Having said virtually nothing since he stepped into the whirlwind last November, Teddy Holland last night summed up the central lessons of the dispute between Cork players and officials.

"In common with most Cork people, I am appalled by the degree of animosity which exists between players and the county board," he writes in his statement. "It is probably unique and a poor boast for all concerned. In the course of this dispute the nature of many of the public and private utterances have been unnecessarily ugly, personalised and hurtful to many people and reflect little credit on anyone. It is time for it to stop."

His decision and that of his selectors to prolong the agony by declining to follow the recommendations of Kieran Mulvey's binding arbitration is therefore all the more unfortunate and it will be left to tonight's county board meeting to bring down the curtain on the whole sorry affair.

Yesterday's arbitration decision by Mulvey was a calm presentation of the issues, culminating in a recommendation anyone observing this dispute would have felt to be obvious - that the football management would have to walk away.

It is clear from Holland's statement that he feels very unhappy at how the appointment of him and his selectors has become the focus of controversy and ill will.

In another passage he makes another valid point: "In attempting to reach success, players must keep in mind that they are carried on the shoulders of tens of thousands of Cork men, women and children who admire them and envy them. Dare I say it - managers, selectors and boards also make their own important contribution."

If there has been one unremitting fault at the heart of this dispute it is the failure to recognise the contribution of others and as the feud evolved, it is equally clear that the county board bear the heavier responsibility in this regard.

Even if it wasn't their understanding that the arrangement of 2002 had conceded that senior managers should choose their own selectors, why did they persevere with the scheme to reverse that policy in the face of clearly expressed opposition from the players?

The suggestion that the players have no right to an input into matters of this importance to county teams is at odds with good sense. The usual prescription about going to their clubs and influencing delegates is disingenuous.

Everyone knows what's involved in training with elite county panels so how could it be reasonable to expect those involved to establish parallel administrative careers simply to register their views on how their teams should be administered? Neither is there any national interest in suppressing the Cork players for fear of some vast conspiracy to undermine the authority of county boards.

Mulvey's arbitration tellingly observes: "I do not see the events in the Cork GAA as an exercise in 'player power'. Rather it is a local dispute relating to specific circumstances and their own unique chain of events."

All authority, whether governmental or organisational, undermines itself when it acts arbitrarily and without good reason. That in a nutshell was what happened last October. No plausible justification of the decision to change the system of selectors - or the defiance of consequent reasonable misgivings when deciding to appoint Holland and his team - has been advanced during the course of the dispute. Just because a person or body has the right to do something doesn't make it right.

Mulvey also correctly identifies the players' original zero-to-60-in- 10-seconds strike announcement as a contributing factor to the impasse, but in their defence they haven't sought anything more than they wanted last October - a reversion to the previous system of selector appointment and no managerial appointment to be made under the revised procedures.

The memorandum of understanding, devised by Mulvey and the GAA director general, Páraic Duffy, and accepted by both sides (by the county board as a concession for agreement to allow Holland remain and by the players as a road map for future relationships) will at least give some guarantees that what happened over the past three months won't happen again - or at least not quite as easily.

If anything positive is to come out of this, apart from the considerable relief of Cork's inter-county participation being secured, it might well be that the memorandum could become a template for defining relationships between senior players and county administrators.

It's a cliche but there haven't really been any winners in all of this.