August dominated by GAA’s managerial merry-go-round
Almost two years of Covid has meant that the word ‘normal’ is no longer as easily defined as it was pre-March 2020, but there is definitely an abnormal feeling to an August devoid of inter-county activity.
As all sports editors will testify, a certain amount of pages will always need to be filled whether there is a famine or feast of activity. There are only so many ‘top 20 of this’ or ‘top 50 of that’ lists which one can compile. It is certainly a finite exercise in terms of readability. Yours truly was often glad to compile such lists when not a lot else was happening in ‘real’ sport, but some of the stuff filling pages in recent weeks in national newspapers is stretching readers’ tolerance. Mine included!
Of course, the GAA’s managerial merry-go-round is a great source of column inches when games are few and far between. Pedantic Pat will be only too glad to correct me, but my mature recollection (I was glad of the reminder of that infamous phrase in the recent 1990 Reelin’ in the Years programme!) is that the whole concept of a team ‘manager’ in Gaelic games only began when Kevin Heffernan brought Dublin from nowhere – and I mean nowhere – to All-Ireland glory 48 years ago. Bookies’ odds on GAA issues were pretty much non-existent then (PP may wish to correct me again, be that Pedantic Pat or Paddy Power!), but you could have named your price on Heffo’s Dubs in January 1974.
Enter Mick O’Dwyer with a younger and equally talented team from the Kingdom, and the legendary Waterville man ‘became’ a manager also, after decades of the word ‘trainer’ being used for the man patrolling the line (in Micko’s case complete with a rolled-up match programme). Most team talks were as sophisticated as Jon Kenny’s character in D’Unbelievables, ranting and raving while smashing cups around a dressing room. Fancy tracksuits and tops were a long away off in the 1970s, but now every junior ‘B’ club has a top with the word ‘bainisteoir’ sewn on. As for the entourage of ‘specialists’/‘hangers-on’/‘mentors’/‘tormentors’ needed at the top level – well don’t start me!
What those two truly great men were paid – either under or over Peter Quinn’s infamous invisible counter – we will never know, but every dog on the street knows that the gravy train is now virtually out of control when it comes to remunerating managers at inter-county level (and the club scene is far from squeaky clean either). Getting round rules is a way of life in GAA matters and financial deals hammered out with managers can always be concealed with and without the aid of ‘benefactors’.
Westmeath has been fortunate in that both Joe Fortune and Jack Cooney have had a successful 2022 and there has been no talk whatsoever of either being under pressure. This is unusual in a county which is (thankfully) operating at a decent level in both codes. The latter is homegrown and in the job for all the right reasons. In the natural order of things, Fortune will move on in time, and continued progress in the maroon and white bainisteoir bib will surely have him on the list of candidates for his native Wexford and his county of domicile, Dublin. And who knows where else?
However, for many counties, the search is still on for a ‘messiah’ who will bring success, some of those counties with unreasonable levels of expectation. The concept that it is a young man’s role no longer fully holds with sexagenarian Jack O’Connor having just done what he always does by regaining Sam for Kerry. Similarly, the much-travelled Liam Kearns is taking over Offaly, while Colm O’Rourke takes over the Royal reigns in his mid-60s. Both our neighbours are miles off the level they were during their heady years, and the new incumbents face tough tasks from demanding supporters.
In hurling, Davy Fitzgerald is back with Waterford and his second honeymoon there will be short, albeit he has inherited a team of the right age profile with a lot of potential. However, Limerick’s hunger shows no sign of abating. Davy is sure to bring a buzz to the Decies camp, and he will no doubt “love dem lads” the same as he did the Wexford lads. And the Clare lads. And the Waterford lads first time round!
Yours truly learned Rosemary Stewart’s simple definition of management back in number-crunching days: “Management is knowing what to do and getting other people to do it.” The English lady, who wrote three respected tomes on management, divided a manager’s role into three sections: Demands (what the manager must do), Constraints (limits to what the manager can do), and Choices (freedoms the manager can exercise). She died in 2015, aged 90, without ever having been nominated for an inter-county job in her life. If only the practice was as simple as the theory!
As ever, my late and much-lamented pal, Ned Flynn, summed up the demands on a modern-day manager succinctly. When he was chairman of Castlepollard hurling club he asked an interviewee had he any questions before wrapping up proceedings. The manager-in-waiting asked: “Am I right in saying that if I win the Westmeath Examiner Cup, ye’ll say I’m a great fellow, and if I don’t, ye’ll say I am a gobs***e?” “Spot on”, Ned replied, before his inevitable closing comment, “and Happy Christmas.”
There are many ‘great fellows’ and ‘gobs***es’ getting fitted for trendy bainisteoir bibs this very day!