Jarlath Burns in favour of club and team ranking system to tackle abuse of officials

GAA President elect Jarlath Burns has told RTÉ Sport that he would be in favour of more diligent tracking of club player and supporter behaviour in order to cut down on the abuse of match officials.

Burns, who was speaking at the BOX-IT Athletic Grounds ahead of a charity skydive next weekend, has said that he would like to see an addition to a referee's report where both teams as well as their supporters are given grades across the season with potential sanctions to be applied as a result.

"I would like to see a situation where on a referee's report there is an index, one to five, of how the home team, opposing team and supporters behaved so then we will be dealing with data," he said.

"At each county board meeting you’d be able to say which is club is consistently the club that is abusing referees because there is a lot of irrational abuse going on for our referees.

"Most of the games I go to, going as a neutral or going to cover for TG4, you say to yourself 'I think the referee actually had a fine game there, I thought he did well.’ Then you talk to people on both sides and they’ll say 'I thought the referee was terrible’.

"When we become emotionally involved in a game we lose sense of rationality and logic and I think that we need to focus on the worst culprits at club in particular who are abusing referees and causing referees not to want to continue to be referees."

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