'The game is okay' - Smart sliotar enough change for Brendan Cummins

Brendan Cummins believes that the sliotar needed to be standardised but he doesn't see a need for a change in how far a hurling ball travels any time soon.

The two-time All-Ireland winner and Tipperary U20 manager was a member of the GAA's Sliotar Work Group, which this week unveiled a new 'smart sliotar', essentially one containing a chip that when scanned tells you it is a ball that meets official regulations on size, mass and bounce.

The new ball will be trialled at U20 level this season, with a plan to introduce GAA-supplied sliotars at all senior inter-county games in 2023, ending the practise of each team bringing their own favourite from the over 35 officially licensed balls. Manufacturers will now have to reapply for licenses and supply balls for testing to make sure they are within narrow guidelines.

"If you are making a hurling ball, it is not an exact science," Cummins tells RTÉ Sport. "It is not like making guttering for the side of the house, where it just slips in. There is going to be slight variation in it.

"I could put 10 balls down on the table here and bring a load of players in and they would say five of them are duds and then the other five, they would have a row over which they like the most. That is the way the thing is.

"But we have to standardise it. If there are 15 or 20 different suppliers who are putting the chip into the ball, well, if it meets the modernised standards that we have in the ball, then the ball is in play. And it might be 5 or 10 % (difference in performance) either way but it is being checked.

"So every time one of our players at under-20 level this year puts the ball down to take a free, they know the ball being played in the championship over there and over there is the same ball."