Striking a chord with the public
The Red C poll carried out among Leesiders this week was overwhelmingly in favour of the players in the current dispute, which has rumbled on now since mid-November.
Anecdotal evidence has always favoured the players in this dispute. Here’s solid proof of the full extent of that support.
There isn’t much ambiguity in a return of 56% supporting the players’ decision to strike as opposed to 23% against. The margin in favour of Teddy Holland stepping down as manager was also emphatic: 64% feel the new football boss should stand aside, while 19% disagree.
(In both the above cases, the remainder are made up of ‘don’t know/no opinion’ — just in case you thought there was a miraculous third option).
The results should give the Cork County Board some food for thought: the survey was carried out in its core market and produced a level of dissatisfaction that would have many a Government Minister being handed the revolver and the bottle of whiskey.
Granted, there’s a natural inclination to side with the men who wear the jersey rather than the men who vote in committee rooms.
Supporters cheer players, not administrators.
Certainly in normal circumstances the board might claim — with some justification — that a natural bias might be colouring the results and that their unglamorous work was at best not being appreciated properly, and at worst was not actually understood.
Not here, though. If there’s one thing you can say for definite in this particular situation, it’s that even those who normally take no interest whatsoever in the workings of the county board are fully au fait with the processes and operations of the board on this issue. The appointments committee, the executive, the delegates: you can’t walk from one end of Patrick Street to the other without overhearing those keywords half-a-dozen times as pedestrians in twos and threes greet each other: “Any news of the players?”
(The fact that people refer to the dispute in those terms may, of course, be significant in and of itself, though we don’t have the empirical polling data to back that up.)
In short, people are up to speed on how the board operates, and they don’t approve.
ON top of that, the results may be taken as an indictment of board policy in dealing with the issue outside the committee room. The poll can be interpreted as showing public dissatisfaction with the board’s decision to put details of the negotiations, chaired by Kieran Mulvey of the Labour Relations Commission, into the public domain, for instance.
By extension, the players can infer a vote of confidence for their consistency. The results of the poll endorse the players’ decision to refuse to be drawn on the nuts and bolts of the discussions held in two sessions with Mulvey.
Given the rapidly diminishing chances of Cork teams taking part in this year’s championships — never mind the league, which is now generally discounted as a realistic target for Rebel participation — another result has particular resonance. Asked which side in the row had undermined Cork’s chances of success in 2008, the respondents were unequivocal.
Fewer than half of those polled blamed the players; almost three quarters of them held the board responsible.
Perversely, however, the news isn’t all bad for administrators in Cork.
One more significant finding was that over 70% of those polled said their interest in following the teams had not diminished.
In an odd way the board should take comfort in this result. It suggests that despite everything that’s happened over the past three months — the recriminations, the acrimony, the postponements — the value of the Cork GAA brand has remained remarkably high.
What couldn’t be asked in this week’s polls, however, is this: how much longer can that feeling last?
