Bloodied and bandaged
LIGHT touches were in short supply on Thursday night in the Rochestown Park Hotel, when Kieran Mulvey of the LRC emerged from a well-earned meal following his arbitration hearing with the Cork County Board and player representatives.
The negotiator said he’d be issuing his adjudication the following morning, as he had an early flight. Reminded of the possibility of industrial action at Cork Airport, Mulvey’s response was inevitable: “One strike at a time...”
Light relief has been generally thin on the ground in recent months on Leeside. You’ll be reading some oracular pronouncements in the coming days. Dissections of the process, booming endorsements and waspish condemnations. Though God preserve us all from the local radio station in Cork which referred to Wednesday night’s negotiations as the arbitrary process.
Few of those sweeping overviews are likely to do justice to the atmosphere in Cork over the last three months, a rank stew of allegations and abuse, suspicion and uncertainty. Since early November, the strike has been static in the background on Leeside — occasionally loud enough to disrupt transmission entirely and never quiet enough to be ignored totally. No wonder earlier in the week one of the players went for a run to clear his head. At 11pm.
Since Kieran Mulvey became involved in the dispute, the niceties of negotiation and protocols of resolution have entered the lexicon. Compromise not conflict; resolution not victory.
But it would be difficult to see yesterday’s ruling as anything other than a stunning win for the players.
Their stance has been endorsed by public opinion on Leeside, as evidenced in last Saturday’s opinion poll in this newspaper, and now by an independent arbitrator.
The players wanted the new system installed by the Cork County Board last October overturned, and this morning that system is in the recycling bin.
Where there are winners, there are losers. Teddy Holland and his selectors have been relegated to a pub quiz question, the men who managed a county but never even made it to a dressing room with their players. When Charlie Haughey was Taoiseach, they used to say the long, echoing corridor down to his office in Government Buildings was the longest plank in the world for errant politicians. As Holland’s selectors turned their cars down the Marina for last night’s meeting with the executive of the Cork County Board, they must have known exactly how such politicians felt, and it would be hard not to sympathise with them.
The men waiting with the axe in Páirc Uí Chaoimh haven’t enjoyed the last few weeks either. The Cork County Board has had administration of its affairs effectively removed by Croke Park. Officials at GAA headquarters initially felt that this was a local matter which would have to be resolved locally, but that changed, and now questions will be asked about how Cork officials conduct their business, to put it mildly.
The ramifications at a local level are also likely to be far-reaching. At a meeting of the county board last week with over 100 delegates present, one delegate proposed a vote of no confidence in Teddy Holland, but could not find a seconder. Those same delegates may now be asked to install a new manager at their next meeting. Who’d be a fly on that wall?
For the players, the stakes were considerable, but all through the dispute they had one considerable advantage, usually referred to as the show-us-your-medals card.
The players remained consistent in pointing to their record under the “old” system: four hurling All-Ireland finals in a row, 2003 to 2006, and last year’s All-Ireland football final. They could show empirical proof that old system worked; the new proposal was a matter of possibilities, not definites.
Problems remain that couldn’t be addressed by Kieran Mulvey. The fixtures crisis that supposedly sparked the reform of the selector appointment system remains, a festering mess that must be addressed.
Another challenge for board and team alike is the appointment of a new Cork senior football manager. The whiff of cordite will eventually disperse from the scene and at some point in the next week or two a coach will have to walk into the most widely-discussed dressing room in Irish sport and deal with some relatively mundane issues: organising a defence, planning to curb an opposition danger-man. If you thought Denis O’Brien-Giovanni Trapattoni had legs, wait until these succession stakes take off.
The onus on the players to perform is also worth considering. The stock answer when you ask an inter-county player about the pressure of a big game is straightforward: “There’s always pressure when you play for Cork/Kerry/Kilkenny/fill in as appropriate.”
That pressure has been ratcheted up a few notches in Cork. Expect full houses for Cork’s league openers and players surfing the adrenalin, but it’s a long season to embark upon without a preseason.
Still, discussing games rather than industrial relations procedures can only be taken as progress.
The world has kept revolving while this dispute rattled on. Kieran Mulvey’s plane was in fact delayed yesterday morning, as it happens.
The GAA world goes on too. Even as the board and player representatives grappled with a resolution in the Rochestown Park Hotel during the week, Kerry’s All-Ireland captain Declan O’Sullivan was enjoying a meal in the dining room a few yards away. You couldn’t script a twist like that.
Then again, you couldn’t have scripted any of it.
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