Hurling referees must clamp down on throwing says Kelly
Throwing of the sliotar in hurling needs to be seriously clamped down on by referees, according to Mullingar’s Barry Kelly, a four-time All-Ireland hurling final referee.
The vastly experienced St Oliver Plunkett’s club man, who now works as a referee’s advisor with Croke Park, said referees need to be more vigilant and he suggested there will be stronger emphasis on the indiscretion as the season progresses and championship kicks in.
Illegal hand-passing is now rife in the game, Kelly feels, with little or no emphasis on the skill in a coaching sense.
“It has become endemic,” he remarked.
“I would say last Sunday in Mullingar, if there were 100 handpasses, there were 10 done properly. The referee could easily have blown 30 (in the Westmeath versus Wexford game). It’s meant to be a release and a strike; it’s meant to be like handball really. You look at warm-ups before a game and none of them are being done properly. It's being thrown."
Kelly was in TEG Cusack Park for the Division 1A clash, won convincingly in the end by Wexford, 2-23 to 1-15. He feels Kilkenny referee Sean Cleere was not strict enough when it came to enforcing the rule. There is now a break ahead of round three of the league and referees are expected to be grilled on their lack of consistency around the application of the hand-pass rule.
"There’s three rounds of the league left to get some kind of clamp on it,” opined Kelly.
"I know the referees are meeting this Wednesday in Dublin and I think they are going to get it hard and fast from Croke Park."
Kelly feels inclined to support former Tipperary hurler, Conor O’Donovan, who campaigned for a change on the rule last year.
“I’m more and more inclined with the Conor O’Donovan type, flick it off the hurley, because it has become endemic in the game now. It’s now basically just fouling the whole time" observed Kelly.
O’Donovan attempted to highlight the flaw and offer a solution.
“It would be much simpler for everyone if a striking action with the same hand that a ball was thrown from was deemed a foul,” the Tipperary man remarked.