Gaelic Games;Maybe it's the 90th anniversary this month of the Russian Revolution that has inflamed the people, but whatever the reason the GAA has been threatened by a second player strike in the space of four days, writes Seán Moran

The Cork soviet, having been successful five years ago, is at the stockade again. Coincidentally, at Friday's media conference to announce details of the GPA vote to withdraw from intercounty competition in the New Year, there were attempts to link the events of late 2002 to the national action threatened now.

Apart from the unflinching support offered to both campaigns by the Cork hurlers, there's not a lot in common between what happened back then in the face of grievances that the public at large and, more importantly, the Cork GAA community, accepted were reasonable and well-founded.

The current impasse over player grants and their distribution doesn't attract such a high level of support in the country at large. This will not matter should the negotiations, as expected, work out and the strike be averted. But the latest action - the threat of withdrawal should the Cork County Board not reverse its decision not to allow county managers choose their own selectors - is not guaranteed the support that the players got five years ago.

There is already unease at the notion that players should be trying to override a decision taken by a majority of the clubs at county board. In other words, it's not their business what way the county wants to organise intercounty teams, even senior ones.

Let the players work through their clubs to convince them, rather than threaten to walk away petulantly just because they don't like certain decisions.

But, as usual, there are many layers to what has become a complex situation. The first point to be made is that the intensity of intercounty preparation is at unprecedented levels. This has almost become a mantra that is intoned every time an elite players' issue arises. Nonetheless, it's true.

Player power is a familiar phenomenon at this stage and not just in Cork. It mightn't always express itself in formal campaigns, but no county can survive or thrive if the players aren't happy with management.

County boards may be reluctant to bow to pressure, but eventually reality dictates that dressingrooms have to be content.

The fact football and hurling are amateur games means no one's forced to play - a point that has been occasionally advanced as a justification for dismissing the GPA and its demands for improved treatment of players - and therefore players are perfectly free to withdraw co-operation if they don't care for any team management.

Players have a vested interest in team management being as good as it can be, and the idea of county boards appointing selectors isn't anyone's idea of best practice.

There's additional friction in the fact that it was the players' strike of five years ago that established - among the many improvements in the way players were treated - the principle of managers being able to choose their selectors. It mightn't have been the highest-profile demand, but it was one of a package of measures that was granted.

Certainly among the hurlers the decision to reverse that policy is keenly felt as the latest attempt to roll back the concessions won in 2002. Ironically, it doesn't concern the hurlers for another year, as Gerald McCarthy has another year to run as manager.

But it will have been firmly in their minds that they'll be next.

The near unanimity of delegates in December 2002 is unlikely to be repeated next Tuesday evening when the county board next meets. The clubs voted 84-11 to impose selectors on whomever would be appointed football manager.

If the intention was to get rid of Billy Morgan it succeeded and he walked away last week, withdrawing his name from consideration for the next managerial appointment.

But football feelings were running high. Not alone had the county got trimmed in the All-Ireland final, but there was discontent with how the team had been managed despite Morgan having been allowed to choose his selectors.

So annoyed had the executive become over the constant agitation to have fixtures called off, over and above the stipulation in the by-laws that forbids club matches being played within nine days of championship intercounty fixtures, that a code of conduct has been introduced to bind team management to comply with the by-law and not to interfere with club schedules any further.

There may have been a rethink on the selectors issue once the dust settled on Morgan's departure, but the players' intervention may make that more difficult.

Factor in that it would require a two-thirds majority to overturn a previous decision and that means the players are going to have to convince over 50 delegates to change their mind.

It's not a good time either for the intercounty scene to be trying to dictate to the clubs. In Cork, as in many other counties, feelings are running high about the intrusion of the intercounty game into club territory. As one delegate put it: "If someone had proposed that Cork pull out of the National Leagues to concentrate on club games you would have almost got a majority."

But the clubs have to ask themselves whether this is a sufficiently important point of principle - as in, "who runs the GAA in Cork?" - to justify insisting on restrictions that no serious manager would accept.

In the meantime, unless the problem is resolved, Cork will have to put on the long finger the appointment of a football manager. Whatever the chances of finding someone whose choice of selectors could be palmed through as the county executive's choice and rubber stamped by the wider committee, no one's going to go near the job at present while the threat of mayhem hovers over the landscape.

The October Revolution prompted the pious old aspiration about the conversion of Russia. Compared to sorting out this, that looks easy.