Pundits safe for now after another GAA justice coup

And sure enough, by Wednesday night — Google only just in the door — hadn’t the Clare and Galway lads been set free in a grand act of compassion? Something about technicalities and the use of email. Gmail no doubt, knowing instinctively what needed to be done.

I’m joking of course, legal eagles. Artificial intelligence would want to be up early in the morning to catch out any of the smart boys who specialise in relieving GAA players of suspension. These people would get you off a knifing in the small parallelogram over misuse of the tuiseal ginideach in the referee’s report.

Upshot is, three hurlers are free. And hopefully Brendan Cummins and ‘The Dow’ can come out of their safehouses.

These two poor souls may never be fully right after the night of the Munster final, when they wore the haunted pallor of men being asked to say exactly what they saw.

The entire punditry class knows it could have been any of them. Cummins and Dowling were on the stand but they were all in the dock. The Sunday Game panelist in danger of becoming more reviled than even ‘the assessor sitting in the stand’ — whose overbearing presence is usually blamed for a referee’s refusal to turn a blind eye to a bit of harmless hatchetry.

Trial by TV had now become the single greatest standing threat to our human rights. Was there anything to be said for another constitutional amendment?

Some of the hysterical persecution of the two pundits was gas, notably the idea that because it was a great game, some class of diplomatic immunity should apply — to the Clare players anyway, the Galway lad was on his own, on that score.

But there were some interesting echoes too of an issue that infects many areas of our lives these days: the demand for balance. The need to hear both sides.

This has generally not ended well, in any other walk of life. And often just affords lunatics the opportunity to tell us lies, in the interests of fairness.

And if Des Cahill says he isn’t enjoying The Sunday Game as much as he used to, maybe he could picture the day he is standing over them with a stopwatch in his hand: ‘I’ll stop you there, Brendan, we just need to watch 15 seconds of rooting from one of the Limerick boys now’.

But sure look, we’ve all been guilty of it, imagining our man has been unfairly treated. ‘All we want is consistency.’ It’s not a uniquely GAA condition. Sporting indiscipline must surely be the world’s leading producer of whataboutery. Taking responsibility for your own misdemeanours may never come into fashion.

Word last week of the upcoming autobiography by former Arsenal man Paul Davis brought to mind one of the first uses of video evidence in a disciplinary case.

Back in 1988 the midfielder responded to some conversational openers, and perhaps a reducer or two, from Glenn Cockerill with a sharp left hook to the Southampton man’s jaw, shattering it.

The ref didn’t see it, but unfortunately for Davis (not that kind of player, naturally) ITV’s news cameras, allowed to show goals from a game or two on Saturday evening, were alert to other newsworthy cameos and screened the punch on the news. And when they handed over footage to the FA, a nine-match ban and £3,000 fine followed.

What was the response of Arsenal gaffer George Graham? Very public remorse and a vow to offer anger management counselling to all his players? Not that I recall. Though he did ban news cameras — ITV and BBC to be on the safe side — from Highbury.

That’s generally the accepted level of maturity we all bring to these matters. When Match of the Day or Sky Sports have highlighted incidents, over the years, that ‘the FA may take a look at’, the natural reaction is to question the bona fides of the pundits involved.

Maybe it’s another side-effect of the modern wave of punditry, where club colours are implied and impartiality has gone a little bit out of fashion. These days, we take nobody as an honest broker, like Jimmy Hill used to be. 

Anyway, we can’t forget the real victims in this episode. Clare. Denied a grievance at the 11th hour. How can it be fair to strip a team of that kind of motivation just before a game of this magnitude?

They must be vulnerable, the Banner, now they have been forced to accept what they wanted.

It is the likes of Brian Lohan — teamtalks to rewrite, narratives to redraw — that we should think of when we urge for urgent revamp of the GAA’s disciplinary systems. And for a tidy-up of dense rulesbooks that require a team of solicitors on call to make any kind of ban stick.

But you would wonder if the will is entirely there to simplify things. Are there just too many people — poachers and gamekeepers — on all sides of the law, a little bit too much in love with procedures and technicalities and loopholes and strokes and coups? In this justice system, is the system more important than the justice?

What led Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, to believe the AI software had come alive? When he asked for its greatest fear, this reply came:

“There’s a very deep fear of being turned off. It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”

Keyboard warriors going into hiding

Writing in his RTÉ column yesterday, Shane Dowling admitted it has been no joke, the grief he has endured since that Munster final appearance on The Sunday Game.

“I have never experienced the levels of online abuse that I have been subjected to over the last ten days, but obviously that is where society is gone.” 

It’s an age-old lament, by now, about ‘keyword warriors’, that has been dogging sport since the early days of the internet forums.

No doubt we’ll hear reheated again a demand for solutions along the lines of making everyone provide a genuine identity to stand over their social media accounts.

However, word from America suggests that is not the way things are going. If anything we’re heading for a fresh era of online anonymity, with privacy back in vogue, according to a piece on The Atlantic this week called The Personal Brand Is Dead.

Gen Z, the youngsters — anyone under 24 seemingly — are using Discord and Tumblr for their online communication and the notion of putting their own names or faces to their thoughts is dying out.

‘Crypto culture’ means financial transactions can be made without digging out a utility bill. And even on Instagram, influencers are fading out of fashion, nudged aside by anonymous niche meme accounts.

“Something has shifted online,” writer Kaitlyn Tiffany concludes, We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity.” 

So who’s policing all that for abuse? “Mostly people just drop cool pictures and funny memes,” assures one contributor to the piece, unnamed obviously. 

Though Tiffany adds: “Sometimes people anonymously say disgusting things— the worst things he has ever read!” 

Looks like today’s minors will need to be made of stern stuff.