Laois GAA ref blows his final whistle Maurice Deegan Interview

This week we had a chat with Maurice Deegan, the recently retired Inter-County referee. Maurice was due to referee his last inter-county game in the inaugural Tailteann Cup Final between Westmeath and Cavan but unfortunately contracting Covid meant he couldn’t don the black polo shirt for the last time in an inter-county environment. The Stradbally man started out refereeing over 20 years ago. He has refereed in three All Ireland Finals. Maurice told us about how he
started his career as the man in the middle, his all-Ireland final experiences, Social media abuse and much more.

Tell me a bit about your background in GAA, how you got into refereeing and what drew you towards the black polo shirt?                                                                                                                                                                       My refereeing career started over 20 years ago, Stradbally had a friendly match and the then secretary of the club Niall Handy at the time asked me to ref the game. I did that game in a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt and that’s where it started. Niall put me forward for training then Brian Allen, who was over the Laois referees at the time, got me a few local club games and then I got a few underage development games and it kind of happened for me very quickly. There weren’t that many young referees at the time. I was lucky in that sense.

Let’s talk about the three All Ireland finals that you refereed, Kerry V Tyrone in 08, Dublin V Mayo replay back in 2016, and finally the Donegal V Mayo All Ireland in 2012. When you’re doing a game of that magnitude, were you able to treat it in your mind like any other game or did you feel additional pressure for them?
To be honest it’s quite tough to treat it like any other game. It’s completely different in the sense that it’s at a whole other level. Especially in terms of exposure. The buzzing in your ear from eighty-plus thousand people roaring is phenomenal. The preparation doesn’t change as such, you might give yourself a little bit more time. All three of them were very different experiences as well. With the first one, I was very young to be doing an All-Ireland final, I was only thirty-five at the time. It
was massive and that game in particular between Tyrone and Kerry was billed as probably the biggest game of the decade. There were serious players on both teams and they were at loggerheads really as the two top counties for a while before that. The stand-out memory from that 2008 final was that Kerry Was winning the game well, but Tyrone came strong and turned them over in the last 10 minutes. It was a great final. The next one I got was the Donegal one in 2012 and I remember sitting down on the pitch after the game, I remember the crowd singing a Donegal song and it was just amazing. That day Michael Murphy got one of the best goals ever scored in an All- Ireland Final. It was early in the game but the crowd just went awol, the noise was incredible. Then the 2016 replay was a different kettle of fish. That was a tough game. Similar to Tyrone and Kerry back in 08, Dublin and Mayo were the two best teams for the few years leading up to it. And they certainly didn’t like each other. I remember a kick-out late in the first half and everywhere you looked players were pulling and dragging out of each other, it was carnage. Myself and the linesmen and the umpires had a discussion at halftime. I said look lads we need to pull this in here and get control of the game, and we did in the second half. It was a very difficult game to referee though.

Talk to me a little bit about refereeing during the growth of social media, and I know you were saying there that you don’t engage with social media, but I was listening to David Gough on off the ball a few weeks ago I was appalled by the abuse that he gets regularly, even outside the online stuff, the letters in the post, the phone calls, Have you had much of it down through the years and if so how have you found dealing with it?
Yeah, I have had a few letters down through the years. Maybe in ten years, I might go back and read them but I don’t pay much head to them these days. My biggest issue is probably what my kids see on social media about me. I’ve two girls, one is eighteen and the other is twenty-three. As I said I don’t have any social media but they would have seen it all on their social media. I genuinely feel an awful lot worse for them than I do for myself you know? It’s tough on them. They are going to be
affected by what people write about me. I don’t think people realize that it’s not just Maurice Deegan their attacking online, It is Maurice Deegan and his family.

How the game is played has dramatically changed since you started refereeing. You’ve also seen plenty of significant rule changes the likes of Hawkeye, the black card, the mark, etc. Are games easier or harder to referee nowadays compared to when you first started?
Refereeing the games themselves, as regards physical hits and incidents, I think the games are a bit easier these days. It’s everything off the pitch that is a bit tougher, I don’t have social media or anything like that but a lot of lads would struggle with the fact that anyone can get to you within a millisecond online. But as far as the game themselves are concerned they would have been a lot tougher to ref in the past. I would have done a lot of games in Ulster and them games were
incredibly tough. I loved doing them for that reason. If you were reffing a game between Donegal and Monaghan or Armagh and Fermanagh, you were tested big time with them games. To an extent you still are but even in comparison to five years ago, the game is a lot less physical these days.

We saw a few brawls this year, the most notable being obviously Galway and Armagh but we’ve seen a couple of them in the league as well and they kind of take the good out of the occasion, Is there anything more that the GAA or the CCC could be doing in your mind to try and remove these incidents from the game?
It’s hard for the GAA to remove these types of incidents. They possibly could be sanctioning the teams more than they have been doing. I suppose you have to go after players individually and let there be no comeback from it. Sanction the offender more so than anything else. Like mallee is very tough on a referee because there is just so much going on. It’s very tough to know how many cards to give or to have control when they break out on the pitch. It’s why the sanctions that the GAA hand out after are so vital.

Another thing that sticks out to me this year, I suppose you could call it either game management or time wasting by teams throughout the match, you know you see teams that have goalkeepers who take frees and rarely are the keepers in any rush to get up the pitch to take the free, another one is when a team has a player black carded they tend to try to slow the game right up to minimize any potential dangers of being down to 14 men for the 10 minutes. Do you think there need to be any changes in the rules to try and discourage teams from these kinds of tactics that or is it even possible to eliminate that kind of time management?
Yeah, that time management, if you want to call it when a team is down to 14 men as a result of a black card, goes on all the time. More often than you would think. Maybe if there was something brought in for them 10-minute periods, that the ref could have the power to stop the clock. If a player goes down or whatever. Like it is in the rulebook if a player goes down and is putting on an act to waste time, a referee can brandish a yellow for that. But to eradicate that kind of thing you need to give a bit of power to the ref with regards to the clock during them periods

If you had full power in Croke park, what would be the changes if any that you would make to the current set of rules?
The standard of refereeing is so high right now. It’s incredible. We are being assessed all the time, and if you are underperforming, you don’t get games. A referee these days will get the decision right 99 times out of a hundred, but it could be that one time he gets it wrong that could be crucial. So, I wouldn’t mind something like a TMO, as they have in rugby, being brought just to diminish the chances of getting that one crucial decision wrong.