McCarthy does not have a history of this type of incident. He has to take responsibility for his own actions, but that responsibility should be mitigated somewhat by the clear sign that he was part of a group that were amped up to a counterproductive level; not in control of their emotions – something for which they paid a swift and lasting price.
Perhaps they felt they could bait Cork into an act of mindlessness. It wouldn’t be a totally irrational thought in fairness, given what Shane Barrett did the previous week in Ennis, and given Cork’s history in Munster last season, where they were reduced to 14 against Waterford and Clare.
If we needed any further proof then we got it on Sunday: there are very few heroic, backs-to-the-wall stories anymore. There are exceptions which prove the rule – Tipp v Wexford in 2019, Limerick v Waterford in 2023 – but in general if you lose a man you will suffer the obvious consequence against the tactically astute sides you face now.
In that light, you might think management teams would be carrying out an urgent cost benefit analysis of marker laying down, physicality, playing on the edge; general dunting buffoonery.
Dunting has always been with us, and it’s at the less sinister end of the spectrum to some other things that have happened in the name of imposing yourself.
Yet there are a couple of reasons why it might be reduced, if not retired, now.
Perhaps it does help to set the tone and we’d be lying if we said it hasn’t added to the general argy-bargy thrill of it all at certain times. But we’ve long gone past whatever is the Goldilocks right amount of the thing.
The Clare-Cork game in Ennis this month was at times like bullfighting, only minus a matador and plus an extra bull.
In an ideal world the respective captains would come together before a game now and agree in advance to chalk the dunting contest down as a no score draw and get on with the game. The guys on the field are all tough by everyman standards, but if they had a true aptitude for combat they’d be boxers or MMA athletes. But they are elite level hurlers, not fighters.
If you want to set down a physical marker that will make a difference there are more consequential means, which don’t incur the same risk for yellow and red cards. There is the tackle count, the number of sprints you put in over the 70 minutes-plus, your number of blocks and hooks, the frequency with which your side came out of a ruck with the ball and your contribution to that total.
Energy is a precious commodity in any sport, in particular one as frantic and fast as hurling at this level, so you need to be careful how you spend it. You’d burn a fair few kilojoules crashing into someone, resetting and doing it again a half dozen times. Maybe better off using the gas for another purpose.
The flashpoints didn’t end after minute zero-point-one on Sunday. Tipperary defenders kept at a few Cork attackers. Declan Dalton was involved in skirmishes, which may have had a worse outcome for him on a different day. At one point Alan Connolly was grabbed from behind in an arm lock and thrown to the ground. The ball was nowhere close, but the umpire was. Connolly did well not to retaliate once no attention was brought to the incident. The natural tendency for many here would be to try and dispense your own little bit of justice once it doesn’t come from officials.
Tipp would have hoped for such a response, their best chance by far of getting back into the contest being an evening of numbers to 14v14. Honestly, they would have been mad not to try and encourage a Cork player to lash out.
One who didn’t seem to get quite as much harassment, to my eyes at least, was Darragh Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon infamously celebrated his point to put Cork six ahead late on against Limerick in the 2018 All-Ireland semi-final in an overzealous way, jumping right into cousin Richie English.
Now 28, Fitzgibbon seems more cold, not interested in the more tacky paraphernalia of the game. He’s locked into how he can hurt a team where it counts. And no matter how determined someone is to start a row, you just end up looking silly if the other party is at once unafraid and disinterested.
Fitzgibbon will just let you risk a card should you wish, then win the next ball and put it over the bar. Darragh McCarthy was his natural rival on Sunday to leave an opposition defender looking a bit hapless, as he did to Ger Millerick during the league earlier this year, if not O’Donoghue in the league final.
But you’d have had to fancy him to give O’Donoghue an extremely tough day once the game got going on Sunday. Unfortunately, it never did for him. He’s likely feeling terrible now, but hopefully that won’t last.
He’s the perpetrator of a dumb and potentially dangerous offence but it took place in a wider culture where this kind of action can and does happen a lot.
One overwound 19-year-old got hit with the tariff on Sunday. He’ll have learned from this, hopefully others will too, especially those who send out teams full of futile machismo, their eyes off the ball.
The 42
