LOCKERROOM:The end is nigh for the Cork County Board in their long-running saga with the county hurlers, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
WE’RE GETTING to the end of an era in Cork. You can feel the smell of change in the air in a way that is irrevocable and unstoppable. Sometimes events just run away to a conclusion which those who engineer these things can never envisage.
Krusty, Sideshow Bob and the boys with the Acme Run The Board kit are the archetypal cartoon figures who have run out over the edge of the precipice but have kept running simply because they have refused to look down.
This past week will have caused them to glance downwards to see the nothingness beneath their feet. Club after club have expressed dissatisfaction at the way the affairs of Cork GAA have been run. From virtually everywhere within the People’s Republic by the Lee there have been upsurges of support for the players.
The wind has been changing for some time. The Rule 42 business in Cork left a bad taste in many mouths and made sure that the enemies were piled high in the long grass. The county board got led this winter right into the long grass.
What a tide in the affairs of Cork. For Croke Park to do what they recently did, to feel the need to offer to run the key affairs of the Cork County Board is commentary enough on the sorry state of things.
For ten to twelve thousand people to take to the streets on a cold Saturday afternoon. For one of the greatest hurling teams of our age to be training away alone twice a week while a regiment of spotty imposters fill their jersey. For clubs to hold a series of extraordinary general meetings in order to get their hands back on the levers of their own democracy. For so many of those meetings to throw up the results they have.
For men and women to march together yesterday in the snow and the sleet singing “we’re not shoppers anymore” in witty riposte to the dismissal of their last march as just a lot of people getting their Saturday messages.
Something has been rotten in the state of Cork GAA for a long time. Three Stripes. The various shaftings of Billy Morgan. Rule 42. Three strikes in a few years. That one of the premier franchises in GAA culture has been allowed to fall into such disrepair is a scandal which Croke Park are just waking up to.
You just have to walk around the crumbling edifice which is Páirc Uí Chaoimh to have it suggest itself to you as a metaphor for all that has passed.
A year ago the confederacy of dunces must have been telling themselves that night is darkest just before the dawn. The Mulvey agreement looked like a put-down for the suits and administrators. In the bunker, though, they figured out that the deal could be refashioned – if you lacked the goodwill to do anything more useful with it – into a skewer upon which your enemies could be impaled like olives on a cocktail stick.
The “process” which inserted Gerald McCarthy once again into a relationship which had broken down last summer was thus the instrument of revenge. It should have worked more effectively. A smarter confederacy would have used a different instrument than Gerald McCarthy. Somebody whom the players would resent but not go into uproar against.
But the humiliation of certain key players had to be complete and visible. It had to be the sort of appointment which gave rise to high fives and smirks down in the bunker. So they rammed Gerald back into the post and said like it or leave it boys.
It was a blunt instrument poorly wielded. Frank Murphy’s weapon of choice in the political skirmishings he has survived and triumphed in down the decades has been the rule book and the lengthy speech. Used by an expert, the rule book has a stiletto’s frightening facility for penetration. The blade doesn’t slash or slice. It just brings a crushing finality to its victims.
Post Mulvey, the agreement itself which seemed like a breakthrough for the players was picked up and looked at in the cold light of day. What is an agreement but a set of rules. What is a set of rules but a weapon to be wielded by the one who masters them most comprehensively.
It was a high-stakes gamble which depended on there being as much fatigue among the general public as there would be among the players. Old dogs generally find new tricks problematic, however. Whatever little the board had learned in the Teddy Holland dispute the players had learned more.
This time the players went with the old rope-a-dope trick invented by the Machiavelli of boxing, Muhammad Ali. They lay on the ropes quietly and let the abuse and contumely rain down on them. If the dispute had to run to the spring so be it. The board and Gerald McCarthy blew themselves out. The leaking of facilitators’ documents, personal attacks on several beloved players and an ever more shrill insistence that younger members of the Cork panel were straining at the leash to break ranks all backfired.
The new Cork panel, an unfortunate bunch of tyros willing to be cast in the role of blacklegs, fell into the habit of taking regular beatings which were neither colossal enough to provoke outrage or narrow enough to inspire hope. Instead of getting their big break they became irrelevant.
And in-fighting the rearguard action the rule book was pulled from the scabbard again. No more votes. In the interest of democracy there will be less democracy. This past week in Cork, though, democracy has burst from the grassroots as triumphantly and energetically as a geyser leaving the land and reaching for the sky. It is as unstoppable as a force of nature. The rule book has been turned against those who used it as both weapon and shield all these years. The players need only wait now for the light brigade from the clubs to restore Cork GAA to a welcome place of sanity and daylight.
And the vinegar pusses of the politburo will be with us no more. Liam Óg Shakespeare of Avon might have commented that ‘’tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard’. We prefer to reach this morning however for the lines of the bard of Los Angeles, Tom Waits, Small Change got rained on with his own thirty-eight.
