TOUCH wood, and I know you should never say this, but I can only ever remember being sick once in my life.
The only time I’ve ever thrown up was maybe when I was P4. The mother had come and get me from school and on our way into The Town (Dungiven), I couldn’t keep it in and was sick all over the floor in the back seat.
Apologies if you’re at your breakfast.
The downside of never being sick was that you never got a day off school.
I was no good at faking. Because I didn’t know what it felt like to be sick, I didn’t know how you were supposed to be.
Over-acting was the easiest diagnosis for a skeptical mother. A grimace pulled that little bit too tightly. Being unsure where the sickness was and what it felt like. Conveniently-timed coughing when it was supposed to be a sore stomach. The Amateur Dramatic Society didn’t know what they were missing.
There’s a famous story in our house. Jonny, one of the younger siblings, tried to pull a sickie one morning. Nobody was quite buying it but they weren’t sure.
Jonny was into music. Always had a guitar. Lying prone in the bed, seemingly unable to move, the guitar was produced and a song request made as a method of ascertaining the legitimacy of this mystery illness.
Up he springs from the bed and takes the instrument in his hands. Two notes in, it’s too late to go back. Out to school, boy.
In a nutshell, we weren’t good actors.
So believe me when I tell you I know what bad acting looks like.
Gaelic football has become depressingly full of bad acting.
In the era of statistics and accurate measurement, it would be an interesting study that detailed the proportion of head injuries that are suffered in the final 15 minutes by the team winning a game.
There also appears to be a direct correlation between mystery head injuries and black card periods.
You can understand why referees are loathe to ignore men going down holding their heads. Player welfare has to be protected at all costs, and it has to be seen to be protected.
There are enough unseen collisions in a game that it’s hard for officials to go down the line of delivering a verdict they fear could have dangerous consequences.
It’s safer to go in and check out the player lying on the ground, let the medics deal with him and then add on the time at the end.
Problem is that everyone is now playing on that.
We’re at the stage with diving in Gaelic football that it’s triumphing because nobody is really talking about it any more. Nobody dares tackle the subject because of the dangers associated with head injuries.
What we have is not a growing trend but an established one going back over many seasons.
Nothing is sacrosanct when it comes to our ability to bend rules.
Referees became wise to traditional time-wasting efforts and started to tell players to get up, or goalkeepers to kick the ball out. Lazarus became an ineffective player when that happened.
So then coaches got smarter. What were the two things that would prevent a game being restarted? Head injuries and goalkeepers.
There’s one particular inter-county goalkeeper who’d want to be having a word with his optician. His contact lenses keep falling out at the most inopportune moments, such as when his team has just conceded a couple of scores in a row, or there are three minutes left and his team’s lead is down to two points.
Eagle-eyed observers would note that it never really seems to happen when there’s a game to be chased.
Umpires have to do more than stand with their two arms the one length.
A nation saw Evan Comerford fall to the ground after Dublin had given away a penalty against Kerry.
It was exactly seven minutes from Kerry were awarded the spot kick until Comerford was taking the free out that resulted from Sean O’Shea’s frustrated swing on the rebound.
With absolutely nobody near him, Comerford lay down holding his head 35 seconds after the award of the penalty. Next thing the Dublin physio was stretching out his right leg! It took three-and-a-half minutes for O’Shea to be allowed to take the penalty, followed by exactly the same length of stoppage after the rebound, when there was more legitimacy to Comerford’s spell on the ground.
The first one was scandalous but everyone’s walking on glass around it, scared to say what they know they should say because of the very real threat of a proper head injury.
Whether the time is ever given back is questionable (Paddy Neilan added six first half minutes in that game, despite that one incident taking up seven) but what definitely isn’t given back is momentum.
Monkey see, monkey do.
In one recent club game I watched online, an example stood out a mile.
You were able to see the player in question from start to finish on one attack. He didn’t make any contact with anything or anyone. The opposition were on a run and kicked the score.
The cunning defender didn’t even do it straight away. He waited until the goalkeeper had the ball in his hand. Then out of absolutely nowhere, he falls to his knees, clutching the side of his head. Game stopped, physio on.
It happens in every single game now, lads going down out of nowhere holding their head.
When someone is seriously hurt in a football match, everyone knows they’re seriously hurt. The crowd knows it, the opposition players know it and the referee knows it. We’ve all been in situations where you’re calling the ref to stop the game for an opponent because you just know.
But if there is cynicism to be applied then Gaelic footballers will find ways to apply it.
It’s become so common now that the situation really needs taken command of.
It feels like there are two options.
One is to let the medic come on to the field and deal with injuries while play goes on.
The other is to borrow from soccer yet again by forcing anyone that receives treatment off the pitch and not allowed back on until the next break in play.
The law of unintended consequences might decree that teams might get punished somewhere down the line by losing a man to a legitimate injury, where the opposition scores a goal when he’s off the field.
What other options are there, though? To allow the final 20 minutes of a game to be allowed descend into farce by men lying down holding their heads?
It really is so horribly ugly what’s going on. Like, we’ve always prided ourselves on not being like soccer, not being like them.
We’re becoming like them. We’re nearly worse than them got, truth be told.
Lads aren’t just gonna tighten themselves up and stop it. It’s at the stage of needing a deterrent.
Like Jonny and the guitar, paying the price might make a few boys think twice about lying down.
