It would speed the game up anyway.
Jason Flynn is a specialist sideline taker. He’s cut many beautiful balls from the line for his club Tommy Larkin’s and for Galway and he’s seen plenty of them sail over the bar.
But like all sideline takers, the efforts that scrape the sky before splitting the posts are fewer and further between than the ones that, after plenty of time spent placing the sliotar on the turf, more delays sizing the leather up, and eventually taking a swing at it, it scutters on down the line or skews off well wide to a moan from the crowd and a roar from teammates.
It’s tough to be a consistent sideline taker. That’s because it’s such a perfected art. Even a minuscule blip in your routine will see it end in disaster.
That’s why, event the most famed line-ball aficionados in the game like Austin Gleeson have had more unsuccessful attempts than successful ones.
Flynn’s prowess in the art of the cut means his thoughts on the subject are worth their weight in gold. Five Transition Year students from St Mary’s Secondary School, Nenagh created the platform for those thoughts to be heard when they launched Hooked on Hurling, a cracking 80 page book with insights and contributions from 32 inter-county players all over the country.
The Galway forward raised an interesting point when he claimed that, in order to speed up the game and to get rid of the dilly-dallying involved in hitting line balls, that players should have the option to take a sideline from their hands. They wouldn’t be allowed to score directly, with the movement from their teammates being crucial to its success.
This would be an option for players. While the other change, that has been long campaigned for, would be that if players decided to take on the line ball, that the score would be worth two points for them.
The combination of both could be class for our game.
The issue came up for debate on Thursday’s GAA Hour Hurling Show and Colm Parkinson, Seamus ‘Cheddar’ Plunkett and Diarmuid ”The Rock’ O’Sullivan thrashed out their thoughts on it.
Wooly: “Austin Gleeson thinks there should be two points for a sideline cut. It’s such a skill, it’s such a really difficult thing to do, and two points would be a proper reward for being able to do something that no-one else can.
The Rock: “It’s a wonderful, wonderful skill.
Cheddar: “I would agree with the two points for it. It’s an outrageous piece of skill. Jason Flynn mentioned about taking the sideline out of the hand to speed up the game. I would agree with that. I think it might be a disadvantage for defenders but I think anything like that that speeds up the game, and brings the game to a higher spectacle, I think we should look at it…I can see Jason Flynn’s point of speeding it up. You can’t score off the hand.
Wooly feels it would be the best of both worlds.
 “So you could go off the hands, and if you want to go off the ground then, you can and it’s two points if you score it,” he said.
Cheddar was again worrying for defenders.
“I think it would be very difficult for defenders. You get yourself back facing the ball and that, let’s say it goes over the sideline, six forwards, the midfield and the forwards would be galloping all over the place. A ping of the ball into the hands and it’s bang over the bar. It would be spectacular to watch but as a defender it might be difficult,” said the former Laois manager.
Is it a viable solution? Have your say in the comments section.
You can listen to this sideline chat, more dark arts talk from The Rock and much more on Thursday’s GAA Hour Hurling Show right here.
