By John Harrington

Refereeing and umpiring at inter-county level is quite often a family business.

There’s a good reason for that. Inter-county referees operate in such a pressurised environment that they need to trust their own team.

If you’re in a situation where you need to seek the counsel of an umpire to make a decision critical to the outcome of a match, then you’re going want to have full faith that their judgement is sound.

David Gough, who refereed the drawn All-Ireland Final between Dublin and Kerry in 2019 is a case in point.

His long-time umpiring team has comprised of his father Eugene, his brother Stephen, his uncle Terry, and his cousin Dean, and he is on record as saying he couldn’t imagine refereeing at the highest level without their backing.

You can understand why a referee might find it both supportive and comforting to have family members standing at each post, but how do the umpires themselves feel about it?

Especially if, like Eugene Gough, you’re the father of the man in the middle who over the course of an average 70 minutes is going to anger large sections of the crowd even if every decision he makes is the correct one.

How do you switch off the paternal instinct and simply focus on your own job?

“You don’t so much switch off to it but you just don’t react,” says Gough.

“That’s just the way it is. You have to grin and bear it. We laugh about it afterwards but you genuinely do, you have to.

“If you start taking that sort of stuff in you’re going down the road of no return. We talk about it and we laugh about it afterwards among the umpires in that area.

“I can remember one incident where in the very, very early days and it was more just where someone said something to me about, ‘Who’s that effing referee? What’s his name, do you know him?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t know who he is!’

“Within three minutes David was in saying, ‘Dad! Dad!’ The goalkeeping was looking at me. That was just a low level club match in the early days.”

These days David doesn’t have to run all the way into Eugene to gain his counsel thanks to the ear-pieces and microphones that allow them to stay in constant communication.

Every referee who officiates in Croke Park is now kitted out with these devices, but the Goughs were ahead of the curve.

They had their own kits moulded in Specsavers which they use even at club level to ensure they’re giving themselves every chance to do the best job they can do.

Technology is a big help, but Eugene believes the fact that they’re all family is an even better asset when it comes to helping his son David referee a game well.

**“**We have an understanding I suppose because we are a family,” he says.

“We find it easy to talk to each other anyway. We’re always bouncing things off each other all the time.

“I imagine if I were umpiring for another referee – someone I didn’t know that well – it would be more difficult.

“With David, though, it just flows. We know how to communicate what we have to say but it has to be the wording in the rules so we need to understand them.

“Is it ‘rough play,’ fouling off the ball,’ or ‘dangerous play’? You need to use the right wording. Then David decides whether to apply a card or a tick. It’s understanding the rules but also knowing the correct terminology.”

David Gough’s refereeing performance in the drawn All-Ireland Final was pretty much flawless which is all the more laudable considering he was undermined by some before a ball was even kicked.

Many high-profile pundits saw fit to question his impartiality because he worked in Dublin, so how did his father Eugene feel about all the pressure that was being heaped on his son’s shoulders?

It turns out he was completely oblivious to it, because he made the calculated decision to holiday in Lanzarote before the All-Ireland Final.

“I needed that because it was a distraction,” says Gough. “I would be nervous generally. Big games like that.

“But no, when you walk out on the pitch at Croke Park, it just seems to dissipate, I don’t know what it is. The nervousness that you have inside, you’re running through little instances in your mind and your wordings about what we have to say to David and have I got all this stuff right in my mind.

“You just try to stay fixed on something, you don’t want to drift. It’s not anything like the level that David is at but you’re just trying to stay on top of what’s going to take place because something I might say or indicate to you gives you a decision to make so it has some bearing and you don’t want to say something wrong or get something wrong.

“You want to get every fact right in your mind and get the wording proper so that David can make decisions.

“What I found that day when I got out on the pitch, there was just so much going on then, it just seemed to…this stuff trawling through your mind stopped and I just got into the whole buzz of it. It’s fantastic.

“You don’t realise it at the time because you’re so busy watching your square in front of you, off the ball, you’re not following who’s having a great game or what comes after that score, you’re watching for off the ball stuff because you don’t want something happening and you not having some sort of view on it or whatever.

“You’re completely watching it and it’s only afterwards when you sit down and you replay the game and you watch it and you see who really played well and how the game went. You know the intensity…it was electric that day."

The ultimate nightmare for any umpire is to make an incorrect decision that directly impacts the result of a match, which is why Gough was more than happy to have the help of Hawkeye on All-Ireland Final day.

“I find Hawkeye very good. I think it's a great system, I really do.

“I was at the receiving end of a decision in the All-Ireland where I awarded what I felt was a justifiable score but that virtual post that's above the real post, if you don't see that at the right time...what caught me at the time was that the ball is very rarely now kicked directly straight by a player. Very rarely now.

“In the old days that may have been so, but now they're curved and their curving in so you have to get into the right position to make the decision if the ball hits that virtual post.

“In my case, most of the ball was inside it, but Hawkeye showed there was a small sliver of the ball was shaded by the virtual post. So it's difficult.

“The decision was right. If it comes over the post then it's a wide. On that day it was instant.

“I knew looking at it afterwards from what people had said, even on the commentary of the game, when the Hawkeye replay had taken place, both of the guys doing the game had said, 'Thats in, that's good, that's a score'.

“Even though they were watching it they made the error as well, because most of the ball appeared inside, there was just a small, moon-shaped sliver there.

“But the right decision was made on the day.”