By Jackie Cahill

Ladies Gaelic Football Association President Pat Quill has urged players, officials and managers to behave in a responsible manner as the championship summer approaches.

New guidelines were recently introduced at LGFA annual congress to clamp down on players feigning injury or attempting to get opponents sin-binned or sent off.

While acknowledging that such episodes are isolated, Quill and his fellow administrators are anxious to clean up the ladies game.

He explained: "We brought in (rules) this year whereby a player can now be booked for feigning injury or attempting to get a player sent off or put in the sin bin. That's certainly an addition to help clean up the game.

"There's an onus on everybody, whether you're in administration, a player or a manager, whatever the case may be, to play within the rules and to play to as high a standard as possible.

"But to be fair to all teams, they do instil the importance of discipline.

"Otherwise you're going to be short players. People are made very much aware of that in any meetings we have with county board officials, referees or team management. That whole area is stressed. It's the image that people that give - their own self-image as much as anything else."

Meanwhile, Quill admitted that he's not sure how many spectators will travel to Croke Park for next Saturday's Tesco Homegrown National League finals.

Honours will be handed out in the Division 1, 2 and 3 deciders at the Dublin venue and Quill concedes that gauging a possible attendance is difficult.

He explained: "Some of the counties are travelling a long way - for Cork and Mayo it's a long journey, the same with Kerry and Galway. It's a wonderful programme of matches and I know in these harsh economic times that people say, ah we'll see it on television.

"There will always be people who say that but they just don't think. If the crowd is small, they say it's because it's on TV and if wasn't that we'd have more.

"This is something that is occasionally thrown back to us but the benefits of TG4 outweigh whatever number don't attend our games because of the fact that they're not on live television." Tweet

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