Cork gag raises few laughs

There is a deeply strange element to the notion of 20 Corkmen gathered in the same room and not a word to say between them. Another millennium will pass before this transpires again.

Yet that was the scenario at last Saturday's official press meeting with the Cork footballers, a standoff which has already drawn comparisons with the infamous Mayo disappearance a few summers ago.

From a media prospective, the decision to dig tunnels and retreat underground - with, one must assume, Larry Tompkins handing out the spades - can be summed up in many ways. Inconvenient, certainly. Funny . . . well in the peculiar sense, maybe. But mostly it's just saddening.

If Cork want to win the All-Ireland football championship it will be difficult to know what to make of them as individuals. It will be hard to describe any genuine emotional traits or warm characteristics of the team.

Larry Tompkins, it would seem, is moulding a team in his own image - or at least the public perception of that image. Resilient, utterly focused, relentlessly cautious and forbiddingly humourless. For his own reasons it would seem Tompkins has decided that communication with the media might in some way unhinge Cork's preparation for Sunday's game.

He could well point out - if he were available for comment - that he is perfectly entitled to adopt such an approach.

That much is unarguable, but it doesn't explain the reasoning behind the silence. Cork PRO Jim Forbes acknowledged that the build up to Sunday's match was low-key. The press meeting was organised by the County Board at the request of the management - the fact that only Don Davis and Joe Kavanagh articulated their views on the semi-final was as much a surprise to the board as to the press.

It must be presumed that there has to be some sort of logic behind this - Tompkins would not send his team to Coventry for the sheer hell of it.

"It has to be remembered that there are many young players on the team, I suppose there is anxiety to shield them from all the attention which is also laudable in a way," said Forbes yesterday.

And there is also the undeniable fact that on any team there are players who are reluctant for reasons of shyness, time or plain indifference to make themselves available for the formulaic Q and A sessions. Again there is nothing wrong in that but it is hard to imagine at least five Cork players not being comfortable with the process. A trawl through archives of the past 12 months suggests that a number of current Cork footballers have made themselves available with a courtesy which is still common in GAA circles, despite the suffocating demands on time. The whole process of the media interviewing GAA athletes is nearing the point of breakdown anyway. The ever-spiralling "hype" demands more coverage which in turn puts the squeeze on higher profile players from every county.

The mass GAA coverage in every medium seems to have inspired a fear within some management structures which in turn has prompted a guardedness on the part of the players. Rarely do players welcome discourse on aspects of their selves other than that relating to their role within the team. As a rule, they offer inoffensive answers to questions they have heard a thousand times before. Still, though, even within that format it is possible to gauge some understanding of what drives the players on, of what their worries are, of who the wag of a team might be, of what the collective mindset is. It enables the media and public alike to attain some sort of grasp on the nature of the spirit of the particular team.

The truth is that players or teams need afford absolutely no loyalty to the media if they believe media attention to be an intrusion of what they are about, well, they have a right to.

But surely they do have a duty towards the public, the folk who stand watching them on wet days in October and who might just hope to read or hear the players' views on the Saturday or Sunday morning of an All-Ireland semi-final weekend. Of the four semi-finalists left in the football championship, there are stories to each team. Armagh, driven by a near religious hunger, Mayo and the ghosts of 1996 and 1997. Meath, being Meath, and Sean Boylan still there twinkling.

There is a story to Cork buried somewhere too. Hell, probably hundreds of them, Cork being Cork. But right now they merely appear as a bunch of faceless figures in red jerseys. That's a shame, and nowhere near the reality.