Shane McGrath on all the talking points from the GAA weekend

RARE have been the days over recent years when someone couldn’t survey the state of Cork football and cry ‘Crisis’. Summers have brought pain dressed up in different forms for years now.

It has been most gleefully applied by Kerry, deepening the discomfort of their old rivals.

The state of the finances surrounding Páirc Uí Chaoimh caused alarm before Christmas. The poor condition of the playing surface last Sunday invited fresh criticism.

A country watches on, minds boggled by the disjunction between resources and success.

Whereas the county’s hurlers can always rely upon a large support, even in the bad times, the footballers suffering is more solitary.

And they are suffering badly now.

Clare won at a canter in Cusack Park, and the only wonder was that the nine-point winning margin was not even wider.

The home team were helped by a significant wind in the first half, but they were also facing opponents who look dreadfully uninspired.

The 2010 All-Ireland win is usually the reference point to illustrate how much Cork have declined, but 2010 was also an important year in their relationship with the National League.

That was the year they won the first of three Division 1 titles in a row, as they established themselves as one of the leading teams in the country under Conor Counihan.

By the middle of the decade, they remained one of the country’s most powerful spring-time sides. In 2014 and 2015, they topped Division 1 after the regulation seven rounds of play.

In the latter year, though, they were hammered by Dublin in the final, losing by 11 points.

Relegation followed in 2016, but even that comes with an asterisk: they were one of four teams on six points but went down on scoring difference.

However, once they fell they couldn’t correct the spiral. They finished fourth in Division 2 in 2017, winning two of seven matches, and last year was even worse as they came sixth.

Cork look flat out of ideas. Ronan McCarthy was a respected player and when they were vaporised by Kerry in the Munster final last year, there was sympathy for the scale of the job he faces.

But frankly it looks a doomed one, in the short term at least.

The five-year plan revealed last month to regenerate the game in the county is backed by persuasive figures like Counihan, Graham Canty and Brian Cuthbert.

If it is to work, it will take years. The plan envisions Cork becoming ‘regular All-Ireland contenders in all grades of inter-county football, including club Championships, within three to five years’. That looks plain fanciful. The playing numbers may be huge, but the suspicion remains that football is an afterthought in the thinking of too many people in the county.

So they struggle on, suffering and mostly neglected by their own.

It seems a shocking waste, and it will be many years before they fight against the current and win their next unlikely football title – in the League or the Championship.