At Tuesday’s Cork county board meeting, Murphy outlined the merits of having a player sin-binned, instead of being sent off, when picking up a second yellow.

The sin bin was experimented with in pre-season competitions in early 2005 — whereby a player was put off for 10 minutes upon being shown a yellow card — but didn’t survive the league. Cork brought a motion to Congress that year which proposed 10 minutes spent on the sideline be the sanction for receiving two yellow cards. It failed to garner sufficient backing.

“My recall of that Congress is there was tremendously strong approval for it from Congress,” said Murphy, “but the point was made by Kingdom representatives relative to its operation at club level and the difficulties that might be experienced at club level in being able to control the time of play a player would be off for. I would say had this point not been made, it would have likely been fairly well carried.

That influenced Congress because at that time, whatever rule you had it applied to inter-county and club, but there have been changes since in terms of that approach. The question I am asking you to give a viewpoint on is; why not experiment once more with it at inter-county level?

Continued the Cork GAA secretary: “In regard to yellow cards generally, they are often very harshly imposed. The referee, maybe, at the beginning of the match, can be more strict than later on.”

This can lead, said Murphy, to players being sent off for “minor offences”.

Although 2020 is the normal year for the consideration of the revision of playing rules, the standing playing rules committee has the power to propose to Central Council motions on any given year and there is also the facility for playing rules changes to be trialled in non-championship games next year.

Elsewhere at Tuesday’s county board meeting, John O’Donovan of Clann na nGael remarked: “There is something systemic wrong with Cork football at the moment”.