In the pantheon of experiments in the GAA, the Black Card looks increasingly looks like going the way of the sin bin and allowing the ball to be plucked directly from the ground: into the bin.
Introduced to curb cynical play, the black card has fallen foul to a problem rarely seen in the GAA: it's actually too well defined. Rather than be enforced solely to stamp out cynicism, the GAA decided to help referees out by trying to define exactly what that cynicism is. Ever since, we've had players depart games early for all manner of benign offences, many of which were not particularly cynical in their execution.
Pat McEnaney spoke to the We Are Ulster podcast a couple of months ago about the rule, and was honest about its failures, admitting that "if we don't get it right, the Association, and fellas like myself, will have to have a wee think about it".
The weekend was notable for its lack of black cards: there were none given in either of the All-Ireland quarter-finals, despite some pretty blatant examples peppered throughout the games.
Writing in The Irish Times, Jim McGuinness has accentuated the lack of enforcement of the rule over the weekend. McGuinness flagged the incident in the first-half of the Kerry/Galway game, in which Shane Enright horsed into Johnny Heaney off the ball. Referee David Coldrick gave him a yellow. He also cites a similar incident in the Armagh/Kildare game from the night before.
We're living a lie with the pretending that everything's okay. Everything is not okay because in those two situations - at the business end of the championship - either the officials don't know the rule or they don't know how to detect and enforce it. Either way, it's a very bad situation.
If you look at the Enright foul, Peter Crowley comes over and taps referee David Coldrick on the back, a wee bit of moral support. Enright gets the yellow and he taps the ref on the back because both players knew it was a black card and the referee didn't? It's incredible!
McGuinness' full column in the paper is available online.
