The key to playing the coaching game
To which I could only respond: “Pretentious? Moi? Mais non!”
Presumably there is some kind of segue you could drop in here to shoehorn a comparison between the work done by the recently deceased father of structuralism, among primitive Amazon tribes, with the bitter struggles in Clare and Limerick GAA circles.
That would be cheap, however. We’re far more upmarket than that.
The controversies surrounding the management regimes of Mike McNamara in Clare and Justin McCarthy in Limerick, however, could lead one to presume that inter-county management is quite simply an impossible job.
It’s certainly difficult. About the only inter-county hurling manager who seems to travel serenely through the seasons is Brian Cody – well, usually serenely, unless Marty Morrissey is asking about penalties – but that’s hardly surprising. The only groaning in Kilkenny is done by the trophy cabinet in Walsh Park, and that drowns out anything else that may be humming along as background noise. For other hurling counties, there’s a drawback to the fact that there’s a shallow pool of contenders. Though Kilkenny have been ahead of the pack for a couple of years, the rest of the peloton are of a reasonably equal standard, which means that catastrophic defeats – take Limerick’s at the hands of Tipperary in this year’s All-Ireland semi-final – or catastrophic seasons – Clare for all of 2009 – can be viewed as apocalyptic.
And players aren’t exempt from that mindset. Before we catch the first whispers of players-play-and-managers-manage wafting down the wind, consider the rather trickier reality: that fans demand excellence from their county players, and excellence requires intelligence, aggression, self-appraisal, toughness and a desire for self-improvement, among other qualities.
Accordingly, the traits which make a young man a going proposition in the heat of a summer Sunday in Thurles are equally likely to arm him well when the chips are down in a confrontation with his county board during the off-season.
With that in mind, it was an opportune time to meet up with Mickey Harte during the week. The Tyrone boss was promoting his book, Presence Is The Only Thing, and we asked him about the tensions that can arise between players and management, without getting into the detail of the Clare and Limerick cases.
“I think it’s to do with how you are with people over time,” said Harte.
“If you can see the pothole up ahead, you can avoid falling into it.
“Respecting each other’s position, if that’s embraced in the right way at the right time, then you can get over it. It’s only when things become almost insurmountable you’ll have bigger problems.
“When you empower players, it’s not to say you won’t have difficulties, but it’s important to have a captain who liaises well with players and management to create a two-way system, so that it’s not all management’s fault, or all the players’ fault.
“You’ve all got to share the blame when it all goes badly, just as you’ve got to share the credit when it goes well for you.
“It’s all about creating an environment based on that sharing. You have to listen to what the players say, and if you do that on an ongoing basis then a confrontation is less likely. Being able to recognise things that are likely to cause some angst – and addressing them then – means they won’t cause as much of a problem further down the line.”
It sounds obvious, because it is obvious. But how many managers can apply those lessons?
* Anyone interested in GAA and movies is in for a treat at the Cork Film Festival on Sunday: check out the Cork GAA screenings in the Cork Opera House, ‘Three Kisses’, ‘Christy Ring’ and ‘Clash of the Ash’. Throw-in at 2pm.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ieTwitter: MikeMoynihanEx
