Credit; John Condon Donal White
Just Hold Him in your Arms!!!!
This topic is a bombshell and has never been talked about before now.
Referees are not aware of this.
IT IS NOT A FOUL IN HURLING TO HOLD A PLAYER WITH YOUR ARMS.
THIS IS NOT A FOUL
THIS IS A FOUL
What does the rulebook say?
Foul 5.10 is “to hold an opponent with the hand(s).” The punishment is a free puck for the first offense, and a yellow for a repeat offense.
The rulebook was very specific; the foul is for holding with the HANDS.
It is not a foul to hold an opponent with your arm or arms.
If you think it is pedantic to highlight the distinction between holding with arms versus holding with hands, I’ll go into a little more detail:
The rulebook itself makes the distinction between arms and hands when it talks about the foul of striking an opponent – “To strike or to attempt to strike an opponent with arm, elbow, hand or knee with minimal force.”
The authors of the rulebook consider hands distinct from arms by mentioning both in this foul’s description.
Also, the rulebook intends hands to mean hands (controversial!) because it describes fouls of pulling a hurley from an opponent’s hands, and it mentions catching the ball with your hands. So if hands mean hands, and arms mean arms, then it is not a foul to hold an opponent with your arms.
Want to gain an advantage legally? Read on …
Who knew?
The rugby-style spare arm challenge was not a foul all along.
If the ref blows a free against you for holding an opponent back with your arm, he’s wrong. We already showed that the foul is for holding with the hand, not with the arm.
Even better, if you hold the opponent with your hurley-arm, then you can 100% guarantee to the ref you are not holding the player with your hand. Your hand is holding the hurley – not the opponent!
One catch though: the ref can give a yellow card for any form of “rough play”. So he may interpret your arm-hold to be rough, and the punishment for that is a yellow card.
But is it rough? And if that’s rough he must interpret a lot of other actions as rough also. And if you take any modern hurling match, how many players would be sent off by half time if holding back a player with the arm was punished by a yellow card?
The take-away
The main point here is that hurling does not have rules that realistically address the contact that inevitably happens in the game.
When people complain about all the pulling and dragging in the modern game, they usually plead for the rules of the sport to simply be enforced. But have they read the rules?
Should we enforce a ruleset where the hook is a foul (as shown in an earlier article) and wrapping a player up in your arms is not a foul?
The game can’t function with its current rules around contact, but that’s a story for another day.
But before we finish here, just a final point again on how to hold an opponent with your arms: don’t pull him down because that is a foul. A standing bear-hug wrap is what you’re aiming for, and amazingly it is not a foul according to the rules.
So just to recap,If you want to execute this perfectly legal tackle,you must remember to do the following
Stand TALL
Wrap him up
Both hands free and clearly on display
Not too rough now!