Mickey Harte expressed his dislike for the new two-point arc rule in the wake of Offaly’s Leinster SFC quarter-final loss to Meath.

Leading by 10 points at half-time, the recently-crowned Allianz League Division 3 champions suffered a second half collapse as the hosts stormed back to win by seven. A spectacular display of two-point shooting by the Royals, who were aided by a strong breeze after the restart, was crucial to the outcome as they earned a provincial semi-final date with Dublin.

“It’s one of those things with the new rules. Ten points up in the old game, you’d have been home and hosed. Not any more,” the Offaly joint-manager noted in an interview with ‘Off the Ball’.

“It’s not the right thing to get two points for scores from outside 40 metres since there aren’t 15 men behind the ball anymore. I can see why it was introduced at the time, But with only 12 players available to be back now, there is plenty of room to get scores and to get two points. I’m not sure if it’s a wonderful thing.”

Harte is hoping the Faithful can take learnings from the defeat into the Tailteann Cup.

“We don’t have a lot of people to blame for this. Meath deserve a lot of credit because they were overrun in the first half and must have been in a poor enough state of mind at half-time. So to come out and do what they did, they can be very proud.”

He added: “It’s very hard to take, but it’s one of life’s lessons in sport that you can take nothing for granted. If our players can learn something from it, it’s that you learn the hard lesson.”

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