Many years ago, my friend and I made unsteady progress back to the place where we were staying. Having let ourselves in, we fumbled around in the dark and found the wrong door – but what a door! It led into a small residents’ bar, where chrome taps and fittings gleamed in the moonlight.

In this ghostly ambience we filled glasses of beer and marvelled at the way life had finally rewarded us. It was our firm attention to settle our unorthodox tariff when leaving.

Having come to throbbing consciousness the following morning and gradually reconstituted, we went to check out. Then came dawning realisation: what to say, how do I put this? It no longer appeared as ‘reasonable’ as it had done in the middle of the night simply to explain we had rambled in and helped ourselves to the taps.

This isn’t an unusual conundrum. Many things that make perfect sense at the time can be hard to rationalise later.

So it is with current controversies about the extreme training regimes and lifestyle protocols of inter-county panels. Gaelic games training is one of the few contexts in which you might be unexceptionally asked to get up at three in the morning in order to pull steamrollers up mountains.

Actual matches

Much of the purpose of this sort of extreme demand is essentially mind subjugation. You accustom yourself to hardship and exhaustion so that the stress of actual matches becomes easier to bear.

In the same way in the 1950s Billy Rackard, with his background in the drapery business, commissioned special lightweight boots for the Wexford hurlers on match days to act as a relief after training in conventional, heavier boots.

Physical sessions that would make US marines quail are one thing but the constant encroachment on the waking lives of what are meant to be recreational sportsmen is another.

Clare hurlers have been in the spotlight recently but there have also been revelations about Donegal and other unidentified teams and the regimes players are expected to accept.

There is some unhappiness in Clare management at the fall-out from departed hurling panellist Davy O’Halloran’s protests in this newspaper that he felt humiliated by punishment prescribed for breaches of the team’s code of conduct, a document which, it is argued, has been driven by players and not management.

It is irrelevant, however, if someone feels they are being bullied whether the source of that aggravation is their peer group or management but again a lot comes down to perception. No matter how unreasonable the code of conduct there will be no issues unless someone dissents and the matter becomes public.

Nor is overwrought intensity exclusively a modern problem. Forty years ago Kevin Heffernan was demanding of his Dublin dressing-room which one of them was going to be the Judas on that particular day or ignoring a player after a poor match while greeting his two companions before telling him not to bother coming to training again.

Ultimately the games are amateur. However cracked some of the dispensations may strike the average person county panels are comprised of consenting adults. O’Halloran may have withdrawn his consent in Clare but it was a rare act of free-spiritedness in the overall inter-county context.

The vast majority of players accept these restrictions on their social lives and other elements of control because they believe their teams will benefit and improve, if not win trophies, as Clare did.

Continued involvement with county panels shouldn’t however mean that players can be traumatised psychologically any more than they can be physically compromised by overtraining.

How do you prevent or police these situations? The GPA is the body charged with player welfare but faced with a conflict of opinion between all of its members inside the Clare panel and the one or two outside they decided to make no official judgement and also chose not to address the matter publicly.

Club fixtures

The GAA itself has been fighting a losing battle with the influence of county managers for a long time at this stage. The desire to control county panels has led to the disruption of club fixtures, tugs-of-war over young players in the early part of the season and the perennial issue of burn-out.

On the more positive note the GAA are currently piloting the appointment of Player Welfare Mentors in each county to mentor those aged between 15 and 22 and involved in county panels. Intended to address problems of the fixtures overload caused by multi-eligibility, this could be extended to monitor how young – and by definition more vulnerable – players are treated within senior inter-county set-ups.

Managing All-Ireland-winning teams is not always a reasonable business and it’s up to the GAA and its county boards to provide balance rather than just putting on hats and scarves and putting off club fixtures.

smoran@irishtimes.com