Where I stand on leading question
I don’t begrudge any manager his staff: whatever suits you may not suit me, and if you need a dozen or so bodies in the dressing room apart from the squad of 30 players, more luck to you.
But what interests me is the dynamic between selectors and manager in the GAA context.
It seems strange in the modern context, but plenty of counties have five-man selection committees in operation during high-octane championship games, a manager and four selectors puzzling out moves and substitutions in the most pressurised conditions. Occasionally, you get a glimpse up close of how that operates, when the details of how those decisions are reached leak out — Jack O’Connor’s memoir of life on the sideline with Kerry was interesting in that regard — but my basic question is: How are the roles divvied up among selectors?
Clearly, you may have a selector devoted to coaching, or physical preparation, but what of the others? How are responsibilities allocated to them? I raise this here because I stumbled across an interesting book review over the weekend, a view of Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows, by Richard Hytner.
The book is about leadership and deputies in all walks of life, particularly politics, and the reviewer, John Gray of The Guardian, paid tribute to a particularly strong part of the book in which Hytner identified particular types of advisers to leaders. That section of the review need only be read with ‘bainisteoir’ standing in for ‘leader’ and ‘selector’ replacing ‘adviser’.
“. . . advisers themselves fulfil a variety of functions,” wrote Gray.
“They can act as caddies — telling the leader about the course, supplying the right clubs and providing an atmosphere of calm confidence and focused attention.
“Or roadies — providing organisation, emotional support and sanity; undermen (male or female) who take part of the A-leader’s load; cornermen who give direction; Sherpas who have an intimate acquaintance with the mountains to be climbed; or philosophers who provide an independent point of view — and may sometimes explain the processes whereby A-leaders make their decisions better than A-leaders can themselves.”
A prospective manager can organise his fellow selectors in that way, depending on what he’s looking for from each of them, though clearly the best of them do that anyway and probably have done so for decades — I just hadn’t seen it delineated so concisely before.
In the interests of disclosure (and in no way at all to encourage budding managers to give me a call) I have no problem in saying that while I may have the build of a Sherpa — a less-than-match-fit Sherpa, mind — I have the attitude of a philosopher.
But at least I’m cheap.
I don’t doubt that Liveline have already talked and texted seven bells out of this subject already, but I can’t really let the weekend pass without visiting what in sporting terms really is the gift that keeps on giving.
No, I am not referring to what one friend of mine refers to as the ever-proliferating number of nicknames among the Tipperary hurling team (though clearly we are at a stage where there are more nicknames in the Premier County dressing room than there are actual bodies in jerseys).
I refer of course to Roy Keane, pictured, whose intentions regarding the managerial vacancy at Celtic should become clear very soon.
Obviously at this stage several paragraphs come to mind which have been aired in so many outlets over the last two decades that we need only refer to them by shorthand or, if you like, as though they already existed in a book index: Keane, Roy, psychology of; O’Neill, Martin, relationship with; Celtic, Glasgow, attractions of; Delaney, John, repercussions for.
Talking of books, the person for whom I feel a smidgen of sympathy here is Roddy Doyle, who is ghost-writing Keane’s new autobiography for publication this autumn/winter, presumably.
The reason I feel for Doyle is that he is currently enduring a familiar headache faced by the sportswriter.
Your nightmare when covering a night game, as a reporter, is uncertainty and the rousing finish.
What you want is clarity, decisiveness, a clear narrative and, if at all possible, a one-sided hammering with the result in no doubt within seconds of the event beginning.
What you do not want is a see-saw battle for supremacy; what you most certainly do not need is a fatal mixture of both, where the event conforms to the expected narrative for almost all of its length, only to lurch decisively against the grain of expectations at the very end: the nightmare of the last-second winner, in other words.
Obviously Keane’s book is going to be good no matter what — he’s too interesting a character, with too lively a backstory, for it to be anything other than a gripping read.
But I have a mental image of Doyle sitting down with his coffee one evening, having sent off a couple of chapters on Keane’s impressive punditry with ITV — maybe a revelation or two regarding what he said to Ronaldo when he caught the Corkman around the neck recently — and flicking on the television.
In my mind’s eye I can see the blood draining from Doyle’s face as word linking Keane to the Celtic job filters through, even as he splutters his coffee all over himself.
In the publishing house you may be sure all the past chapters are being pored over with a fine tooth comb for hostage-to-fortune references to management from Keane’s time with Ipswich and Sunderland.
It’ll work out. It always does. For Doyle it isn’t quite Roy Keane Ha Ha Ha, though, and it probably won’t be for a while yet.
The more I read about the World Cup about to erupt in Brazil the better I feel about this country and its chances of staging major sports events in the future.
The tales of criminal neglect and bribery, waste and venality pouring out of Brazil leave me in no doubt that whatever about our many shortcomings in infrastructure and size, the level of corruption here would put us on any shortlist for major tournaments in the future.
If you doubt me, the best the Brazilians have to offer is Father Ted-esque yarn of several million dollars which appears to have been literally “resting in the account” of the relative of one of the organisers.
She was 10 years old at the time.
All of this without touching on the Fifa/Qatar nonsense, of which more during the week.
I’m confident our great little country can match those levels of corruption and zoom past . . .
Late to the party department... I know that Brian O’Driscoll brought what he brought for the last decade and a half, and good luck to the great man in his retirement.
As Myles used to say, yield to no man in admiration last speaker and all of that.
However, Ronan O’Gara paid eloquent tribute to James Coughlan here last week, and good luck to him in Pau. Quality comes with no qualifications.
