Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: Listen, it's a dangerous job but somebody has to do it. We dandered down to Parnell Park yesterday to see the footballers of Dublin and Cork disporting themselves, and sat for well more than an hour in a wind that would chill the knackers off a brass monkey.

Then we went into the dressing-room precinct where the atmosphere was even colder. Came away quite shook, so we did.

Billy Morgan first. After a while the Cork dressing-room door was swung open and there was Billy, resplendent and Tarzan-like in naught but a white towel. Always liked Billy, even going back to the days when I was a freelance and used to call his house with inordinate frequency and a couple of times somebody who sounded very like Billy answered the phone and said apologetically that Billy wasn't in, that this was Billy's brother. I took the hint.

Then yesterday, we're just about to compliment Billy on being such a fabulous cut of a man, what with his towel and his tan and all, when before he has even cleared his throat or towelled his chest he unwinds with a recital of the sins allegedly committed by this hack against the good name of Nemo Rangers. Wonders aloud what the humble hack has against said Nemo Rangers. Recalls various slights in various yellowing bits of newsprint and leaves your correspondent so flabbergasted that he can't even bring himself to issue any response beyond a mysterious smile.

And get this: Billy is the best part of the afternoon. Going to Billy first is the soft option. It's having dessert before you eat your greens. Tommy Lyons doesn't send Christmas cards anymore since a critical piece written last summer on the day before the Armagh game. It didn't seem critical at the time, but the following week Dave Billings patiently drew our attention to some of the harsher passages and before you could say "ups and downs" we were on the outs with Tommy.

Next time he reads a piece with my name attached to it will probably be my obituary ("A fool who was never suffered gladly . . .").

Since then, Tommy looks queasy any time he sees me in his way. That's common enough, of course, but there was a time when taking out a microphone within half a mile of Tommy was the equivalent of walking past a hungry Alsatian with a lamb chop hanging from your sleeve.

Now it's the Big Queasy.

All of which means nothing and means everything. Talking to managers in March used to be child's play. It used to be first-date kind of stuff, people warming to each other, doing the old "wonder of me" routine. Even managers who had been around the block many times were smiley and benign in March and April. Generally it was high summer before they got stressed enough to care about externalities like the media and what gets written about them or their teams.

The game has changed, though, and Billy and Tommy are under more pressure than ever before. You can see it in their faces, that certain tightness, that suspicion transmitted by flickering eye patterns and twitchy muscles that the world is out to get them. The pressure is corrosive. Especially if you let it be that way.

Billy is back in business at county level after a hiatus and it would be interesting to know after this summer if he feels things differently. Experience will teach him always to have one eye on his own county board, but will he feel that the weight of media has changed with the preponderance of outlets and stations and the increased levels of coverage and comment?

He will have learned something yesterday from Tommy Lyons's haunted look. Tommy is as gaunt and japeless as old Yorick these times. Yes. The same Tommy who rode the Tiger in the summer of 2002 with enthusiasm and some alacrity and saw his team come within a point of having a shockingly perfect summer. What is grimly fascinating is what has happened since. Tommy has experienced the whole hype cycle. The defeat to Armagh last summer could have been swallowed whole and Tommy could have locked himself into the dressing-room and held his peace. But . . .

Mistakes were made and the genie got out of the bottle. Stephen Cluxton was publicly rapped on the knuckles, the team which had gone so close the year before were said to have overachieved and it was questioned whether Dublin had the players.

The media reported all this as squarely as possible and Tommy's problem thereafter was not how it got reported but how it played to the players. There were rumblings and whispering, and the various gripes which success keeps at bay suddenly assumed pressing importance.

This year Dublin are determinedly low-profile and Tommy approaches knots of media like a man afraid he's going to catch something terminal. Which is a pity. Swagger, be it that of Tommy Lyons or that of the team itself, is something Dublin needs. Teams from the capital don't thrive on being nervy and tentative. Self-doubt suits them as poorly as it suits any side.

And yesterday at Parnell Park it was impossible not to wonder if all this pressure isn't a little self-inflicted. This summer at least a few more teams will be imitating the style of football played by Armagh and Tyrone over the past couple of years. How many, though, will be adopting their approach to other things, especially the media?

The northern sides appear to have mustered players with the intellectual nous to appreciate that what goes down on the sportspages is some other-worldly business which shouldn't affect them. Joe Kernan and Mickey Harte have adopted open-door policies with the press; players speak if they want to speak, decline if they want to decline. They come to the phone and find out who it is and accede to interview requests or politely decline. It seems a mature and grown-up way to go about things.

In terms of style and tactics, Armagh and Tyrone have received as much criticism as anybody, and yet generally they accept flattery and criticism in the same manner. They float above it all. It's one person's opinion. No more. No less. No big deal.

The way they have coped (by ignoring the need to cope) speaks lots for their focus.

The result has been one less thing for players to worry about. They talk or they don't talk. They don't spend the weeks before big matches behaving like fugitives.

And in Meath, Seán Boylan has always been the same. No doubt certain lines written down through the years have gotten under his skin and under the skin of his team, but Meath has always been a happy place to go for work.

Ditto any county which Mick O'Dwyer looks after. Micko couldn't be doing with media fuss and bother himself, but he seems to have realised long ago that there's more pressure in having players cloister themselves away than there is in just opening up the shop.

Yesterday at Parnell Park Dublin and Cork did enough to convince anyone of anything. You could look at the absentees, the conditions, the time of the year and the better passages of play and make the case that these were two teams who will be considerably better come the summer. Or you could look at those periods of banal, error-ridden play and persuade yourself that these were two mediocre teams on a bad day.

Either way, the next six months are going to bring higher levels of scrutiny and comment. Dublin and Cork players work in and play out of large population centres and large media centres. The football teams from the two biggest GAA counties are always in a state of feast or famine. People are always being blessed or blamed.

How much has been learned from our new northern masters will be as evident off the field as on it.