Players don’t always know what’s best for teams

WAS Gerald McCarthy’s management so lamentably bad that it stopped Cork from winning this year’s All-Ireland? Or last year’s?

The players — the ones on the inside, as Ben O’Connor says — now argue that things were far from right with McCarthy’s regime.

This could be the reality of it, or it could be that the players are acutely aware the public cannot effectively gainsay the claims of training-ground ineptitude because they (the public) are simply not at every, or indeed any, session.

Back in July, Ben O’Connor didn’t see Gerald as the problem. Or Donal Óg Cusack either. Or the entire Cork panel. They all seemed happy with the Gerald operation, and painted a picture of ever-evolving relationships that might soon lead Cork to glory.

The Cathal O’Reilly document will doubtless be ridiculed in the next few days. However, for a group of players reportedly obsessive about honesty of communication, it is unthinkable that someone like Cusack would honour Gerald with a lengthy word count and gushing praise, if he really believed the manager to be a patsy.

For what? For the sake of a quiet life? Is it the same Donal Óg we’re talking about? Now, those same players wish to portray Gerald as a man totally out of his depth.

The niggling reality for the players is that this depiction of Gerald doesn’t wash with the public.

Gerald was a legend before any of them were born, and his status has remained undimmed in the interim. They could sling mud at him until Christmas — and knowing these boys, they just might — but none of it will stick.

There are wrongs on both sides here — county board and players.

The county board has rarely covered itself in glory in Cork. The feeling that one man (county secretary Frank Murphy) wields far too much influence has endured for years.

The wild fluctuations among the delegates — all opposed one week, all in favour the next week, being their favoured flip-flop routine — doesn’t say much for individual thinking at the tier below the executive committee.

This has all the appearances of another Board v The Players row, another power struggle. Another Frank and Us shoot-out.

Thus far, we only know one side of the story of how the ‘process’ to conduct a manager was carried out.

It doesn’t look good for the board, and if they had a solid rebuttal of Ben O’Connor’s claims, we fancy we’d have heard it by now.

But to what we believe to be the most distasteful — and revealing — aspect of the affair: the case against Gerald has the taste and touch of a manufactured grievance.

Yet look at the ferocity with which the players went for him.

Gerald will stand his ground. It’s time somebody did. Players don’t always know what’s best. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Cork hurlers have now come out with all guns blazing for the third time this decade with ever-decreasing justification.

Earlier this year, Justin McCarthy was hounded out of Waterford. Because the players knew best, we were told.

What did they know? Humiliation in the All-Ireland final, the worst display in living memory at that stage, proved the players were guilty of ridiculous selectivity when they identified Justin as the main obstacle between them and greatness.

The Cork players could be guilty of equally ridiculous selectivity now.

Players can look for scapegoats. They can whisk up resentment in a flash. It is an understandable reaction given all the time they put in only to see titles slip through their fingers.

But in the aftermath of a championship season, as a number of leading players come towards the end of their days, emotions run high, the manager’s shortcomings come under an unforgiving microscope, and, all of a sudden, the spotlight falls on one man.

It can be illusory.

In Wexford, many players would have got rid of Liam Griffin after 1995. The Wexford captain thought so little of his manager he lined out in a club game a few nights before the championship — an open statement of hostility towards the management team.

A year later, Liam Griffin won an All-Ireland with the team. In Meath, they found Sean Boylan a curiosity at first. Not quite a figure of fun, but not someone who would lead them to glory. Count the medals.

The point is players don’t always know what makes a good manager. And even when it’s all over, and the medals gather dust in the glass cases, they still disagree about the quality of the manager who brought them there: some will say he (the manager) was the reason why, some will say he had it easy with the players at his disposal.

We presume the Cork footballers will get down to the breaker’s yard and knock the hurlers’ grievance around a bit until it fits them too.

The GPA, buoyed up by the growing comfort of their relationship with Croke Park officials, will wheel out the argot of the trade union movement.

The players will tell us they only want what’s “good for Cork.” As if Gerald McCarthy doesn’t. As if he would give two years of his life to the whole thing for the crack.

Meanwhile, Kilkenny and Tyrone — with the simplest of drills, plenty of old-fashioned training games, and county boards that handle things sensibly — win the All-Irelands.

This time, at least, it looks as if Cork will be allowed to wash their dirty linen in their own back garden, without allowing the stench to infect the National Leagues.

A year looking in might be what’s needed right now to inject some badly-needed commonsense into the matter.