Páirc strife leaves Rebels red-faced

THE top brass watching on – and with a double-header for both the footballers and the hurlers they would pretty much all have been there – must have been shifting uncomfortably in their seats the longer the first half of the curtain-raiser went on. A slow-motion nightmare playing out before them.

We say curtain-raiser, it was more like a muck-raker given the condition of the pitch by the time the half-time break rolled around and that’s not a slight on the Cork footballers or the game of football by the way, it’s simply a reflection of the poverty of the playing surface in the shiny new bowl down by the Marina on Cork’s south side.

The men and women with garden forks were fighting a losing battle as they sought to get the pitch back in some sort of halfway acceptable condition for the second half and later for the second match. The pitch looked like a pack of gophers had been set upon it by the end.

Not fit for purpose. Dangerous even. A complete embarrassment given how much money had been spent on the place. As more than one wag commented online and elsewhere, €110m... for this?

What we saw in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last weekend went beyond teething troubles. Some people have cited the early difficulties experienced by Croke Park, but those were nothing like this.

While Croke Park, before it bedded down, could be slippy and far too hard, it never cut up like this. It never looked like a cabbage patch or a lawn after a dog had spent the afternoon trying to retrieve a particularly juicy bone.

Obviously there’s something very seriously wrong with the pitch in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The decision taken on Monday afternoon by Croke Park – on behalf of the Cork County Board – to suspend all play at Páirc Uí Chaoimh for the foreseeable future (in other words until the pitch is in much better condition) was the right one, but it doesn’t half leave egg on the face of the top brass in Cork.

It’s a real mess they’ve got on their hands at the moment. The fact Croke Park have stepped in to assist them is welcome no doubt, but a sign of just how deep a hole – pardon the pun under the circumstances – they’ve dug for themselves.