Colin Sheridan: Another terrible beauty is born in the GAA world

Last week, rumours bounced around that Jimmy McGuinness was joining, or had joined, the Waterford hurlers as something. Nobody was or was quite sure as what

Derry City U19 coach Jim McGuinness, who previously managed the Donegal footballers, had been tipped for a role with the Waterford hurlers. Doing whar exactly, Colin Sheridan wonders?

When Jon Snow, the peerless Channel 4 presenter exited his last ever broadcast, he chose not to waste his last on-air words by listing is own achievements or recounting his greatest days, but instead to pay tribute to those behind the curtain who were charged with putting him there in front of us, night after night. The faceless technicians, researchers, cameramen and producers.

A clearly emotional Snow told those watching: “In the end...I am nothing without the skilled and journalistic teams that, night after night, ensure that Channel 4 News comes to you. The joy of working here is those teams and their skills.”

There was nothing new or original in Snow tipping his cap to the support team that allowed him to do his job so brilliantly over many decades (how many “I’d like to thank my agent” speeches have we endured and quickly forgotten), but there was meaning in what he said.

Perhaps because Snow had that unteachable ability to make you trust him, whatever he was actually talking about, but somehow, even as he left, you knew he meant it.

He was only there, in front of us, because of them. He knew it, and he wanted us to know it too.

Snow represents a dying breed in broadcasting. Essentially a one club man, he fronted Channel 4’s flagship news programme for almost 32 years. That’s a lot of news, and a lot of co-presenters and a lot of backroom teams. He was the star, though. In a sporting context, it was an era that overlapped the time of Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, Sean Boylan in Meath and later Mickey Harte at Tyrone.

“We will never see their likes again,” we say as, one by one, as they finally relinquish the reins on projects that they cultivated like Bull McCabe’s field - “God made the world, and seaweed made that field boy!”

The times they are a changing, however. Just as Snow departs our screens as a nightly North Star, it’s almost just as likely we will see him reappear on the backroom team of an inter-county football team as a “messaging consultant”. Mayo and James Horan could do with an old, trusted hand capable of controlling the narrative following a turbulent All-Ireland fallout. Snow could be the man. Steady. Trustworthy. Would look good in a tracksuit in the dugout during a league match in Navan.

That’s the way it’s going, see. Ask me who the new manager of the Cork camogie team is and I’d struggle (sorry Matthew Twomey!), but I now know that Davy Fitzgearld is “on the coaching ticket”, a strange development for an alpha male far more used to being the one true voice. This GAA offseason has been dominated by one trend — that of the coaching ticket enhancement rumour/announcement. In September, Tomás Ó Sé joined John Maughan in Offaly as a selector. It was an appointment that raised eyebrows, especially because Maughan is a man with 30 years of being numero uno on the sideline. Ó Sé, too, had been tipped for a managerial position in any number of vacant positions, including his native Kerry. That was the level of his stock. A selectorial role for an admittedly coming Division 3 team somehow doesn’t marry with the stature of his name and reputation.

Not long after, double All-Ireland winning hurling manager Liam Sheedy joined ‘Banty’ McEnaney’s Monaghan coaching ticket as “performance coach”. This enhanced an already formidable support staff that already boasted everybody’s favourite defensive coordinator Donie Buckley.

Later that month, as Peter Keane departed Kerry, likely for not having a star-studded enough backroom team, a veritable super-group was put together fronted by Listowel’s Stephen Stack, featuring the aforementioned Buckley as well as All-Ireland winning captains as Seamus Moynihan, Dara Ó Cinnéide and Mickey ‘Ned’ O’Sullivan. Kerry being Kerry, this ticket was at least 100% homegrown. It read like the lineup for The Band’s fateful farewell concert.

In the end, the ticket to end all tickets lost out to Jack O’Connor, who himself had to show some skin to win the favour of the Kerry board. That skin came in the guise of former Down boss and Tyrone native Paddy Tally.

Last week, rumours bounced around like omicron that Jimmy McGuinness was joining, or had joined, or had already joined and left the Waterford hurlers as something.

Nobody is or was quite sure what the specific role of McGuinness might be; culture coach? Spiritual doula? Chef? DJ?

What is certain is that in the case of Sheedy, Davy Fitz and McGuinness (wherever he eventually lands), each one is taking a role a little beneath their station, the way a retiring premier may take a role as a consultant advising developing nations on the health of their burgeoning economies. Crucially, these cameos will allow each one to do other things. You don’t take these jobs to eventually get a bigger one. You take them because you already had the bigger one.

And so the culture of management evolves another turn. Going back to the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the role of the manager was a lot more to do with ensuring the team had jerseys and lifts to matches. The senior players ran the show.

It was not until the emergence of Kevin Heffernan and Mick O’Dwyer that managers became as important to teams as talismanic players.

The next revolution only came in the 1990s, where the phenomenon of the “outside manager” became popular. Nobody was more successful at it than John O’Mahony, whose two All-Ireland wins with Galway stand alone as a beacon of success in an otherwise hit-and-miss world. Micko inspired Kildare, Páidí briefly awakened Westmeath. The opposite could be argued for the pair’s respective twists in Wicklow and Clare.

None of that matters now. It doesn’t matter who you are as a manager, the first question you will be asked in 2022 if you aim to keep your job or win a new one will be, “who do you have with you?”

Personally, I’d like to see Drake, the Toronto rapper, join the Dublin footballers as an image consultant. The guy has a rep for jumping on bandwagons and spectacularly derailing them, so his inclusion would likely prove the fatal blow for an empire that may or may not be crumbling. As for the last of the Jon Snows? Oh, to be a fly on a Nowlan Park wall when the Kilkenny county board ask Brian Cody would he consider taking Davy Fitz on as a sleep consultant?

All has changed, changed utterly, and another terrible beauty is born.