Allen: It was one-dimensional, it was hurling or nothing
After all, Allen himself walked away from the Cork job last month after seven years with the senior set-up, a period that culminated in successive All-Ireland finals, the first of which Cork won.
“Jack O’Connor did a great job, getting them to three finals in-a-row and winning two of them,” said Allen yesterday. “Fair dues to him for having the courage of his convictions and not being swayed by the public or anybody else. He felt for him that the time was right to go.”
O’Connor spoke on Monday of the ‘ferocious’ toll on inter-county managers and how the criticism after the Munster final replay defeat to Kerry helped make up his mind.
Having been a selector under Donal O’Grady after the famous defeat to Waterford in the 2004 provincial decider, Allen knows only too well how sharp the knives can be.
“Realistically, if you want to win you have to ‘dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s’. Everything has to be right. Your science in training has to be right, your doctor and physio and all the rest. The time that is put in needs to be managed rather than more being necessarily better.”
Liam Hayes revealed recently that the job of managing Carlow demands 60 hours a week from the manager, while new Offaly boss Pat Roe has added that the job now is virtually seven days a week.
Though Justin McCarthy was confirmed as Waterford manager for the sixth successive season on Monday and Brian Cody has been at the helm in Kilkenny since 1999, Allen believes that the demands of modern GAA may mean that pair are the last of a dying breed.
“If you take the top counties in both hurling and football, there is an expectancy that you are going to win the All-Ireland whether that is Cork or Kerry or Kilkenny. On the shoulders of the manager lies that burden.
“Like players, a manager’s time at the top is going to be shortened as well. Given the fact that all your championship games are on television as well, there is an added stress.”
Allen spoke eloquently in Dublin yesterday of that stress, about crawling to Fermoy and Carrigtwohill through the endless traffic and the nights when he would wake up thinking about what needed to be done for training or matches the following day.
He tells the story of how he was rang one off-season by a journalist looking for his predictions on competitions as diverse as the Champions League and Wimbledon — where once he could have rattled off contenders, now he struggled to conjure up any names.
“I felt that my brain was kind of dead. It was one-dimensional, it was hurling or nothing. I just felt I wanted to sit back and see whether there was another life outside of hurling.
“I won’t miss travelling to training in Fermoy, going through the tunnel and through all the roundabouts,” he said. “There is a weight lifted. I know that if I stayed on, or Jack stayed on, if you didn’t win it again you would be going out as a failure like lots of politicians.”
It’s that sort of pressure that has led people, Mick O’Dwyer included, to call for managers to be paid for their services, but that isn’t an opinion that Allen would necessarily agree with.
“You’re doing it for nothing but I wouldn’t have it any other way. That (payment) brings it’s own pressure. If I thought I was being rewarded I certainly would feel it as (an added) pressure that I had to deliver.
“This way, I did it with Cork for the love of it. If you achieved then fine, if you didn’t then it’s fine too. It wasn’t breaking the bank for them.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
