Some inter-county GAA managers here cope with dissension better than others. Early last summer the players in one county squad in Ulster, dissatisfied with the way their championship preparations were going, nominated their captain as the man to go and tell the manager the players had lost confidence in him and that they wanted him to resign.

When the captain returned with the message that the manager was staying where he was, thank you very much, a second member of the squad was selected as the second emissary. He was told in no uncertain terms that he was lucky to be on the panel, never mind fronting a revolt. The coup was over before it had even begun.

Liam Austin has been less fortunate. Just over a year ago he was more than happy to subject himself to a raft of media interviews marking his first move into inter-county management with Cavan. If only he had realised then what he now knows to his cost. Player power has been alive and well in Cavan for decades - long before it became one of the GAA buzz words in the late 1990s - and Austin was the 14th manager to fall on his sword since the 1960s. If they don't like you in Cavan, they soon let you know.

The full reasons behind Austin's departure may never be known but it was clear that by the time of the players' meeting 10 days ago his position had become untenable. Looking back, it seems clear that the seeds of his demise were sown even before he took control last January.

His predecessor, Martin McHugh, had been extremely popular. Capturing the holy grail of an Ulster title in 1997 had been comprehensive proof that he was a man who could deliver. That success also propelled him into a position of strength with players, board officials and supporters alike. What Martin wanted, Martin got. There was little chance of anyone being foolhardy enough to launch a heave against him.

Austin assumed the throne almost by default. Mattie Kerrigan had accepted the job, but he withdrew at the eleventh hour for personal reasons and the search for McHugh's successor had to be resumed. The recently-retired Stephen King was an obvious choice but he seemed to be biding his time, gathering some experience away from the inter-county hothouse and waiting to see how the new players grafted on to the panel after 1997 would bed down.

Austin, with a 1991 All-Ireland medal tucked in his back pocket, emerged as the "safe pair of hands" option. Earlier in the decade he had established a reputation as an articulate media commentator whose only obvious weakness was a tendency to shy away from the controversial. A respected coach at underage level (he is a school teacher by day), Austin made no secret of his desire to test himself in deeper waters.

After the heroics of 1997, the 1998 championship season was the dampest of squibs as Cavan limped out of the reckoning at the hands of Donegal. It was at this point, according to the players, that doubts began to surface about the quality of the training regime being overseen by Hugo Clerkin.

Clerkin's name has come up repeatedly during the soap opera of the past few weeks, with repeated insinuations that he simply wasn't up to the job of preparing a county side. Yet his playing record for Monaghan during the 1980s and his PE qualifications both suggest he should have been more than capable. Any visitors to the open training sessions last May could only have been impressed by the obvious level of preparation that had gone into them.

One factor - Clerkin's Monaghan origins - has been hardly mentioned in all the brouhaha. But could it be that the simple, old-fashioned mutual distrust that can build up between neighbouring counties explains a lot of the obvious bad-feeling between the counties? Clerkin's hardly-reconciliatory parting shots ("I would have grave difficulty even sharing a football field with them, let alone a dressing-room," is fairly representative of the general tenor) seem to suggest that the animosity was not all one way.

Austin's reaction to this fairly public shafting has been very interesting and may tell us a lot about the changing nature of the relationship between the GAA and the media.

Clearly well-versed in the nefarious media art of putting the desired spin on a set of facts from his television experience, Austin came out all guns blazing. At his press conference (when can you last remember a GAA manager holding one of those?) he spoke for around three-quarters of an hour outlining his position to the assembled television, radio and print hacks. This, don't forget, was in a GAA world where you can sometimes be hard pushed to get a manager to give the media 45 seconds, never mind 45 minutes.

His command performance was followed by similar media-friendly outings, first by the players and then by the Cavan County Board chairman, Brendan Keaney. At one stage it looked like Cavan would have to set up its own digital television channel - Breffni-vision, perhaps - such was the clamour for airtime.

Contrast this with the situation almost five years ago in Derry, another county that likes to indulge in this kind of ritual bloodletting from time to time, when an All-Ireland-winning team fell apart after the removal of Eamonn Coleman as manager.

Information was thin on the ground then and any news that did leak out was delivered with an air of secrecy that would have made Deep Throat look indiscreet. Mountains of Cavan dirty linen have been laundered in public but this is the inevitable corollary of the GAA's hunger for positive media coverage. Along with the good must come the bad.

Where Cavan stand now is anyone's guess. One year older and presumably wiser, Stephen King looks like the man most likely to. If nothing else he would have the respect of the players whose National League campaign resumes next month with a game against Longford. Their winter exploits, however, may be irrelevant compared to what lies ahead in the summer. Coincidentally, Derry will provide their championship opposition in June and Cavan would do well to remember that their opponents have not been the same force since they flexed their muscles in that stand-off with the county board.

This is a Cavan side which, 1997 aside, has done precious little to merit taking a superior stance against a manager who scaled heights as a player that they can only dream about. The photograph taken at their press conference, which has been doing the rounds, shows an uncomfortable group flanking their vice-captain, Gerry Sheridan. Some are staring into the distance, others are looking down at the floor and few meet the camera's gaze. The abiding impression is of a group of co-defendants in a dock - after all the upheaval, maybe they really are on trial during the weeks and months to come.