Locker Room:Aw. Let me get back to sleep. This is January isn't it? The most uncomplicated and serene of sporting months? Time was when January was a siesta for us pencil jockeys. We'd yawn and stretch and scratch ourselves and then turn back over knowing the sports editor would wake us when February came and the buds of a fresh season started shooting up.

This is January. Will ye all stop. Cease and desist. Step away from the vehicle. It's January.

Why is the blood pressure up coming out of Parnell Park on a Wednesday night? Why are we sweating over what might happen to Kieren Fallon? Why are our bowels made watery by the whole 100-year search for an Ireland manager. And, as they say in certain parts of this city, wither Eddie O'Sullivan?

And why are we are convulsed with worry about the footballers and hurlers of Cork?

There is a fashion in chat rooms and saloon bars not immediately connected with the Southern capital to throw the arms in the air and pronounce the people of Cork and all their deeds as one sorrowful mystery too many. Life is short after all.

Life teaches us though that what the querulous Corkonian gets worked up over today the rest of us will have to face tomorrow anyway. Sonia versus BLÉ. Roy versus the FAI. Eddie O'Sullivan versus the rest of us. Cork is always interesting and always worth watching.

Two strikes among amateur players in six years of Cork GAA? We can deduce either that the players are uppity and don't want to play or that relations between jerseys and suits in Cork are abysmal or non-existent.

Given the work players put in, the heroics, especially of the hurlers, over the last few years, but also of the footballers last summer in particular, it seems unfair to roll the eyes and dismiss the players' case out of hand.

First things first. Both sides in Cork went from zero to 60 miles an hour in no time at all at the start of the current squabble. A sign surely of a failed relationship with lots of issues festering. At this stage there is little point in trawling through the entrails and decoding what was said by whom back before Christmas.

In terms of a resolution, as things stand now with the Mulvey initiative apparently dead in the water, it is hard to locate a rational person who can either stand over the proposed system whereby the county board will choose a manager's backroom team or understand Teddy Holland's reasoning in sticking defiantly in the bainisteoir's bib he has been given. The building is falling asunder around Teddy.

The initial reaction of many of us, jaded as we are with the issue of players' rights, was to note that the county board had voted not once but twice for its bizarre preference in management structures and that players should just accept the rule of democracy. Of course, when we examined our consciences democracy had very little to do with it all and we were being inconsistent anyway.

Almost by way of reflex whenever the subject of pay for play comes up this column froths to whoever will listen that the players don't have to play if it is such a chore. We are in favour of grants, and all for players being carefully and tenderly looked after and respected. Yet when we hear lads talk of how they pat their pockets to see how little money they have when they are in the parade in front of 80,000 people in Croke Park we feel nauseous.

It's no secret the GAA is an amateur and voluntary organisation. Nobody pretended it was otherwise when you got involved. If it doesn't feel like an honour to be there, if all you care about is getting a cut of the gate, well go away and do something else.

Cork reminds us all that there is a flip side to that argument. The Cork players are being asked, for whatever perverse reasons, to operate under a retrograde system which offers them little or no chance of success. They are being told to give their best by a system which almost by definition precludes their getting the best results in return.

And so they are doing what we suggest. They are withdrawing. They are doing something else.

When we tell the players in Cork that the county board voted for the proposed system and that therefore they have a duty to knuckle down and work under it, we forget that for all our fanciful talk about professionalism the players are amateurs. They have no contracts they are obliged to see out.

We are dealing with an issue of how adults want to spend their free time. Graham Canty and Donal Óg Cusack and others want to spend their free time competing for All-Ireland titles and getting the maximum out of themselves. They are being hobbled in that regard. So they are saying, thanks but no thanks.

Aha, say the plain and fed-up people of Ireland, well let them go away so and be quiet about it. Isn't it open now to Teddy Holland or Gerald McCarthy to scour the bushes and hedgerows of Cork for players who are willing to put on a red jersey in such circumstances?

That is no solution. The GAA in Cork would be riven for a generation by the fallout from such a development. What self-respecting player would wear the county jersey under those conditions. What would he tell the children, the grandchildren? What other county would field against such a team? What genuine GAA person would pay to see such an outfit.

When we tell players they can walk away if they don't like what is on offer we are being high-handed and shortsighted. We look back on the Cork strike of 2002 and it's hard to see that the Cork players got anything from that episode which county players shouldn't have been getting all along.

We look back on the proposals which got thrown about at the weekend and it is difficult to see how the players could have been more flexible. Last week the players offered to shelve the entire issue if Teddy Holland stepped down and a return to a more sensible structure was backed by the county board executive in the autumn. Teddy's not for turning though.

So if the players swallowed hard as they say and offered to consider the notion of accepting Teddy for a year if some groundbreaking changes were made to the rather dysfunctional structures which exist in Cork, what would they want in exchange?

A players' representative to be added to the seven-man county executive and a former player and the team captain to make up one-third of the selection committee to pick a new manager whenever the occasion arises was what would be considered as the price.

There are two versions of what happened next. One, that smelling salts were needed to revive the many county board members who fainted when this idea was put to them. Two, that the offer was so notional and abstract as to be impossible to consider.

In the fog an opportunity was lost. Cork could have been a template. A players' representative on the county executive seems like the sort of progressive and forward-thinking development which Croke Park should be urging every county to adopt as part of the process of reassuring players. Throw in a club players' representative too while the changes are being made.

Cork's situation is tricky and emotive. Nobody is going to win all the chips on the table. A solution would stave off more showdowns and would recognise that in these instances there are no winners and losers. Everyone in the GAA is in it together.

Any notion of an "us" and a "them" is a malign growth which will devour us all.