LOCKER ROOM:The GPA's threat to withdraw co-operation from the drug-testing system for players is wrongheaded and counter-productive.

SINCE SPORT became the official opiate of the masses, we often wake with the shakes and cravings and find it hard to focus on what is objectively right and proper in the world.

Amidst all the noise and the chatter, it behoves us to give due reverence to the games. At the GAA's big strategic plan launch during the week there was some of that compelling video footage that demonstrates that hurling was enjoyed and administered so long ago that the Cork County Board are merely following in a long tradition of dinosaurs to get involved.

The point being made by the GAA's "mists of time" footage was that the games are sacred, a gift passed on and polished from generation to generation, as vital and necessary a piece of culture as language or poetry. The game is the thing. We work for the game and hope to leave it in a vibrant state for the next generation.

In that respect, is there not something very poignant and very wrong about the sight of the hurlers of Cork out early on a frosted field on Saturday morning, out there with no company except themselves, out there with the shivery morning grass crunching under their studs, out there training themselves while their county board studiously ignores them?

Meanwhile, men who should have braver hearts keep their heads down and the rest of us neigh and whinny down the airwaves to sports radio shows and down the keyboard to raucous chat rooms.

In his introduction to the GAA's commendable Strategic Vision and Action Plan document the other day, Nickey Brennan stated: "Our players of all ages and abilities are our main priority. Right through the planning process we focused on the best interests of players and members. The plan will get more players involved and provide an environment that ensures players stay with our games for life."

Ho hum. Where do the Cork County Board fit into this strategic vision?

Nickey is right. Players are the priority. They have to be. Every atom of the GAA's existence is about games and the players who play them. The GAA holds the games in trust for the community, and the GAA's reason for being is to facilitate players who want to play the games. We all serve the games. All of us who don't play work in the service of those who do. The understanding is that, in future, today's players will assume that burden of service.

And the writ of that contract operates across the spectrum in a voluntary organisation. Managers, coaches and physios, county board secretaries, games promotions officers, everyone works in service to getting the club or county teams out onto the pitch.

Gerald McCarthy worked for the Cork hurlers, not the other way around. The clubs of Cork put all that love and attention into the men who trained alone in Mallow on Saturday morning as a service to the game, to their clubs and their county. And yet now that the boys are being stamped on and snuffed out all heads are studiously staring at the floor.

It's like this. The game rules. The players are next. Anybody who takes out a team does so in the spirit of service and humility to those things. If the team says (in Cork's case, after two years and submitting to the intervention of a facilitator to try to make it work out) that, no, sorry, this isn't working out the way it should, the county board, whose existence is also one of service, should ensure a dignified and respectful parting of the ways. To humiliate a team who won All-Irelands for Cork so recently and to make outcasts of them is an abomination which perverts every aspiration which the GAA has for its players.

Cork is but one symbol of the gross, continuing distortion of this relationship. The Gaelic Players Association seems to have lost sight of the pre-eminence of the game, too. The issue of grants for players has produced another unfortunate distortion of the way things should be. The GPA's threat to withdraw co-operation from the drug-testing system for players is wrongheaded and counter-productive.

This all comes in the wake of Aidan O'Mahony having the misfortune to test positive for salbutamol because, it would seem, he uses an inhaler. There is, rightly, a lot of sympathy out there for O'Mahony, but also a general understanding of the issues surrounding asthma sufferers and sport. We are mature and informed enough to know that if Aidan had inadvertently overused his inhaler it was an innocent mistake, not the crime of the century. It involved a stimulant which might have given him a little pep but which would have hampered his hand-to-eye co-ordination. The small embarrassment caused the player is the price of vigilance.

There is no point, however, in the GPA, on the one hand, citing players as the cash cows and rainmakers of the association and, on the other, announcing that because players are naught but poor huddled amateurs they should be exempt from drug testing.

Drug testing exists in the service of the games. The GAA takes money from customers, members, media and sponsors in exchange for providing the top-line product that is intercounty GAA. All those who pay the money have the right to know that what they are paying to see is no phony or counterfeit.

And the drug testing exists to protect players and to serve the game. Suppose Aidan hadn't been taking salbutamol, but had actually been cheating by using a drug from the top drawer of the international cheating world. He would be robbing every aspiring Kerry player of a place on the team, he would be betraying his colleagues and his opponents and selling out the game we all serve by tainting it with a culture from which we would never recover.

When we moan about drug testing being an imposition from professional sport on amateurs, we get it all wrong. Drugs are the imposition from professional sport that we must fear. Drug testing protects every player and protects the games.

At all times as we move forward - strategically or otherwise - we must do so by monitoring the effect of our actions on the game we love. Down south, the Munster rugby marketeers must be chuckling at the decision of the Cork County Board to throw it all away.

But when we talk about drug testing being an inconvenience which we can make a weapon of in the fight for money, we betray the game just as comprehensively.