LockerRoom: Perhaps it's not even Frank. Maybe it's just a clothing thing. From Three Stripe international to the Sonia gear row in Atlanta to Roy's rage over the training gear in Saipan (v-necked!!!) to the current leisure shirt crisis among the county hurlers there seems to be a Corkonian allergy to the basic fabrics of society, writes Tom Humphries.

Was Michael Collins shot for wearing corduroys in a rural area? It could be a broader difficulty, the southern myopia. Cork is another place. They do things different there. Cork once got a Munster hurling championship game postponed on account of a tall ships race. Cork, after all, are the people who took the train home from a big game in Croke Park rather than play extra-time.

And Cork, it should be said, screwed up this year's Dublin county football championship when, despite the grace of the Derry County Board in similar circumstances involving Cork some time previously, they refused to grant Tipperary even a refixture having won the Munster football final while playing too many subs. They went to the Munster council with a shonky version of what the rule should be and the poor saps swallowed it. Dublin had to pay the price.

Understanding Cork is a challenge. We have to look past the cocky and ineffably superior front which the typical Corky presents. We have to recognise the sadness which lies in the innate Cork refusal to recognise even the possibility of happiness while superior civilisations exist, particularly to the north east.

And that melancholic yearning which Cork people have to be allowed slaughter each other within the boundaries of a People's Republic of Cork makes the county a Bosnia waiting to happen.

So while noting the poignant circumstances surrounding the Cork hurling crisis and appreciating that the difficulties may be genetic or environmental, it is hard not to be furious with the Cork County Board anyway.

When the GPA was formed a few years ago it raised a few issues which it was possible to be in sympathy with while still fiercely resisting the notion of pay for play. Nobody objected to intercounty players being treated well, to the notion of their commitment and, excuse the phrase, "professionalism" being matched by equal measures of the same from the people who run the game.

The difficulty which Croke Park faced in dealing with the GPA lay in making sure that the issue of pay for play which would either sunder or kill the association never got off the ground. The GAA survives on voluntary commitment and that voluntary commitment continues so long as everyone appreciates that the people who put 20 or 30 hours a week into running a club or running a team are as highly valued as the players who put that time into training at intercounty level.

The association survives in its unique and beautiful socialist splendour because deep down we know that despite his magnificence 79,000 people don't turn up in Croke Park to see DJ Carey. They turn up to see their home place, they turn up as a function of history, geography, family and tradition. They turn up because it's their day out having worked and toiled and cared as much as DJ over the years. And they expect that the money they spend will go to putting hurleys into the hands of the DJs of the future.

The GAA would be fine so long as the realisation of us all being in it together lasted. Tinderbox situations were to be avoided. Concessions were to be made. Meetings with the GPA were eventually held. The GPA, in fairness, could have a valid input. Nobody was going to be in the business of making martyrs. Nobody wanted to create a flashpoint.

IN CORK they were reading off a different script, however. You read through the list of demands made by the Cork players and some of them seem comical and trivial. Leisure shirts. Training caps. Some of them seem excessive. Six hundred free tickets between them for every championship game? And most items just seem reasonable.

The overall sense is that for athletes to have to demean themselves to formally ask for these things suggests there is something deeper wrong in Cork. It's about power and the ostentatious wielding of power. About a deep suffocating conservatism which is expressed through that power. Players who were celebrating an All-Ireland title a few years ago don't suddenly abandon the game on the sort of issues listed unless there is a culture of antagonism and mealy-mouthedness within the county board.

In Cork there has been a systematic grinding down of the morale of players. There were elements of snideness in it but the written response last week of the Cork County Board to the list of players' demands didn't quite read like a belligerent tract posted on the fence by plantation owners. Not quite.

In a different context it might have seemed like a reasonable starting point.

What was shocking about it all was the fact that after such a prolonged period of discontent things had only progressed to this level. What was shocking was the adversarial language used in the exchanges on both sides. What was shocking was the fact the Cork County Board, one of the wealthiest in the country, had been willing to let things slide this far.

What does the entire debacle say to young players? And in a county with high-profile teams in football and in hurling, a county where one assumes the county board has extracted a suitably high price from sponsors, what does it all say to the sponsors about the way their money is spent? What's the message to other counties? What will the impact on the GPA be? Cork have created a template for trouble.

One hopes Croke Park will wade into Cork this week wielding a big stick. There are lessons to be learned at central level after all. First, county board members shouldn't sit on team selection committees. Love him or loath him Frank Murphy has been a lightning rod in all this. When the good that administrators do is outbalanced by the ripples of discontent they cause it's time for a little self-examination.

Second, most of what the Cork players are looking for should be included in the documentation when county boards make deals with sponsors. In the furore over the Genesis report it is often forgotten that Croke Park was supposed to employ a similar line-up of high-powered executives a few years ago. One such to standardise and maximise sponsorship deals might have saved us quite a bit of trouble by now.

Third, perhaps a Cromwellian style planting of a fresh and well-adjusted populace in the Cork area would help.