It's that time of year again. The week of the All-Ireland hurling final. So that means we have the inevitable 'Former Kilkenny player comes out and tells the ref not to be blowing his whistle too much' story.
The only surprise is that Eddie Keher has decided to sit out this one and leave it to a younger man, in this case Kilkenny's All-Ireland winning captain from 1993, Eddie O'Connor.
O'Connor is very much Keher's heir apparent as far as putting some stick about in the media is concerned. He was quick out of the blocks to lambast Joe Canning after Joe's rather tame/half admiring comments about Henry Shefflin's clever attempts to influence the referee between the drawn All-Ireland final and the replay in 2012.
And in today's Examiner, he hits all the usual notes. He reminds people that 'it's a man's game' and 'the good, honest hits are what people want to see.' He voiced concerns about Barry Kelly saying 'the fear I have is he will make a mess of the game' and that he 'might want to be more important than the players.'
All fair enough. Even if the last two comments constitute a rather nefarious attempt to put pressure on the referee, O'Connor is not a member of the Kilkenny back-room team so is free to say more or less what he likes without censure.
But then, he decided he was going to engage in a spot of football analysis. To his credit, it was a brief foray, and he was merely drifting into it to bolster his point on the hurling final, but he still managed to make a misstep.
Eddie decided that Cormac Reilly's problem on Saturday evening was not that he failed to punish blatant indiscretions leading the game to fall into anarchy well before the finish.
Rather, it was that he didn't let the game flow enough, an almost unique perspective on the events of Saturday evening.
When that happens it can ruin the game. It’s a bit like the football match last Saturday [between Kerry and Mayo] when the referee spoiled the game. Let the game flow. If you’re not able for the physical challenges then take up golf
The view of most observers was that Reilly was very loose in his implementation of the rules (not bothering penalising double-hops and at one stage allowing Anthony Maher to take a free kick with his fist) and was too slow to hand out cards, most notably to Shane Enright early on. Indeed, the few people who praised Reilly did so on the basis that he let the game flow.
But he didn't leave it go enough for Eddie O'Connor. Poor Cormac is getting it from all angles.
