LOCKEROOM/Tom Humphries: Sat down 20 minutes ago full of piety and sacred intentions. Was going to put this matter of the GPA and their silly €127 to rest. Yes, I was going to soften a few coughs on that one and then I was going to mow down the survivors for being big ninnies about a drug testing system that everyone else lives with happily.

Outside the window, though, the sun is shining and I'm thinking that what I'd really like to be doing is to be standing down in Marino right now watching St Vincent's and Ballyboden in the camogie feile final rather than writing about people who never seem to do anything these days but moan about their sport and how miserable it is.

I'm thinking that next week this column will be written from a hotel room on the island of Saipan somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and rather than worrying about whether so and so's knackered knee will be okay for the Cameroon game I'll be secretly fretting over the fortunes of some under-11 teams because that's the best and purest sport I get to see these days. I'm thinking that I'm sick to the teeth of hearing top sports people moaning about how miserable their lives are and what oppressive, unbearable demands are placed upon them. I'm hoping the kids aren't listening.

If you want to hear about truly miserable lives, existences eked out against all odds, well listen to this. Try being a sports hack. We have no dieticians, physios, shrinks, trainers or good vibes people. We never win anything. We never hear cheering. By definition, we are in the trade because we are congenital losers. Next week when we take off for Saipan together in the steerage part of the big airplane I can guarantee you we'll be the epicentre of misery. There were cheerier galley slaves rowing their way from ancient Carthage.

This is my tenth year travelling with the team and one thing can be said, we get more miserable as the years go by.

From just after 10 o'clock next Friday morning we'll be honing our hatred of the players. We'll be ready by then. The last six weeks have set us simmering slowly, what with people coming up to us and saying: "Well for ya sunshine, that's not a job you have that's a non-stop holiday."

Listen, we'd rather be Siberian salt miners. You can get drummed out of the union for uttering the words "ah, this is the life". You might think that the misery and resentment begins when the players are ushered onto the plane and to the left past the cooing, swooning stewardesses into the first-class compartments with the big seats and nice sleeping facilities while we are nudged to the right by the burly steward and shoe-horned into our leather lodgings down the back. You might think it begins there as we get ready to spend 17 hours in the air together, the players delicately sipping bucks fizz, we hacks pleading for just one little plastic cup of warm water.

It doesn't begin there. It begins with the packing. When boarding a plane a player will carry a little purse containing a Gameboy, a passport, a toothbrush, some aftershave and 40 grand in large notes in case he sees a watch he likes. We hacks, terminally uncool, must by rule bring 90 per cent of our personal belongings. Laptop. Transformer. Every type of electrical adaptor known to man. Mobile phone. Tape recorder. Camera. Stopwatch. Batteries (pack of 24). CD player.

Earphones. Phrase book. CDs. Novel. Mountain of footie stats for feature which must be finished on plane. Various wires, connectors, screwdrivers, alligator clips, instruction booklets, plugs etc that make us think we won't be helpless when faced with foreign phone systems.

WE'LL arrive eventually, we hacks muttering to anyone who will listen that this is ridiculous, this is the last time, next time we are going to do something about it, blah blah blah, and having landed we'll be separated from the players as they go into quarantine to check that they didn't pick up anything from us. Usually we are driven to a fine hotel and the players are driven to a slightly better one next door.

Our hotel is always some place we couldn't dream of paying for were we actually on holidays while the players' hotel is someplace they mightn't be seen dead in if they were on holidays. So we both resent the lodgings equally. The players because they find theirs dull. Us because we'll probably never be here again and because if we were we'd prefer to be swanking it with the kids and because we know that we'd be content if we could only just stay in the hotel next door.

In the old days under Jack Charlton players and media used to stay in the same hotel. This was a logical move which gave us all an equal footing and which led to us being less bother to the players. We'd sit in our rooms and phone each other if there was news of a press conference. Occasionally we'd bump into players in the lifts. They'd say hello. We'd pretend not to know them. Sorry, got that the wrong way round.

Now, though, we get up in the morning and go en masse to sit in the lobby of the players' hotel. There'll be up to 50 of us loitering there most of the day like a convention of the world's least attractive hookers and when the lift door opens we'll all look up expectantly. Usually a German tourist will exit. Sometimes it will be a player but one of the surly majority who doesn't like speaking to the press, so we'll all pretend we were looking at something else. Occasionally it will be one of those lovely players who likes chatting with the hacks and we'll all start moving towards him as in a scene from Planet of the Living Dead.

Once in a while it will be a player who has a special arrangement to meet a particular hack, in which case the hack must leap up and walk very quickly towards the player before the living dead scene begins and he is forced to use small fire arms to get them back to their seats.

World Cups are a five-week-long fiesta of indignity. There is no Amnesty web page devoted to us. Mary Robinson never calls. We are not an election issue. We are oppressed and forgotten, the nation's dirty little secret.

I know, I know, it doesn't make much of a column this Monday morning, but look at it this way: Have the GPA no shame, that they could be looking for €127 a week when such conditions exist on or near their doorstep. Thanks for listening.