Even the best men have a breaking point

THE departure of Liam Sheedy and his management team from Tipperary yesterday restarts one of those circular questions-and-answers you get in sport.

Q: Just who is able to manage an inter-county side in hurling and football?

A: Someone who’s managed an inter-county side in hurling and football, of course.

Two modern difficulties intersect nowadays to create intense pressure for modern managers: the ever-increasing demands of the modern inter-county game, which absorbs time and energy, and the ever-increasing pressure of living in a horrific recession, in which keeping a job absorbs time and energy also.

The crucial part in the resignation statement of Liam Sheedy, Eamonn O’Shea and Michael Ryan yesterday, one which had inter-county managers all over the country nodding their heads in agreement, was the passage about spending 16-hour days on managing their team. On what is, after all, supposedly a pastime.

If anyone doubts that time commitment and its impact on one’s work and life, consider the Cork footballers’ training camp on Bere Island earlier this year, and its central role in preparing them for All-Ireland success.

Most casual readers, however, won’t have picked up on the fact that players and management had to take that Friday off work in order to go to the camp.

Not easily done in this economy, presuming you have a job in the first place.

Sheedy, O’Shea and Ryan quickly earned a reputation for innovation and fresh thinking when it came to player management in Tipperary.

They moved quickly: from the old days of sitting players in front of TV sets or laptops to analyse their performances on video to issuing their players with clips for their iPods, to be studied by those players at their leisure.

However, you can’t sit still: within days of beating Cork in the Munster championship two years ago Sheedy and the Tipperary County Board were signing off on a deal with Avenir Sports, specialists in video services, to further refine that post-game analysis. Going well isn’t good enough; you have to be going better than the opposition.

That’s a fair example of how the bar keeps rising at inter-county level. It’s not enough for modern managers to simply know a few drills or trust themselves to be able to read a game.

There are media commitments — consider the former manager of our acquaintance who once left his phone unattended and came back to 80 missed calls. There are games to see in order to evaluate the talent within the county is at his disposal; there are opposition teams to look at.

And there’s his own team. Some of them are students, perhaps looking to get jobs; others may be married and trying to hold down a job. The usual mix of personalities and ages; the usual challenge of keeping 30 sportspeople happy.

Factor in the small matter of driving around one of the larger counties — Tipperary, Kerry or Cork being good examples — and most of those commitments come with a tasty one- or two-hour side dish of travel, often late at night during the darkness of winter or autumn.

After all of that, the pressure of a big game in Croke Park must be among the least of a manager’s worries.

There’s a pretty obvious catch-22 when it comes to finding men who can manage at the elite level.

People with the range of skills which are needed as a manager tend to have professional commitments which are equally demanding, hence the dilemma: anyone who is able to master a part-time job this hard usually has a full-time job that’s equally time-consuming and challenging.

As a consequence, most of the people who are qualified to manage at this level are all but disqualified by those same traits and qualities, which have almost certainly drawn them into a career path which maximises the use of those skills.

Although Tipperary are by temperament and history unlikely to go outside the county for a manager, that’s also part of the reason you invariably have the same few names in the pot every time there’s a high-profile managerial vacancy — it’s yet another example of the circular logic of intercounty management, and an answer to the question we posed at the top of the column.

The only people who can manage an intercounty team? Those who’ve managed an intercounty team, of course.