The sack race

The GAA’s season of Sundays turned into a closed season of sackings and resignations. How comethe manager giving seven days a week for nothing ends up with the same amount of thanks, asks Mark Gallagher.

IN ENGLISH football, they say the only managerial certainty is that one day he will lose his job. With the exception of a rare few, who can dictate when they want to leave even if it is past the official retirement age, the security of a manager is directly attached to his side’s last 90 minutes. Of course, in the Premiership, out of work managers can wipe away their tears with a far severance cheque while they pontificate on Sky Sports.

There is no such parachute landing for the GAA. Nothing but recrimination and idle pub talk about how much better you could have done. Or how the county board wouldn’t give you a chance, or how the bar-stool supporter knew it would all end in tears or end without a trophy.

Imagine the life of an inter-county manager. Being a fatherly figure to 31 players, stay informed and offer advice for each of those lives. He has a back-room staff to look after, challenge games to organise, club matches to attend. If his stylish half-back’s confidence is crumbling, he has to pore over every detail of their life to see where the problem is. To paraphrase Tommy Docherty, the only qualification needed for management is to be a bit mad.

The pressure is there for all to see, and the strain can break the public facade occasionally. Witness Tommy Lyons losing his cool after the Armagh juggernaut derailed Dublin’s summer this past July, Eamon Coleman’s outburst when Sean McCague was GAA President (which saw Coleman banished to the stands for a while), or generally nice men like Mickey Moran snarling at journalists because they believed their team didn’t get the fair rub of the green.

It takes its toll. Maybe not on everyone, but most. Mick O’Dwyer, after 30 years in inter-county management, still laughs at the notion that he conducts his team’s affairs within a pressure cooker. But he doesn’t deny it. “Things have changed radically, and negatively from a manager’s point of view. When I took over in Kerry in 1975, there was an expectation of success, but it wasn’t a suffocating expectation. And the focus was totally on the players. The manager was like a film extra - there for anyone to see, but not really relevant.”

O’Dwyer believes the imported Premiership culture of ‘sack the manager’ is largely responsible for the absurd shift in emphasis in the GAA. “We have absorbed many good things but that is certainly a negative. Now everything revolves around the manager - when you lose. Strange that you don’t hear much about him or the selectors when a team wins!”

One of his counterparts returned to county coaching after almost a decade away last winter and noticed the changes. Brian McEniff resumed at the Donegal helm last January. Within 12 months people are ranking his achievement of bringing Donegal within a whisker, poor refereeing decisions notwithstanding, of an All-Ireland final alongside leading the county to an All-Ireland title a decade before. But, it wasn’t a come-back wrought easily. Things had changed in the eight years McEniff was out of the game.

“There is a lot more pressure on managers now and I think the days of managers staying in the game for 20 or 30 years like Seán Boylan or O’Dwyer are long gone,” he says, as someone who has survived in the managerial game since the seventies. “A man couldn’t do that anymore, there is simply too much involved. After a couple of years, it has taken so much out of him.

“People think managers train teams three or four nights a week, turn up for the match on Sunday and that is it. There is so much more. That really only accounts for 30% of what a manager does. Apart from that, there is the travel, keeping all his back-room happy, club games to see, county boards to contend with. Fortunately last year that didn’t bother me because I was county chairman. But you are talking 35 hours a week, maybe more. It is a second full-time job now.”

O’Dwyer concurs. “When I went to Kildare and Laois, I was involved in getting jobs for players, which should have been done long before that. If you want a commitment from a player, he can’t have the headache of unemployment hanging over him all the time. That’s not on.”

The South Kerry maestro firmly believes that what’s good for the player, in terms of claims for remuneration, should also be good for the manager. “It amazes me that, amid all this campaigning for a fair deal for players, there is scarcely a murmur about the manager. The only time I’ve heard it mentioned was when Croke Park launched a blitz of county boards to find out what expenses they were paying the man in charge.

“The first question that I was asked when I joined Kildare was ‘how much are they giving you. Not a word about what I might be able to achieve for the GAA in the county.”

Try putting a price on what O’Dwyer has achieved in Laois. “The media focus now is astonishing, but I welcome it. The media helps sell our games, and keeps the wheels turning. I’ve never closed the gates to any reporters wanting to cover our training. To do otherwise is counter-productive.”

Do managers deserve a little remuneration for their efforts? After all, they are putting social and family matters on hold. They are travelling the length and breadth of the county, and outside their county. Their minds are never on down time. Even when they relax, they fret about how they can inject more of a defensive mind-set into one of their mid-fielders or curtail the attacking tendencies of their left half-back.

And for what? Sometimes, county boards don’t even raise a hand to pat their manager on the back before slamming the door behind them. With increased exposure, the summer is the yard-stick. Managers are fallen by the championship sword. Each year, progress is the key word. And if none is made, a little grumble of thanks. The ludicrous treatment of Paul O’Kelly by the Offaly county board illustrates that sometimes even progress is not enough.

O’Kelly had ideas about Offaly football, ambitious plans for a former power that has more hard times than good in the recent past. Only it upset some people. A review was initiated and by the end of it, O’Kelly, an enthusiastic man who only wanted to bring the good times back to Offaly football, was fired. The end result is that people wanted him out because for the first time in living memory, Laois were sitting at the top table while Offaly were crawling around looking for scraps.

The thing is progress was being made. Five games in one summer equates progress in Offaly, these days. Of course, everyone has their own version of progress. Paidi Ó Sé took Kerry to two All-Irelands but people still don’t know how to rank his reign in Kerry. The barometers of success are forever rising upwards, and sometimes managers can’t even keep up. Even the smallest details, like the championship panel being extended out to 31 players, thankfully doing away with the traditional pre-summer cull of seven players that Tommy Lyons termed absurd, has intensified the pressure.

“It means you are dealing with an extra six or seven players, and that is an extra six or seven minds you have to ensure you get right. Mostly, the pressure comes down to the air of expectancy around managers,” McEniff says. “There is this expectancy there now, whenever somebody takes over a job, that they bring the team places. It is becoming more and more difficult.

“There is an extra night of training than there was a few years ago, you have to deal with personality clashes, sometimes within the team, or with officials or whatever. You are on the phone constantly, you have to keep an eye on the club scene. When your players have club games at the weekend, there are some players you want to be involved to get their fitness right, and there are others you don’t want to be involved and you have to discuss that with their club manager. It is a very fine line, and it is becoming more and more difficult to get the balance right.”

On top of all of that, you have to deal with the male ego. The most striking moment in the first two episodes of ‘Underdogs’ was Jarlath Burns, and his Ulster football mentality, taking a verbal battering from some prospective Jack O’Shea who was obviously a legend in his own mind. Managers have to deal with that on a regular basis throughout the year, hearing the whispers behind their backs that such-and-such wasn’t picked for whatever reason, dealing with the ego on a dark, windswept night in January as much as in the midst of the summer.

“And you invest all this time, your whole life for anywhere between eight months to an entire year, and your whole work comes down to a bad refereeing decision, a simple bit of human error. That makes us all very despondent,” says McEniff, still sore at Micheal Monahan’s inability to see Kieran McGeeney’s fouls during the second half of this year’s All-Ireland semi-final.

Yet, he will do it again next year. Some don’t get that chance.

The only certainty in a manager’s life is that one day they will walk away from it and back into normal life. And whether they do after being pushed or pulled, they can always walk away with head held high and chest out.

As the pressure increases, so does the scale of achievement in managing a county team. No matter what some inside the county think.