Interview Sean Og O'hAilpin: Tom Humphriesgets the views of a modern legend about the players' strike that is quietly tearing Cork apart

Tick tick tick. Winter segues to spring and Seán Óg waits. Tick tick tick. The National Leagues are knocking on the door. Seán Óg waits. Monday he trained by himself in the gym. Tuesday he went hard with Na Piarsaigh. Wednesday he stepped off a plane from Dublin and into the gym again. Same old grind. Tick Tick Tick. He drinks his water, eats his fruit and his boiled chicken, stays ready to put on the jersey he loves and serves. Tick tick tick.

In a couple of weeks Cork are supposed to play the vaunted stripeymen of Kilkenny to inaugurate the league. That hurts. He feels the embarrassment of the fine old mess Cork are in every time he looks at Kilkenny and their relentless progressivism.

Kilkenny, he reckons, are like American athletes, always looking to find better ways of doing things. Cork are like the old Soviet bloc sweat merchants. Waiting for the politburo to nod. Waiting.

Seán Óg is on strike. Striking is something he never thought he would do once in his career. Let alone twice. He knows this time that, despite the service given and the All-Irelands won, the Cork public aren't with him and his comrades now. People meet him on the street and ask Seán Óg will it all be solved, and he says with a smile that he hopes so. He doesn't get abused personally, but friends tell him he and the players are getting it in the neck when the strike is discussed in saloon bars and clubhouse precincts and over water coolers.

Word is they couldn't be bothered playing. He can't understand that.

"I'm resigned to the fact that the National Hurling league, even if it was resolved next week, is effectively gone for us. We have Kilkenny first. Kilkenny have had games and proper sessions under their belts. We're not prepared. Any resolution now is about saving our championship, not the National League. Every day that goes by is eating into Cork's championship."

The summer needs Cork. Fans, rivals, sponsors, television. The summer needs Cork. Seán Óg waits, but he is tired of waiting. He talks to lads every day and he feels the itch in them to get back, to save their summer. Every boyhood dream they shared revolved around summers in red.

The water is so muddy with propaganda now that it serves no one to attempt a forensic examination of who did what in that frenzied Punch and Judy match that started the current shenanigans. The players know they made mistakes, but feel they have engaged, tried to make compromises and take a long-term view. They feel, though, that they are being fed into the grinder this time; the complexity of the situation and the fact they are going to the well of public support for the second time is being used against them.

So Seán Óg is waiting and watching. He had a holiday in Australia over Christmas and came home to a scenario of both sides claiming to have done more bending over backwards than would be seen at a limbo-dance marathon. He wants long-term progress though. And quick.

"Within the top three or four teams in hurling and in football, given the quality that they have, winning comes down to the tiniest factors. You have to have everything right and everybody giving it their all.

"If you put Cork teams out under this system where a manager can't pick his own people to work with, you won't get the best managers or the best support teams. No decent manager will give his life over to working with people not of his choosing, knowing that he can't succeed. "

He is convinced the current impasse is a way of settling old scores from 2002.

"I'm certain about that. When the dust settled on 2002 the board had conceded a lot of stuff, a lot of the powers they enjoyed. They couldn't interfere with team affairs. Donal O'Grady and John Allen came in and took over the running of the team.

"Previous managers never got the same luxury, they had the county board on their shoulder all the time. People were lying in the long grass waiting, though."

He points out that nobody got sacked back in 2002. Things changed, but the people remained the same. The players wanted fair play and a structure that would let them compete on a level playing field.

"Before 2002 we were a joke. Galway hammered us that year. The next summer we contested an All-Ireland final. Why change now?"

When he reflects, though, he reckons it isn't all as sudden as it seems. It's not Change Now. It has been a process of attrition, a slow clawing back.

Last summer there was the Club Energiser business which came to a head. The county board were in bed with Coca-Cola, who wanted visibility for Powerade and RiverRock, their brands of energy drink and water. The players felt a commitment elsewhere.

"This isn't about the GPA, but we do like to support the GPA, we feel strongly about the voice it gives to players, we feel that under the GPA players - if not us, other players - benefit. Every Club Energiser bottle the GPA gets a cut. We were bringing Club Energiser bottles onto the pitch and drinking for a long time. There was that, and the high-handed manner it was done in."

Other troubles. They had problems suddenly with gyms, with training venues (he won't say a bad word about Fermoy, where the team train through the winter), but when the guys who are doing rehab work on injuries are done all the hot water is gone from the showers. What's left is cold water on a January or February night after a day's work and a hard session. It wears him down, and he has never known why the county board won't spend a little money to fix the problem.

Small clawbacks. Thirty meals booked in the Anner Hotel in Thurles after a championship qualifier this year. Taking players, managers, selectors, physios, doctor, runners, stats and video people, etc, into account, the team party is 45.

Niggles. The team used to have a person whose job was to look after conditions and arrangements when they travelled, making sure about hotels and food and just getting things right.

"The county board looked after that this year and it was a shambles. We're off training by ourselves, putting work in, eating properly and then turning up for matches, and, instead of pasta, fruit and boiled chicken, being thrown a heap of sandwiches.

"You see things being clawed back all the time. When we talk about the importance of preparation, you see they don't take us seriously. You're outside and these things seem small, but you can see them. But all of these things were building up. No one thing is what it's all about. It's not about chicken or sandwiches; it's about being pushed back to the way things were before 2002."

So come last autumn, with the footballers having lost heavily in the All-Ireland final and the hurlers no longer the darling buds of May, the hammer came down. You can see a certain genius in the thinking of the man who hatched the amendment. The proposal of a retrograde management system not only gave Billy Morgan a farewell kick in thanks for his service but also served as a shot across the bows of the uppity hurlers.

The gamble was that the footballers, chastened by their defeat, would accept a county board-imposed selection committee and that the hurlers, afraid to down tools again for a cause not directly theirs, would hold their peace and be forced to accept the system themselves next time around.

Nobody can stand up and say the management system being proposed is anything other than a backward step. It is a length of metal pipe being brandished to beat players over the heads.

The argument instead centres on a vote taken among people who were sick to death of hearing about players and their needs and their demands to have domestic fixtures moved. Does a vote among those people, a vote in favour of applying the length of metal pipe to the cranium of the players' collective, render all other considerations redundant? Must the players simply offer their heads (and the blood, sweat and tears of a season) because some suits in a room voted for it to be so? Seán Óg reckons not.

"People say to us players that we are better off concentrating on winning All-Irelands. That's what we are doing though. That's what this is about. The jersey. Respecting the jersey. We don't want anything more or extra. We just want the system we agreed, the system we have been playing under.

"We don't want to pick the selectors or the managers. We just want managers to be able to do their best for themselves and for us and for the people of Cork."

He says the county board will only pick people who they think will toe the line.

"In turn, that cuts off a list of good, decent guys who would bring something more to the teams. You have to have the best possible management and support team in place or there will be no All-Irelands.

"We are all working away on our own now, eating right and training hard to be ready for the games. We want to play, but if we talk about preparing for All-Irelands we want to play under a system that doesn't handicap us. Would this happen in any other serious county? Do Kerry carry on like this in football? Do Kilkenny do it?

"I play to enjoy this game, but there is an onus on wearing the Cork jersey, which every one of us loves and adores and wears with pride. It's about All-Irelands and pride.

"There is an onus to give your best, and there is an onus on the county board to provide the best so you give the players the chance to be the best. I'd hate to see players coming after me being willing to die for the jersey but being doomed to fail every year because the best managers and selectors won't go near the county team. That disrespects the Cork jersey.

"When we go training in Fermoy, we have two things in mind: the Munster championship and Croke Park. If anyone thinks there is anything more important to us than the red jersey, they are wrong. It galls us. It hurts us. This jersey is massive to us. I'm 13 years playing for Cork. I have loved every moment in the jerseys. It galls me that we are in the situation that such a proud county as Cork would take its players and give them a second-rate set-up. Would this happen in any other county?"

In the interim, his sympathies are with his friend Donal Óg Cusack. Having stepped above the parapet in 2002 and become involved with the GPA, there is a perception that Donal Óg is pulling the strings of the county footballers rather than responding to an appeal for help. Seán Óg feels now that Donal Óg is labelled. Anything that is wrong between the players and the county board gets hung around Donal Óg's neck. He has, since 2002, been the Spartacus of hurling.

"Everyone blames Donal Óg! It's as if the rest of us are too stupid to notice what happens us. It isn't true in this case, and if a few people in Páirc Uí Chaoimh think that if Donal Óg is beaten or gotten rid of then everything would be grand, they'll find that if Donal Óg goes there are another 59 players who feel just as strongly."

If the Cork public want to polarise the debate, Seán Óg is clear as to where they should be starting.

"Did you watch Star Wars?" he asks. "This episode is The Empire Strikes Back! If there is a resolution now, something else will flare up next year or the year after until Frank (Murphy, secretary of the county board) wishes to go. I'm not telling Frank to step aside, but I'm saying it would help.

"I'm afraid if we get some resolution here there will be something else next year, and will players be strong enough to go again and stand? Just because Frank did good things in the past doesn't mean we lose the right to argue on other issues or question his future. What is going on here is wrong."

Frank is a question for the longer term. In the interim, the players are willing to shelve the issue till the autumn on two conditions: that the county executive back a recommendation to return to the old selection system, and that the footballers be given a figure to work with whom they can trust.

No one knows quite what it was that inspired Teddy Holland to step into the post when the players were asking that no manager or selectors be appointed before a resolution on the broader issue was reached, but it seems clear Holland's departure is necessary for any progress to be made.

"They should never have named a football manager. That way it wouldn't become personal. That was important, but they went ahead and named a manager and selectors.

"Nobody disputes Teddy Holland's credentials as a football man. Because of the system, though, and the timing, he is the wrong man. I know six great Cork greats turned it down, just stayed away because the players had asked them to.

"To be honest, Teddy Holland will have to go . . . The county board didn't respect the players' wishes. A deal was brokered with Teddy, I imagine, on the basis that something would be sorted. Naming Teddy broke all trust. There had been no response to the players at all, no dialogue. So before anything happens, the management have to go.

"The proposed system will need to be revisited after the season. I think it is too late now to get into votes and detail. Come back to it when the games are over, have a proper debate when the heat is gone out of it. We would be looking for the promise of county board support at that stage."

So he waits. Sometimes he looks around him and despairs. The best promotion of the GAA in any county is having a senior team doing well. He sees little or no promotion of GAA in Cork compared to Dublin. He sees hurling schools dying on their feet and nothing being done. And he looks at the two county senior teams and sees them being hobbled.

"We'll promote. We are only too willing to go around. For 10 or 12 years I have been - I would say - to every school or club in Cork. Gladly. I'll drive to the farthest corner of west Cork if I have time to get down there. All that goes on top of being a player, and being a player is a job every day of the week. But if you don't have your flagship teams and you are doing nothing else, where is the future of the GAA in Cork?"

He wonders if "the county board would prefer for us not to compete in All-Ireland finals or semi-finals so long as they had total say? Under this system, the players and the people who follow Cork aren't getting the best people. That's not what the Cork jersey stands for. But the county board are getting their old powers back. There is no point in looking back after five years of failure and saying, ah, the players were right back in 2008."

Tick tick tick. Seán Óg waits. He doesn't see Cork footballers playing Meath next weekend or the hurlers stepping out the weekend after that. He sees a public out of sympathy with their players and a county board who think they have all the chips on the table and the strongest hand in front of them. He wants a solution.

"Don't use us," he says. "Don't sit down just to be seen to be talking to us, don't think that the longer it goes on or the worse we look you have a better chance of persuading the people of Cork that we don't want to tog out. We give our best for the jersey. Always. We want the best put into it and the best to be backing it up."

He sips his water, shakes his head. Second time around doing something he never expected to have to do once. It's the one thing in his hurling career that hasn't gotten easier with practice.