Where to from here?

“McCarthty should have realised that with limited players on his panel and a baying public on his back, the chink in his armour was far too wide for survival”


Speaker's Corner
Denise Horan

CORK hurling may be moving on this week, but its issues are far from sorted. Finding a resolution to the impasse between the 2008 panel and the appointed manager for 2009, Gerald McCarthy, was, apparently, the ambition of all involved over the last few months. Or so they all said, ad nauseam.
Now, however, judgement by the court of public opinion has been settled for instead. Everyone is weary, so grand aspirations like resolutions will have to wait for another row. And let none be in any doubt – there will be another row.
At the outset, this writer was on the side of Gerald McCarthy, the manager appointed by the Cork County Board last autumn. He hadn’t set the world alight with his tactics or his style of play in the previous two seasons, but he still had credentials. Widely regarded as one of Cork’s best-ever hurlers and a manager who had transformed Waterford from minnows to All-Ireland contenders, he was far from a nobody. And whether Corkonians care to admit it or not, maybe Kilkenny simply were that much better than them last year.
Without knowing too much about the ins and outs of the players’ objections to McCarthy, I felt an uneasiness about players demanding a veto on their manager in return for wearing the jersey and using their talents for the benefit of the county. Judging by the responses to discussions on the subject on the national airwaves and in newspapers, it seems a lot of the sporting public had a similar unease – in the early stages at least.
Then, somewhere along the way, the tide turned. I suppose everyone thought the row would fizzle out quickly; either the players would get sense and return to the fold or McCarthy would resign honourably and with widespread public sympathy. Neither happened, and soon each side had gone too far. The prospect of a climbdown was too dizzying for either to consider.
The Cork public – not noted for their humble acceptance of second best – soon tired of their third-string county hurling team being hammered. McCarthy’s penchant for issuing eloquently-worded, but unmistakably missile-laden, statements irked them too, particularly while his team was losing. McCarthty should have known the unforgiving nature of Cork’s hurling people and he should have realised that with limited – albeit willing – players on his panel and a baying public on his back, the chink in his armour was far too wide for survival.
In the end, his references to his mother’s funeral and his elderly father’s pleas to him to step down, for the sake of his family, smacked too much of emotional blackmail for me to be on his side (notwithstanding the awfulness of the death threat against him and the sympathy I felt for him on that level).
But it’s hard to be on the side of the players either. With their posturing and their demands and their know-it-all attitude, they haven’t exactly been exemplary role models. What they did in publicly humiliating the man appointed to manage them went far beyond what is acceptable behaviour in the name of county or sporting pride. I don’t care how good they believe they are, or how many All-Irelands they think they could win with the ‘right’ manager, they took their arguments too far. Many of them will go down as All-Ireland winners with a mere footnote about this debacle; because of them McCarthy will go down as the manager that none of his players and none of the county’s clubs wanted, with only a footnote about his genius as a player.
No side covered itself in glory in this dispute, with the county board coming in for the greatest amount of criticism. 
But the clubs must accept a huge amount of the blame too. They have the opportunity every year to change the county board, yet a change in attitude and in levels of harmony never seems to happen. The clubs always seem to conveniently overlook the matter of there being strength in numbers. Except, of course, when it comes to humiliating an already beaten man.
Let’s hope they like the feeling of deja vu.