Denis Walsh: Hurling’s handpass has turned into a botched nose-job on the face of the game

Hurling’s relationship with hands used to be simpler. There were binding commandments. If you didn’t have both hands on the hurley there needed to be a good reason. If you messed up, and you didn’t have both hands on the hurley, nobody was looking for any other explanations. It was an open-and-shut case.For generations, one-handed hurling was treated with deep suspicion. It was associated with flakiness, or worse, cowardice. It was no good for hip-to-hip pulls on the ground, or for whipping on a dropping ball. Everybody needed two-handed power for those situations where you might miss the ball but had no conscience about the follow-through.As hurling changed, though, at least one hand was liberated. It was no longer desirable to make every pick-up with two hands on the hurley because too much time was being lost in securing the ball and hurlers are always time-poor.In the 2017 All-Ireland final, only one pick-up was executed with both hands on the stick. Outside of Derek McGrath, nobody noticed. It was no longer a thing. For decades, players had been slaughtered for fluffing one-handed pick-ups but now there is a general amnesty. The old game had gone liberal. Left of Bernie Sanders.READ MOREWe now live in the age of one-handed flick passes, and target men addressing the dropping ball with one-handed deflections and rucks populated with optimistic foragers trying to make one-handed roll lifts.And it is the age of the handpass. What used to be a manoeuvre of last resort has turned into the mortar in every build-up. It is also the most screamingly divisive issue in hurling. There is too much of it, and too much of it is illegal. On the face of the game, it is a botched nose-job.The Hurling Advisory Group will soon issue an extremely detailed report and recommend rule changes to be trialled in third-level competitions in the autumn. During the summer they canvassed widely for feedback about where the game is now and where it needs to go, across a range of stakeholders. A public survey generated more than 8,000 responses.The only issue on which everyone could agree was that handpassing was hurling’s biggest problem. It was unanimous.The former Limerick player Séamus Flanagan, who has become a regular Off The Ball panellist, said on their breakfast show last week that players were “throwing” the ball wholesale. It wouldn’t have come as a surprise to anybody, but it was the first time that an elite player had made such an admission.More handpassing is an environmental consequence of the modern desire to manage the ball. Breaking out from the back, teams are drilled to move the ball to a platform zone in the middle, from where they can shoot or play a high percentage ball inside. The safest way to transfer the ball is with a handpass to support runners.In this year's All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final between Limerick and Galway, Limerick's Cian Lynch handpassed the ball 16 times from 20 possessions. Photograph: Grace Halton/Inpho It feels counterintuitive to describe hurling in numbers when the game has always been closer to art than science, but it is the only way to capture trends. In the 1999 All-Ireland final, there were just 36 attempted handpasses; in the 2019 final there were 103. In the five All-Ireland series games played this year, the average number of handpasses was 101, compared to 168 stick passes. That ratio has more or less held for the last five years.From the All-Ireland final this year Maurice Brosnan reported one startling statistic. Cian Lynch had 20 possessions and handpassed the ball 16 times. Lynch’s hands are as quick as Twitter and his link play is masterful, but when one of the greatest players of this century propels the ball with his hurley just four times in an All-Ireland final, the game has a problem.There are two issues here: the sheer volume of handpasses and the policing of illegal handpasses. Every so often there will be a concerted clampdown, usually in the National League. In one Cork-Limerick game in February 2022, eight frees were blown for fouled handpasses; on the same day, in two other games, six fouled handpasses were penalised. That had all the hallmarks of a memo.Cork and Limerick met four times this year in league and championship, and added together, the number of penalised throws didn’t reach eight. According to the rule, there must be obvious separation between the hand and the ball, and the onus is on the player to demonstrate that in the striking action, but if there is a doubt, referees are more inclined to err on the side of permission these days.The escalating premium on transferring the ball quickly, or out of contact, has led to bootlegged techniques. Senior referees, and recently retired referees, concede that more should have been done to confront this practice years ago. But there is a virus in hurling’s software now and it will be a massive challenge to root it out.One suggestion being considered by the Hurling Advisory Group is to give more power to linesmen. It is often easier to detect a fouled pass from a side-on view but, as things stand, linesmen cannot intervene unless they are asked for an opinion by the referee.There is also a possible technological solution that the committee has discussed. A viable chip has already been developed for hurling balls to verify the origin of the sliotar, and that it came from an approved supplier, and it would not be a huge leap to programme that for other uses. In elite level cricket, an embedded microchip has been developed to harvest a variety of in-game data.In the case of a handpass, the chip could determine whether a ball was thrown or struck by the energy imparted on the ball. Notification of a fouled pass could be transmitted to a referee’s watch in the same way goal-line technology works in professional football.Is the GAA sufficiently engaged with this problem to go down that route? Is it time to get bolshie about this and confront it head-on? Absolutely it is. If there are 10 or 20 frees a game for fouled hand passes in the early rounds of next year’s league, would that be a price worth paying for cultural change? Without question.The time for hand-wringing has passed.