Gotta hand it to Gearóid Hegarty. Not alone is he a six-time All-Ireland winner and the presumptive Hurler of the Year, he went down to Doonbeg this week for the Irish Open and grabbed a prize for himself in the pro-am. Nearest the pin was up for grabs on the 14th – Hegarty stitched one into three-and-a-half feet. Some lads would sicken you.
Better yet was what he did after the round. Hooked by RTÉ Radio for a chat, he was asked about the suggested rule changes in hurling put forward that morning by John Meyler’s expert advisory group. His reply was as pure as his iron play.
“I’d always be an advocate that you can’t necessarily stand still,” Hegarty said. “You look at any sport all over the world, the rules are always changing minutely in small different ways. I don’t hate any of those little proposals to be totally honest with you. I think they all have an argument for coming in, but we’ll see.”
If anyone could be expected to suit up for the Ah-would-ye-leave-it-alone crowd, Hegarty should be a prime candidate. He’s 32, he’s a decade into his intercounty career, he has stockpiled Celtic crosses playing the game as it is. Job number one for him heading into 2027 is finding every inch to win All-Ireland number seven. There’s no obvious Limerick upside to change.
So if he’s up for giving the whole thing a fair hearing, what excuse has anyone else? Why is there a small but loud rump determined to shout it all down at the earliest opportunity? What drives the instinct in people to ridicule the entire enterprise, to pooh-pooh the work done by Meyler’s group before a single ball has been pucked?
To answer that question, there are a couple of aspects of this whole thing worth tossing into the salad. First off, it should be pointed out that the intentions of those calling the proposals every name under the sun are no less pure than those of Meyler and his group. Everyone wants good hurling. If people get cranky about it, it’s because they care. Disagreement isn’t a bad thing at all.
Secondly, there is a huge difference between the mood music around the need for rule changes here and how things felt two years ago when Jim Gavin was overseeing a similar process in football. Gavin and the FRC provided a template for how to go about this exercise, one that has been largely followed by Meyler and his group.
They started by putting out a survey, asking hurling people for their views. They produced a 172-page interim report detailing their findings, which is free to read right now for anyone so inclined. The report drills down into numbers provided by the Games Intelligence Unit, making it one of the most comprehensive and granular studies of hurling that has ever been produced. Just like the various FRC reports, it is the work of serious people.
Hurling to trial new rules which include prohibiting consecutive handpasses
But football is not hurling. And hurling is not football. By the winter of 2024, when Gavin and his band of merry men were starting to shop their ideas around the place to change the face of Gaelic football, the audience was more or less entirely open to whatever they came up with. Football had been so hamstrung for so long by blanket defences and grinding possession chains that they were kicking an open door with so much of what they proposed.
Hurling isn’t in that place. Not yet and probably not ever. The 2026 championship was a bit of a dead duck in so many respects but we know in our bones that hurling bends towards the light. It won’t take much for next year’s championship to regain its sparkle and shine. Change is probably overdue. Equally though, radical change is probably not necessary.
Hence, some of these proposed changes aren’t changes at all. Instead, they are a call for more exacting refereeing of the existing rules. The definition of what constitutes a handpass won’t materially change but now the onus is on the player to show the referee that he hasn’t fouled the ball. Goalkeepers were always supposed to wait on the referee’s whistle before taking a puckout. Now they’re super-supposed to.
That said, some of the proposed changes are definitely radical. Stopping a player who has received a handpass from making a handpass is a fundamental shift in how modern hurling is played. Cutting out the short puckout by mandating that each one has to pass the 45 removes a tactical battleground that has been pored over by team analysts for most of this century. Ending the black card is a deletion of a disciplinary measure that had been working just fine in the vast majority of cases.
So we’ll see. The Fitzgibbon leagues may or may not be much of a testing ground, particularly if the weather turns grotty as the nights draw in. One of the biggest factors in the FRC’s success was the fact that the 2025 football league was the testing ground, with intercounty players learning on the fly in matches that mattered. Meyler’s group hopes the same will happen in the 2027 hurling league. If it doesn’t, the whole thing is dead in the water.
Hurling will be doing itself no favours if that’s how it all ends up.