LOCKER ROOM:If the Cork players feel under attack from their county board yet again, surely it's time for the GAA to look at that county board rather than stand idly by

WHAT A grisly business to have to watch. In Cork right now the greatest, most beautiful, game in the world is being dragged into disrepute. Great icons of hurling are slashing each other like Hutus and Tutsis while a mendacious county board gambles on either the players or the public becoming so fatigued with matters that something breaks.

To paraphrase Tommie Gorman, what about the children?

The failure here is not Gerald's or Seán Óg. It is a failure of administration. A complete and utter failure of men in suits to live up to their responsibilities to the game.

Croke Park, by saying it will remain neutral and permit Cork to settle its own civil war, is in effect siding with a county board which insists on lumbering players with a manager for whom the help of a facilitator was needed to get through last season. It is siding with a county board who took a process agreed on in arbitration earlier this year and used it as a weapon in an ongoing vendetta against its own players.

For the GAA to say it will not get involved is to ignore the fact that it is integrally involved. Hurling is held in trust by the GAA as a cultural and sporting gift to be passed on. If the game is being traduced and sullied the buck stops at Croke Park's door. If players who have illuminated so many Sundays, players who everyone would concede have brought new standards of dedication and application to their preparation, feel yet again they are under attack from their county board surely it is time to look at that county board rather that stand by and watch.

It is a pity too that the great hurling academy that is St Colman's of Fermoy should be dragged into the dirt with the duplicitous pretence that next week's game is anything other than a barefaced flouting of the GAA's new rules on intercounty activity at this time of the year. The rules are being flouted in order to manufacture a grisly showdown with players.

What county board would ask players, any group of players, to take to the pitch in such circumstances? The St Colman's game will bring nothing but long-term damage to hurling in Cork. A grim irony given that the fixture was intended to celebrate the school's rich contribution to the game.

What county board would put players in that position? Well, try a county board facing its third major upheaval in six years, a board which seems unable to command the trust of the people it works for. There is some misapprehension in county board circles when the players are accused of turning Cork hurling into an industrial relations battleground. The players don't work for the county board. The county board works for the players and the Cork GAA public and for the games.

Now while we are diverted by examining the conflicting claims of the players and Gerald McCarthy we should instead be examining the effectiveness of the Cork County Board, a body whose pettiness and vindictiveness has brought embarrassment after embarrassment to the GAA in Cork, from the assassination attempts on Billy Morgan, to the refusal to play out extra-time in a major fixture because a train needed catching, to the attempts to get a major game postponed because of a tall ships' race, to the crumbling state of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, to the endless unrest among players.

This is a flagship county of the GAA. All of us in the GAA expect more and deserve better.

Now in the present business of the Cork hurlers, the Cork County Board either knew of the difficulties which both players and management had been having with each other and should therefore, for the benefit of Cork hurling (which is the only thing that matters here in the long term) have said that it was time for change. This, after all, was a season when for the first time Kilkenny crept ahead of Cork in the record books.

It ended up too being a season when Cork were being held up to the light as a specimen study in chaos and Kilkenny were lauded as the model for all others to follow. Now the Cork County Board, knowing of the strife and unease of the last two years and knowing that in doing so it was selling out Cork's history and Cork's chances of burnishing that history, opted to ram the same arrangement down everybody's throats again.

The alternative scenario which is equally inconceivable is the Cork County Board knew nothing of what was going on within the set-up of its own county hurling team for the last two years, in which case it was unfit to preside over hurling in the county at all.

It is very fine for the Cork County Board to hang back in the shadows and let a decent man like Gerald McCarthy suffer the hurt and embarrassment he is so clearly experiencing, but the rest of us shouldn't be so diverted by the Punch and Judy show that we forget about the impresarios staging the entire thing.

It is very fine for us to watch the night skies illuminated by the trace glow of bullets and rockets fired at Seán Óg Ó hAilpín for standing up for his comrades but in doing so we miss the point. When Gerald McCarthy, in pure frustration, cites poor compliance with various elements of his training structure is there not a single figure of substance within Cork GAA who will step in and say that there must be something seriously wrong here. The Cork players, as motivated a group as can be found within the game, clearly felt what they were failing to comply with was, as Seán Óg suggested last week, an enterprise that could have been dreamed up by a Disney character.

Maybe they were right. Maybe they were wrong. But they didn't believe. And if you can't make your players believe, that is a failure of management which sadly is terminal.

Surely when the compliance rate among such a driven bunch of players is as low as Gerald McCarthy made out in Saturday's papers, with poor attendance at recovery sessions and a low response rate to nutritionists' questionnaires, then that is further evidence of why a facilitator was needed last summer. Whatever connection a manager needs to make with a group of players just wasn't made.

Both Gerald and the players got through their two years together. This summer, when Cork exited the championship, Gerald, more aware that anybody else of the problems which had existed between himself and his panel, had the chance to walk away with his considerable reputation intact.

The Cork County Board needed (if it was as ignorant of events as it seems) to take soundings amongst its players as to how things stood, then it needed to say gently to Gerald McCarthy that a perfect time had arrived to step down quietly with the thanks of everyone involved.

Cork had been beaten by Kilkenny but had succumbed only after a heroic struggle which had encompassed two epic comebacks in their previous championship games. The chance was there for everybody to thank Gerald for his considerable service and to move on.

Their failure to do that was the last in a long line of failings by the guardians of the game by the Lee. Croke Park can stand by and watch great men sunder each other in frustration or it can tackle the root of the problem for once and for all. For the sake of the game we all hold in trust for the next generation there can only be one course of action.