On the Friday night of the 2002 All Stars banquet, seven highprofile players called a press conference in Cork's Imperial Hotel to announce the withdrawal of services by the entire Cork hurling panel. They cited difficulties with the county board which went back years. After meetings with the board in the previous two weeks, little progress had been made and the decision was taken to engage in strike action. Cork hurling, which at the time had no manager, suddenly had no squad either.

The GAA community went into shock, with rumblings that the entire affair had been organised by the nascent Gaelic Players Association, testing the waters for the inevitable militant push for professionalism. Cork's hurlers insisted this was not the case, they had simply been driven to the extremes by the refusal of a county board to change its penny-pinching ways.

But stories of younger players being warned off joining the players' body by county officials inevitably hauled the GPA into the debate, sparking a nationwide debate on player welfare and the practicalities of amateurism.

The following Tuesday, the Cork county board gathered for what was described in these pages as "one of the most historic county board meetings in the history of the GAA". The central figure, both in the picture above and in the issue in general, was secretary Frank Murphy.

Murphy was the most respected and feared administrator in the GAA, renowned for repeatedly using the GAA rulebook to Cork's advantage. Liam Griffin in these pages noted the supreme irony that the strike should happen where it did: "Cork are the most successful county in the GAA.

They're the biggest, the richest, the best administered. In Frank Murphy they possess arguably the most capable sporting administrator in the land. If any county was equipped to crush a players' revolt, you'd have imagined it was Cork."

At the meeting pictured above, Cork's selectors resigned with Murphy stepping aside from his own position as selector. Such demands were never publicly aired by the players, but they were understood to be necessary for progress to be made. A thawing of relations ensued, eventually leading to further discussions between the parties and a resolution to the crisis.

Kieran Shannon wrote that, "Murphy's performance would have impressed any observer.

'Class' was once defined as making it look as if you were leading a parade when you were really being chased out of town.

Murphy and the rest of the county board gave a master demonstration in class.'

As Murphy rationally explained during the course of the meeting, no concessions were being made to 'the strike', issues were merely advanced by the board of their own volition. The way was now clear for peace to break out.

However, as successful as the strike was in bringing player welfare further up every county board's agenda, there was a warning from a key player just a couple of weeks ago in this paper that the issue hasn't gone away just yet. In an extract from his autobiography, Brian Corcoran told of being approached by a county board official and then "counting out coppers to pay for our sandwiches and a fizzy drink" after this year's All Ireland final.

"The strike may be over, lads, " he wrote, "but the struggle is not."