Cork public show it's all about the players

The Cork public voted with their feet with a massive turnout for their beloved hurlers.

TUCKEY STREET is a tight little artery leading off Grand Parade in Cork and it carries in a short few yards so much of modern Ireland and so much of old Ireland. From outside Hillybilly's Fried Chicken Express you can look down Tuckey Street and see a Christian bookshop, a Masonic lodge house, a family planning clinic, a solicitor's office, a pub and a Polish restaurant all huddled together on a row. On Saturday, with a crowd of 10,000 or more still singing The Banksas an anthem of hope and solidarity, some of the footballers and hurlers of Cork stood down from the makeshift stage from where the speeches had been given, leaving behind the frontline of a dispute which is both as modern and as ancient as Tuckey Street itself. Away from the communion with a Cork public who had turned out in numbers which had surprised even the players, they remained in demand.

Seán Óg Ó hAilpín stayed for 90 minutes posing for pictures and signing autographs and taking the well-wishes of strangers. Behind the stage, Jerry O’Connor, John Gardiner and others did shorter stints but it was instructive to watch these demonised players from whom Gerald McCarthy and Frank Murphy and company are protecting the GAA. If there is one thing the GAA always says, whether it means it or not, it was reinforced in Tuckey Street. It is about the players. First, second and last. Everything that makes the GAA unique stems from the relationship of players with the people and places they come from.

A queue of Corkonians came to speak conspiratorially in Gardiner’s ear. “Keep it going Gah boy.” “Don’t let them bastards beat ye.” “Ye know what ye mean to us all.” Gardiner had spoken a few minutes earlier from the platform about previous triumphs and triumphant homecomings which the team and fans alike had shared. His words struck a chord and reminded us pointedly that those of us who write for papers, or those who shuffle papers in offices and even those who train teams will never be as central to the essence of things as players are. They make the memories. They write the songs.

Saturday was a day when the smoke of ongoing battles thickened. The players who we have come to think of and love as The Cork Team, trained in the morning in Na Piarsaigh. Donal Óg, Seán Óg and John Gardiner were sitting in a room together afterwards wondering where it would all end when texts started arriving and somebody stuck their head in the door with the same message as the texts were bearing. Gerald McCarthy was on the Marian Finucane Show.

The boys had taken their fill of Gerald's version of events that morning when they went through a long interview the manager gave to the Irish Examinerand and pretty soon Donal Óg had heard enough. He got up and called RTÉ. Seán Óg and his friend, workmate and clubmate John Gardiner sat straining to listen as Cusack lit a few Molotov cocktails and chucked them toward Montrose. They wondered at the sheer madness of the entire situation they find themselves in.

There are a million war stories to be told when the dust settles but, at the centre, things are as simple as they ever were. Gerald McCarthy is doing probably what most of us would do if we were put in his situation by the abuse of process which the Cork County Board have pulled. He is hanging tough and trying to make the terrible position he is in sound like a crusade for old values and amateurism.

Hurt and embarrassed he doesn’t, one imagines, spend too long wondering why the Cork County Board came to him in the first place when John Allen left. In head-hunting him the board overcame a long-standing hang-up they had about players who went doing missionary work in other counties. Gerald’s stint in Waterford was forgiven. He was inserted into the Cork management job.

Whether he saw himself as the county board’s man or not is beside the point. They players viewed him that way. They saw the gradual erosion of rights they had fought for and the wholesale abandonment of a successful training system they had evolved.

And they got on with things. In 2008 they needed the help of a facilitator to get through the season with their manager. If that and the number of defeats they endured in 2007/2008 didn’t spell the end of Gerald’s tenure than perhaps the leaking early in this dispute of the confidential material gathered by the facilitator should have. But here we all are.

Frank Murphy, a man who can turn an audience to stone with his four-hour orations on the intent of the amendments to obscure GAA rules, says not a word. Gerald, out there as a pawn on the board, cuts a poignant figure tilting his sword at windmills, his cadre of young players dragged along as fall guys in this grotesque misadventure must wonder among themselves what is going on when they hear of Gerald writing to all of last year’s squad over Christmas.

What must they think when they listen to Gerald insisting over and over again that the younger stars of the Cork team are being held virtually at knife-point by the senior panel members and yet see them all march of their own accord into press conferences and voluntary training sessions.

They must wonder at players like Kieran Murphy of county champions Sarsfields, who has surrendered the captaincy of Cork and watches five of his team-mates line out for Gerald’s team yesterday. Or Paudie O’Sullivan living at home under the same roof as Gerry O’Sullivan, chair of the county board. They must look at those two and know the pressure they have to be under in club or home and wonder what keeps Kieran or Paudie or other young players in the group. It has to be more than the persuasiveness of older players.

And perhaps, cut loose on the high seas and facing into a championship which will surely drown them forever, they must wonder what they are doing following Captain Bligh; they must talk among themselves about the failings which led an entire crew to mutiny; they must wonder if this is how they want to be recalled, if this is the senior county career they want to explain to their grandchildren.

On Tuckey Street, the Cork players disperse slowly, reassured and heartened by the affection of their people. It has been a unique occasion, a sea of people taking to the streets on a cold, cold Saturday afternoon to cheers for the devils of the modern game. Nobody saw any horns or tails or cloven feet. Just a public and its team. They way it should be. It was heartening and hopeful but certain faces were turned away. From the Politburo down in Páirc Uí Chaoimh no word came. Gerald was still left out there, a dangling man. The players dispersed and the crowd just melted into the backdrop of the city. The lorry which provided the trailer which formed the stage was gone by 5 o’clock and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Just the way the Cork County Board would have wished it.