Cork avoid a marriage made in hell

On Gaelic Games:Phew! Just as it looked as if the whole Cork business was going to become an endless loop of fraught encounters between desperate county officials and the pugnaciously aggrieved management team they had once appointed and were now unable to persuade to go away, it's finally time to write the last word on the whole dismal episode.

And the air has been thick with ironies. A dispute that in the eyes of many started with the Cork county board's unwillingness to face Billy Morgan and tell him they wouldn't be renewing his appointment as senior football manager ended with the same county board having to vote out an entire management team that they had happily installed in succession to Morgan - and whom they had steadfastly backed through the mounting realities of the past three months.

Then at the weekend we had Cork's Central Council representative Bob Honohan apologising for the inconvenience and disruption that his county's inability to field teams had foisted on other teams. Honohan had, in October, proposed the fateful motion that the county board take back from future managers the power to choose selectors.

To say that Honohan in effect triggered the whole fiasco is maybe to take liberties with cause and effect, as county chair Mick Dolan should have ruled the proposal out of order for lack of adequate notice but instead it went to floor.

It's safe to speculate that had the matter been kicked back to the clubs they might have been slower to embrace such a wacky proposal than they were to react heatedly to the players' threat of strike if the decision wasn't reversed.

Finally we had the irony of a manager and selectors, chosen specifically because they wouldn't be overpowered by the sensitivities of the situation in accepting the role in the middle of a raging controversy or assailed by any inconvenient doubts about their position in the weeks that followed, getting thick at the suggestion that they resign, having done nothing wrong, when the executive really wanted them to do so.

It would appear that the county board's cunning plan to summon arbitration a week ago was almost entirely predicated on the presumption that the players wouldn't agree or if they did that they would lose.

Instead the board were left there having a Wile E Coyote moment, holding the stick of dynamite they were sure they'd just chucked into the dressingroom. Since Friday night it had been thrown around with no one willing to take the blast.

Apart from an interlude on Saturday night when the county board solemnly accepted the arbitration determination, the matter has swung between Teddy Holland and his selectors refusing to step down and the board refusing to fire them in the hope they'd come to their senses and do it voluntarily.

Instead they had apparently been going around preparing for the new football season. Fortified to their satisfaction by the assurances of county officers that initially the matter would blow itself out quickly and subsequently that it would all end well for them, they appear to have been blithely unaware of the eyes of a nation, curiously trained on them, wondering when the penny would drop.

Either way everyone involved with the now redundant football set-up has dodged a bullet, as it would clearly have been a marriage made in hell.

Even making allowances for the unpleasantness and bruised feelings that Holland and his selectors must have experienced while the row raged all around them, some of the references to the footballers, who would have been under their direction, were eye-popping in their disrespect.

It's likely that the Cork players who were thrashed by Kerry in last year's All-Ireland final are the last people on earth who need to be publicly reminded that they had been humiliated - particularly by someone who says he wanted to manage them.

Nor is it true to say that the comments about "the most chaotic, abject capitulation in the history of Cork football," were simply the parting lash of someone very upset at a turn of events because a similar attitude had been evident at an earlier stage in the course of brief meetings between players and the prospective new management.

The clean-up operation has been impressively snappy. Conor Counihan's previous work with the football panel makes him a logical choice and his continuing interest in the position meant that the county executive didn't hang around before offering him what will be a considerable challenge given that the power vacuum hasn't allowed the footballers stay as intently focused as the hurlers, who were able to train as soon as the dispute had been resolved.

At national level the Central Competitions Control Committee took an equally logical if unexpected decision. By awarding the points to Cork's four National League opponents the CCCC has saved itself a nightmare of refixture scheduling and punished the county for its disruption of a national competition.

But would last night's Cork executive meeting - still in progress at the time of writing - have been justified in looking askance at the forfeits handed down by Croke Park? After all didn't Kieran Mulvey in his arbitration decision call on the GAA nationally to defer Cork's fixtures?

"In view of the fact," he wrote, "that this arbitration could only have been undertaken on February 14th and a decision issued today (February 15th) I request the Central Competitions Control Committee to agree to a deferment and a rescheduling of Cork hurling and football intercounty match commitments to a future date so as to facilitate the parties in accepting the terms of this adjudication."

GAA president Nickey Brennan had been central to getting Mulvey involved in the process and director general Páraic Duffy had played a role in the talks that preceded last week's hearing. Cork could argue that they had had to swallow the arbitration so why shouldn't Croke Park grant the postponements in the words of the decision "to facilitate the parties in accepting the terms of this adjudication"?

Then again the county probably isn't best placed at present to throw itself on the mercy on the court given that the GAA nationally wasn't party to the binding arbitration.

There may be complaints from other counties in the respective divisions of the Football and Hurling Leagues but no solution was going to be universally popular and this at least allows the competition to proceed without further disruption.

It would, of course, have been even more interesting had Dublin and Antrim been Cork's first scheduled opponents in the hurling.