Think you can do better?: Taking a closer look at Referees

By Brian Murphy

In a recent drive to recruit more referees, the GAA used the clever tagline 'Think you can do better?' to promote their campaign.

The initiative involves current inter-county referees acting as 'Recruitment Ambassadors' within their own counties, with the aim to increase the number of referees at club level and, consequently, provincial and national level.

The 'Think you can do better?' slogan caught the imagination because it cuts to the very heart of one of the fundamental issues with refereeing - plenty of people in GAA circles, from players and supporters to administrators, feel they can do better, but not enough of them are willing to put their reputation on the line and actually take up the challenge.

Maybe it's the parochial and often tribal nature of the GAA, or perhaps it's down to the huge increase in media coverage of inter-county games in recent years, but in the GAA everyone seems to have an opinion on referees.

Many of us are self-appointed experts, especially when there has been a perceived injustice involving our team or when controversial decisions, often made in a split second, are repeated ad infinitum on our television screens, removed from their context and setting.

The truth is that most of the time we hardly notice the referee - a good one will facilitate a good game rather than dictate its course - and there is a large dollop of truth to the old cliché that a referee is only noticed when they make a mistake.

It begs the question, 'why would anyone willingly put themselves in the firing line?' For most of the referees officiating at national level, it is a demanding, time-consuming pursuit, but for many it is also a hugely rewarding experience.

When I was invited by the GAA to go along to their annual fitness test and a subsequent seminar in Croke Park to document what pre-season is like for inter-county referees, I was happy to oblige, but, admittedly, I did so with a gear bag-full of pre-conceptions.

The first - and in hindsight, the most misguided - was that you didn't have to be particularly fit to be an inter-county referee. Why would you?

Up to seven years ago, it was a referee's personal responsibility to maintain their fitness levels to a decent standard. However, as Gaelic Games began to evolve in the last decade and the levels of preparation and training undertaken by inter-county teams began to increase dramatically, an ever-widening gap emerged between the fitness levels of players and officials.

Pat Doherty, National Match Officials Manager of the GAA

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To address this concern, the GAA linked up with DCU and, under the supervision of Professor Niall Moyna from the Department of Health and Human Performance, standardised tests were devised to ensure all referees on the national panel met minimum fitness requirements before the start of every season.

On a raw Friday night at the end of January, I joined the referees on the national hurling panel for their annual fitness test on one of the artificial five-a-side soccer pitches in DCU, an exercise overseen by Moyna and former Cavan inter-county player Dermot Sheridan, who is a post-graduate researcher working under Moyna at the college.

Known as the Bangsbo Test - or as the Yo-Yo Test sometimes - it is a variation on the bleep test designed to test an individual's aerobic endurance fitness levels. In practice, it involves running and then sprinting between cones set 20 metres apart, incorporating a 10 second recovery period after each set of sprints. As the level increases, the time allowed to complete each sprint decreases, and the lactic acid builds in the legs and the lungs begin to burn.

Thirty-two referees from the national hurling panel were split into three groups. The participants were nervous initially, but in the first group just two referees failed to meet the minimum standard of 16.8. Over the course of the three separate tests, a further four failed to hit the target. All six will be given one more chance to reach the standard this Thursday in DCU before they can referee at national level; if they fail a second time, they will then be removed from the national panel for the year.

Anyone who has done the Bangsbo Test will know how tough it is, and that attaining a level of 16.8 is even tougher still. At that stage in late January, it was still two weeks out from the start of the Allianz Hurling League, but the fitness levels of nearly all the participants were hugely impressive. Most continued on beyond the 16.8 mark and 11 attained a level above 18, which is considered to be the gold standard.

A week earlier, when the inter-county football referees were put through their paces, the results were of an even higher calibre, with one referee, Fergal Kelly from Longford, breaking the 20 mark, a level of fitness usually attained only by elite level athletes.

Carlow referee Paud O'Dwyer recorded the highest result on the national hurling panel at 19.1. After he had recovered from his impressive efforts, he gave an insight into the training regime he underwent to ensure he passed the test with relative ease.

"In the off-season, I generally train three times a week - from the middle of November leading up to the fitness test," says the Palatine clubman, who played inter-county football for Carlow between 1999 and 2003 before taking up refereeing. "Generally, I would do a 40-minute session, a warm-up and then a good 25 minutes of 100 to 200 metre intervals. I'm not mad into long running but I enjoy the fast stuff and it seems to suit me.

Referees at their annual fitness test in DCU, January 2015

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"Come the summer then you wouldn't be doing as many sessions because you are out three to four times a week. During the Allianz League when I still won't be doing a huge amount of games midweek, I will still try to get out twice a week and then you have games at the weekend."

Another referee had painted two lines 20 metres apart in a field at the end of his garden and spent three months running intervals, three to four times a week, before he felt satisfied that he was at the right level of fitness to pass scrutiny. In his 40s and brought into the national panel for the first time, he was ecstatic at passing the test.

Others joined up with their colleagues in neighbouring counties and had formed training groups in certain parts of the country, doing collective track and field sessions once a week to keep up motivation levels in the dark winter months.

Niall Moyna has been involved from the very start of the process seven years ago and has overseen the dramatic improvement in referees' general conditioning and fitness levels in that time.

"What we did, starting seven years ago, (was) we set standards based on their initial results," says Moyna. "We didn't pick these figures out of the sky, it was based in their results and knowing that 90 per cent of the referees could attain that.

"Each year, it has incrementally improved and there has probably been about a 40 per cent improvement in fitness levels over the last seven years to the point where most inter-county referees now would have a fitness level way beyond club level players.

"Believe it or not, the level what they have to attain in their pre-season test is where most inter-county players would be at the beginning of the season. Obviously when it comes to the championship, some inter-county players will get to 19 and 20, but a referee does not have to have the same fitness level as players.

"However, there is a level they need to be at to officiate and I believe we have got to that right now.

"They now have, particularly the top referees, a level of fitness closer to the players and we do not see large fluctuations over the course of the year. They are now being more careful in that when they attain a certain level of fitness they are maintaining it over the winter.

"I did two sessions on the track with them this winter, and I was blown away with their fitness and their ability to perform the session, and in particular their ability to recover from the sprints. That told me they were light years ahead of where they were seven years ago."

Football referee Joe McQuillan

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As a former inter-county footballer, Paud O'Dwyer is one of a new breed of young referees who see a high level of fitness, as well as maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle, as fundamental to the job. Although studies on the distances covered in games by top referees have been conducted in the past, the latest information dates back to the 2011 Championship, and with the increase in fitness levels and the pace of the game, it is probably safe to assume that the results have jumped accordingly in the meantime.

When you consider Barry Kelly from Westmeath covered 10.65km, hitting an average speed of 8.3km/hour and a top speed of 22.6 km/hour, in the Leinster Senior Hurling Championship final between Kilkenny and Dublin at Croke Park that summer, it gives a real indication of the fitness levels required. Joe McQuillan from Cavan recorded the highest result for a football referee in the 2011 Championship, hitting 10.14km in the Leinster quarter-final between Laois and Dublin.

Another top level hurling referee had tracked his movement with a GPS watch in a recent pre-season competition. He had covered more than 8km in a 60-minute game. The red line tracking his movement covered nearly every area of the field.

"It's essential to have a very good level of fitness in hurling because you need to turn quickly and move quickly all the time," O'Dwyer says. "If the ball is in around the 21-metre line for a while and suddenly a lad drives it 80 yards up the field you have to get there because if you don't see, for example, the full-back pulling the full-forward you are in trouble. It's vital to have the speed and stamina to get up and down the field.

"The days of standing in the middle are long gone. Nobody follows a referee and looks at his performance until he makes a mistake. People don't see the referee and will never say, 'he was in a great position there' or 'God, he recovered very quickly there'. But if he misses something then they will be watching."

After the fitness test, the hurling referees reconvened in Croke Park for a meal and a talk by the GAA's Community and Health Manager Colin Regan on nutrition and healthy eating. At 9am the following morning, they were back in Croke Park for a pre-season seminar hosted by Pat Doherty, the GAA's national match officials manager, where over 80 clips from incidents in games over the previous 12 months were dissected and discussed in detail. Using 'turning point technology' - the same technology delegates use in voting at GAA Congress - each referee was given a hand-held device and then asked to vote on how they would have dealt with a specific incident highlighted on a big screen.

The seminar focused on aggressive fouls, technical fouls, referee positioning, referee communication and teamwork, and was attended by Dickie Murphy and Willie Barrett, both members of the National Referee Committee and both former All-Ireland hurling final referees. Seminars are held regularly throughout the year and the hurling referees will be back for another gathering after the second round of Allianz Hurling League games - the football group were back for a second time last Thursday - have been completed.

Niall Moyna also led a discussion and recounted a story about a group of players he was once in charge of who felt aggrieved by a refereeing decision they deemed to have cost them a game. When the fall-out from the decision threatened to detract from their preparations for a subsequent game, Moyna issued his players with a short quiz on the playing rules of Gaelic football. Inevitably, none of them knew any of the answers and it was agreed that they would focus on improving their own game rather than blaming referees in future.

Professor Niall Moyna

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Over the last few months, the GAA have been gathering information on referees to compile brief biographies for publication in official match programmes. Through a shared website hosted by the GAA, which allows referees to log in and share videos, presentations and all manner of other information relating to the job, they have been submitting data under a variety of headings such as 'playing experience' 'number of years refereeing' and so on.

Picking through the information has been an eye-opening experience and has helped to debunk a few more of the myths that tend to build up around referees. The first one, which becomes immediately apparent when you spend time in their company, is that inter-county referees are much younger than one might expect.

Nearly all of the referees on the national panel have played Gaelic Games to a good level with their clubs; others have played at inter-county level, and most have taken up the whistle after their playing careers have come to an end. While referees are breaking into the national panel earlier and earlier now, gaining experience by working up through the ranks is the only guaranteed way to break into the championship panel and to get a shot at refereeing in provincial and national finals, which is the ambition of most referees who operate at the elite level.

The referees with the highest profiles, the ones we are all familiar with from big games in Croke Park and provincial finals around the country, therefore, tend to be more senior officials who have earned their stripes and may not be entirely representative of the wider circle.

Another of the charges frequently levelled at referees is that because they have never experienced playing at the highest grade, they cannot expect to understand how the game operates at that level. A quick glance through the names on the national panel and their playing experience should dispel that particular myth.

There is a former Cavan senior footballer in there (James Clarke), a former Carlow footballer, (Paud O'Dwyer), a Carlow hurler (Patrick Murphy), a former Carlow dual player (John Hickey), a former Wicklow senior hurler (John Keenan), an All-Ireland minor medal winner with Tipperary (Fergal Horgan), a Hogan Cup medal winner (David Gough) and a number of referees who have enjoyed successful underage inter-county careers. Anthony Nolan, who was included in the Football Championship panel last year in just his second year on the national panel, has played minor, U21 and senior football for Wicklow and is one of the top young referees in the country.

That may seem like a decent return, but the GAA are determined to get more inter-county players to take up the whistle when their careers have ended. So far, Colin Regan, who played senior inter-county football for Leitrim for 15 years, is the only ex-player to answer the call in the latest recruitment drive. He will start the referee foundation course soon and who knows where that will take him.

So, do you still think you can do better? Then why not give refereeing a go...

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Visit www.gaa.ie/referee for more