Defiant to the end
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Wednesday March 11 2009
They didn't land with burning torches and pitchforks to his doorstep but Gerald McCarthy last night accepted the inevitability and futility of the situation he had found himself in and bowed to the public pressure mounting up against him.
Faced with the threat of open revolt by clubs if he remained in place, McCarthy has taken the logical step of stepping down as the club votes stacked up against him, rather than prolonging the agony and aggravation that arguably the biggest controversy in GAA history continued to cause.
In recent weeks a threat of serious physical abuse had apparently begun to surface in the background and the pressure on his family is understood to have further influenced his decision.
There will be undoubted sympathy for his position, perhaps more so beyond Cork than in the county itself, but in making the decision himself at this stage, and not forcing it on clubs at County Board level, McCarthy has made the right choice.
Those five All-Ireland medals will shine again but ultimately they were never enough to preserve him as coach of a county team limping disastrously towards oblivion.
He fought the good fight, he made his stance at what he perceived as player power and took it further than anyone ever expected he would. He showed a level of defiance that epitomised his career on the playing field.
At one stage you might have thought he could prevail. Getting a team on the field for the St Colman's game in November was a start. Keeping them together in the climate that existed was also an achievement and making his points so succinctly -- whether in word or print -- through the dispute, helped his cause.
RETAINED
But once the 30 members of the 2008 squad retained a united front throughout the four-and-a-half months and their replacements continued to lose games by double-figure scores, the manager's fate was sealed.
The Cork public, and by extension, the clubs, place much greater value on a successful team, populated by the best players, than the principle of a County Board having the authority to govern on matters relating to the management of its inter-county teams.
Whatever about the demands of the 30 players or even the marchers that had taken to the streets on this issue, once the clubs made their voices heard in such a telling manner over the last two weeks, McCarthy's position was wholly untenable.
He had sought the intervention of the clubs himself on the day after the players' press conference in Douglas on Monday, January 26, by suggesting that the clubs had a "big call" to make. Now they have made that call.
The 2008 hurlers will distance themselves from any talk of 'victory' in this latest dispute but the fact remains that three times they have gone toe-to-toe with a Cork County Board executive and three times they have emerged without having to make a concession.
In 2002 and 2008 they bloodied the nose of the Board, this time they might just have delivered a fatal blow.
Can some members of the executive continue to serve the needs of Cork GAA having pushed McCarthy's appointment through in the first place? If McCarthy feels the need to go at this stage do they not share the same sense of resignation?
Central Council delegate Bob Honohan, one of McCarthy's most fervent supporters, articulated as much at Cork's most recent County Board meeting.
The Board gambled on re-appointing McCarthy last October in the knowledge that some of the players would not be happy and might, in fact, walk away as they were precluded, it seemed, from strike action in accordance with the Mulvey arbitration terms. But that gamble has backfired spectacularly.
The ramifications of the last four and half months will reverberate for many years in Cork GAA and the GAA as a whole. It is now apparent that if the best hurlers or footballers in any county hold the line, as the 2008 Cork hurlers did, they are likely to prevail. True, the distrust between players and their Board and clubs and their Board is not as great as it is in Cork.
And the bonds of loyalty between these Cork players are probably not replicated anywhere else. But it now stands as a test case.
It has also revealed a huge disconnect between the clubs and a Board populated by delegates who clearly weren't able to gauge the feeling of the club members they purport to represent, hence the most recent 84-13 vote in McCarthy's favour, a vote railroaded through them on the night. The document produced by Croke Park and presented by one of the county's own, the next GAA president Christy Cooney, as a way of brokering peace contained implicit criticisms of the way the Board has been doing business.
This document can hardly be ignored now that a solution of the management issue has been found.
The players themselves made mistakes early on in this epic, bitter battle, perhaps even before McCarthy was reappointed in late October.
Armed with the Cathal O'Reilly document -- compiled in the midst of last season and gushing with praise from the players of his management -- McCarthy was made feel that he was a wanted man.
The players had lived a lie about their manager but someone forgot to tell McCarthy this and it wasn't until the morning that his reappointment was being rubberstamped that they got around to it.
For McCarthy the die had been cast and he was ready for battle.
This sorry mess would have been cleared up much sooner had the clubs mobilised themselves earlier. In the end, only they could be the ultimate power brokers.
But the players were slow to get their message across and it wasn't until their press conference in late January that the real power of their message became clear. Cork GAA is a mess but an even greater mess may have been averted in the nick of time.
The business of sifting through the rubble will begin with the appointment of a new manager and most of the 2009 squad will disappear without trace from the national stage.
One wonders why he put himself through it in the first place but he stood on a point of principle that the clubs of Cork didn't agree with because ultimately, they didn't have trust in their own County Board.
- Colm Keys
