backofthenet wrote: ↑Wed Dec 24, 2025 10:03 pm
What county player would take offense at whats said to them on the field of play?
If our county players are that mentally weak we are going nowhere, they will get that in a lot of matches be they club or county and would have had it since about 15 id imagine. I would be shocked if there was an original jibe by the time they hit senior
First of all, to be very clear - I am not referring to any one player or any incident here. Ciarán Burke has been mentioned in this thread, and what I'm about to say is not about him specifically any more than it is about any other player when it comes to the topic of what the Americans call 'trash talking' or what would be more widely described as 'sledging' over here.
Like all things, there is a scale to this behaviour. As a lifetime junior B, the only sledging I ever heard were surgically accurate descriptions of how spectacularly useless I was as a player, so in that sense I've never been exposed to anything that was even remotely out of order. And quite frankly, if all we were talking about here is lads insulting your ability to puck or kick a ball, either at Junior B or senior intercounty, then there's nothing to discuss. Last year in his pre-county-final interview, Brian Duignan talked about the Rynaghs lads needling him about the missed penalty in the last few minutes of the semi-final, particularly as he walked up to take those frees late in the game. And to be clear, BD was perfectly fine with that, he saw that as part of the game.
That said, we've all heard the stories of the ones that go way too far. Anthony Daly has spoken at times about being accused of violence against his partner by a Waterford player. We had an incident in our club last year here in Roscommon where an underage player of ours was racially abused and there are plenty of GAA players who can tell that story, and there have been instances at intercounty level where players tried to use both their marker's loss of a sibling to suicide and the death of another player's child as suitable material to "gain an edge".
Slight tangent, I had the misfortune of being on holiday in a foreign country once with nothing to read except Cathal McCarron's biography (given to me as a present, I hasten to add!) and to this day I regret that I didn't just bin it after 50 pages, it enraged me the amount of truly appalling and disgusting behaviour he excused in the name of being 'part and parcel of Ulster championship'. So as an aside, never read that book.
Anyway, back on topic. I don't think I'm being too presumptuous when I say that I don't think anyone on this board would admit to being okay with any of the above; so we can accept there is a line, somewhere. And while defining where that line is, is not easy, I've often thought that the simple answer for this would be when you're marking a player with a reputation for crossing the line when it comes to verbals, to just tape a small voice recorder inside your jersey and let it run.
Plenty of those devices are out there, cheap as chips and very small, you wouldn't notice them either as a player or as an opponent. Then when something is said, make a point of taking it out, pressing stop and saying "thanks for that" and passing it over to one of your lads on the sideline.
If the player is happy enough that what he's doing is within the bounds of acceptable competitive behaviour, he'll have no problem with that being posted on social media the next day, or sent to the relevant CCC.
Or, on the other hand, if you're the type of person who thinks that sledging is fine but someone recording what is said to make the player publicly accountable is not on, then I'm quite comfortable in saying you're a twisted individual who should have no influence on how gaelic games are played and administered.
Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't come up already, and in my opinion it's a stonewall certainty that it will soon.