The strains of a life less ordinary
THE picture Colm Coyle paints is a stark one. The season that’s in it, he might as well be jangling the chains of Jacob Marley, for his words are a warning to all you new inter-county managers in 2011.
What he forecasts for you, with your fresh, crisp bainisteoir bib, and your high hopes and aspirations is crippling hours, 30 to 40 hours on top of what they’re doing for a living — and add more if you’re managing outside your own county.
Your work, you may as well know, will suffer. Free time will be a luxury to the point where you don’t know what to do with yourself when you get some.
Players, he insists, will question a lot, if not everything that you do, and then look for you to be their guidance counsellor. A sort of father figure, if you will.
The gig itself is a thankless one for the majority of it. Few will see how much you put into it. You will show symptoms of stress even when you consider you are impervious to it.
There will be occasions when you will consider giving it all up before you get sucked back into it. Oh, and don’t smoke.
Wear sunscreen.
Coyle doesn’t rule out returning to what he terms as “the madness” but after his stints with Monaghan and his native Meath, he will do so with his eyes wide open.
Holding the position of Monaghan senior manager between 2003 and ‘04, he remembers working five days a week, sometimes more. The two-hour round trips to and from the county were made ad nauseam and as an outside manager there was that obvious sense of over-compensating.
It didn’t get any easier with Meath where he took the helm in 2007 and ‘08. Not that he put in more effort because he was a Royal — and a successful one on the field as that — but he remembers having three phones — one for personal use, another for work and then a special football hotline. He never saw the bills for the last mobile because the county board paid for them but he reckons they were significant. The buzzing he got in his right ear from time to time was proof enough of that.
“The time spent working away from the team is more than what you spend with them,” says Coyle. “You watch a lot of videos. You’ve systems now where you have people do it for you but you still have to look at the relevant points.
“At training, even after the players are gone, you have meetings with selectors and medical staff. Yep, unbelievable as it is, being with the players is just a small part of it.
“Travelling to Monaghan, it would have taken an hour up and an hour back, then two or three hours with them. That’s 25 hours for a full week then you have meetings on a Saturday, catch or organise a game on the Sunday. Throw in all the phone-calls and anybody doing it now would be doing at least 30 hours, going up to 50.
“I was reading about Liam Sheedy there in Tipp and he stepped down for no other reason but family. Tipp reached the holy grail and leaving the gig was a genuine thing for him. He was doing 40 hours plus a week, did the maths and was thinking of his kids and wife. And what about hobbies? A game of golf? Not a chance. We’re a mad species, so we are.”
It wasn’t until he got away from the game that Coyle was able to get a measure of his grá for it.
His company Coyle Sports Surfaces who specialise in all-weather pitches was compromised greatly during his time with Meath because it took second preference to management. It just had to.
“In general when you’re doing it, it takes first preference over everything,” reckons Coyle. “There were times where my work suffered. I work for myself on all-weather pitches and there are times when it suffered when I was with Meath which was a time of economic boom.
“It all comes down to finances. We tendered for a lot of jobs and they involved a lot of meetings and when you can’t make those meetings you lose out on them. It all boils down to pounds, schillings and pence.
“You can’t put a figure on it, you just can’t but I just know that now when I’m not involved business is way better — and we’re in a recession! I was wondering if I channelled all my energies into the job during the boom what might have been.”
No regrets, though, even if he pushed himself close to the brink.
He recalls one trip to the dentist when he complained about his teeth only to discover he had contracted the parafunctional jaw condition bruxism.
“The thing about stress is there’s a lot of it. I would have imagined I wouldn’t have been the stressful type but I remember having to go to the dentist because my fillings were falling out. He told me that I was grinding my teeth in my sleep with stress. It’s not happening now, thank God. It obviously was a subconscious thing.”
HE’S seven months now without a cigarette but doesn’t feel the habit got any worse during his two management spells. However, there was plenty to smoke about during the Graham Geraghy episode in 2007 when the Meath forward was dropped off the panel before returning after he allegedly struck team-mate Stephen Sheppard in a training match.
Coyle at the time didn’t get a moment’s peace with the intense level of media scrutiny. It was the only time he questioned why he was in the position. In general, he plays down the impact of the media in the amount of work he put in but that was an episode he’ll never forget.
“I remember the incident with Graham and there was a bit of a story there but not much was going on because we had spoken,” he said.
“It was 24-7 stuff, the phone was ringing and people looking for the inside track. That was the only time when I said, ‘Jesus, I’ve had enough’.’’
That was the worst time in his time as Meath manager. Surprisingly, not that infamous July evening in 2008 in the Gaelic Grounds when Limerick’s Ian Ryan recorded 3-7 in a qualifier and compelled Coyle to step down as Meath manager.
“I was kinda disappointed with the performance on the day but at the time I just made the decision,” he recalls of announcing his decision on the bus following Meath’s nine-point defeat. “I was told by some that I made it too hastily but that’s just the way I am. Things weren’t right going into it and I would have given my all. It was a hard thing to do but work was beginning to suffer so something had to give.
“If we had held on against Wexford (in the Leinster championship) our season could have been totally different because we were playing good football. Limerick are a good team and proved it since so it wasn’t a big disgrace. The season was over and I couldn’t do another year. It wasn’t about me being disappointed with the lads or the set-up... my time was simply up.”
His instant departure stemmed a lot of the criticism that would have come his way but some of those who suffered at the hands of his Monaghan and Meath teams weren’t so lucky.
He felt for them. As a fellow soldier, he couldn’t help but.
“There’s an awful lot of criticism of managers when a result goes the wrong way but I’d have always felt sympathy for other managers, even when we beat their teams. They’d get the chop and I’d be so sorry for them because I know the amount of effort they’d have put into the whole thing.
“It’s the same across the country, from the Kerrys and Tyrones to Division Three and Four teams. There’s not too many of them without passion. You can’t really do it without a love for the game. It’s like a drug.”
PLAYERS, he feels, get off too lightly. It’s the one piece of advice he would give to any prospective inter-county manager: prepare to be everything and then nothing to them.
“One of the biggest challenges now is that lads tend to question everything now whereas before, with the great Seán Boylan, we followed him blindly. Lads now are more opinionated and if they see or hear that Tyrone are doing this or Kerry are doing that, then we have to do it. There’s a lot of it happening at inter-county level nowadays.
“I know it wasn’t the players with Eamonn O’Brien (being dropped as manager this year) but it’s gone like professional soccer where the managers are at fault for that block not being made or that score not being scored. If people realise what they put in, the amount of time and effort selectors put in, they’d think differently.
“There are a lot of them (managers) getting quick shifts, for want of a better expression. Players can be difficult to deal with and there have been loads of instances of it. Having said that, if anybody is going for it I’d tell them to go for it. Sure, I wouldn’t rule out losing the plot again myself.”
Not right now, though. Not in a million years. He looks across the border to Louth and recognises just how difficult Peter Fitzpatrick has it in trying to fix jobs for players on the brink of emigrating.
“I wouldn’t like to be in it right now. I see Peter Fitzpatrick has three or four heading off to Australia and they had a tremendous season. Beforehand, he’d have been thinking Louth could really push forward in 2011 and the next thing these lads have to leave and there’s not much he can do about it. He’s going to have to spend a serious amount of time and energy trying to sort them out somewhere.”
But now Coyle is free. The liberty of it all has given him a great perspective of just how manic his life was for four years during the Noughties.
“It’s amazing now doing a 40-hour or so working week and looking back and thinking I was doing another 30 or 40 on top of that. You wonder how you could do it but when you’re doing it, you don’t think about it.
“It’s funny sitting back and realising that you’ve a Saturday or Sunday free. That’s when you see how much you put into it.”
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