What a warm-up for football's showpiece week. The scenes at the end of Antrim's county football final last Sunday triggered major media reaction with television pictures and print follow-up. Sometimes such coverage can be voyeuristic or a bit on the opportunistic side but on this occasion the authorities were probably lucky that the All-Ireland is flying down the track towards us all; otherwise there would have been a week-long feeding frenzy.

Underpinning the whole range of reactions has been a simple sense of shock. Whether it was the despair of the county board or the sickened response of those who told radio programmes that they would never attend a football match again, the mood was almost one of despair.

This was all the more dispiriting given the season that the county team had enjoyed and the evidence of gradual renewal within Antrim in recent years. Improvements had been made to Casement Park and in the past year there have been signs of a football resurrection with a B All-Ireland proving a portent of last May's championship win over Down - the first since 1982.

The constant retailing of that statistic had begun to irritate the players and in the aftermath of the even more sensational draw with Derry, Sheeny McQuillan put it on the record: "What people will have to understand about us is that we are the new Antrim. This is not the team that has lost for 18 years. We have been together for eight months. It's not us. Once you get to know us you'll find out how good we are in the future."

It makes poignant reading three months on. Sunday's match featured seven of the players who played Derry that afternoon. McQuillan lined out at centrefield for Cargin against St Paul's Joe Quinn. Together they had battled Anthony Tohill and Dermot Heaney in the championship. In the final of three days ago, they were in opposing trenches.

No one has suggested that McQuillan, Quinn or any of their county colleagues involved themselves in the scabrous aftermath but the wider context was pointed out by Eamonn Grieve, county board treasurer, in this paper yesterday.

"The animosity that this creates between clubs and county board, and within the county board, sets everything back after the great summer the county had in the championship."

It is one of the besetting problems of weaker counties that inter-club rivalry blights the prospects of producing a coherent county team. Antrim appeared to have overcome that difficulty after many difficult years but instead manager Brian White will have a delicate task to draw everyone together once again in time for the coming National League campaign.

It's a far cry from what had been planned for Casement Park at the weekend with a double bill of county finals (hurling as well as football) and the presence of Danny Murphy, Ulster Council chairman, in Belfast for the afternoon.

Antrim's county board will now attempt to clean up Sunday's aftermath with an investigation and, it is hoped, appropriate suspensions. But the degree of unpleasantness created won't be as easily dissipated.

In the early days after his accession, Sean McCague earned a reputation in disciplinary matters as something of an interventionist president. If ever a situation called for intervention it would be this one if the county board does not take a strong position. Unless draconian suspensions are handed down, the whole GAA suffers because failure to act will reinforce the image of lawlessness within the association.

Even strict measures won't erase the wretched publicity the incidents received but a strong signal will at least indicate that such behaviour will hurt those involved in the future.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that this will be the case. The clubs involved have done grave damage to both their own county and the image of the game in general. Yet there have been ugly incidents in previous years' club matches and it's only seven years since Cargin and St John's had to be put out of the county championship after a county semi-final - the title was handed to Lamh Dearg.

Cargin retained the Antrim championship at the weekend and possess fine players but on the disciplinary front are obviously slow learners. To have been severely disciplined within the last decade and once more to be at the centre of further controversy suggests at best a degree of recklessness.

It must be on the cards that both the champions and St Paul's will be banned from next year's championship. Furthermore Cargin will surely not be permitted to take their place in the Ulster club championship against Derry champions Bellaghy. Presumably Danny Murphy, after his ringside perspective on Sunday, won't be too cut up should Antrim withdraw their representatives.

Of course the lead in these matters has to come from on high. And unfortunately there have been too many examples of high-profile, televised delinquencies which have gone unpunished during the season's championships.

Finally on a positive note, it's a relief to be able to look forward to an All-Ireland between two such attack-oriented footballing teams. Neither Galway nor Kerry are saints. But Kerry have eliminated the tendency to foul which marked their All-Ireland success of three years ago. And Galway have, as a unit, an excellent disciplinary record.

Yet even if we are blessed with a free-flowing final this weekend, the images of last weekend at Casement Park will have eroded goodwill. Whereas no one's arguing that a violent county final will undo the advantages of a memorable All-Ireland final, the message is clear: indiscipline remains the most damaging and apparently intractable problem facing the GAA.