LOCKER ROOM:Wouldn't it be great if GAA development work was being augmented by having high-profile managers working full time within the county, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

IT WAS COLD but beautiful in Inniskeen yesterday as the Grattan’s extraordinary campus (three fully-lit and pristine Prunty pitches, stands, terraces, bells and whistles) hosted big time inter-county football. The pitches are set down on a perfect parcel of land between gentle green hills stubbled with dark leafless trees.

Everybody was welcoming with fine humour beforehand and better humour afterwards. Even the production of a press card at the gate failed to produce the sort of nauseous recoiling it does in other GAA grounds. If it weren’t for a thousand friendly injunctions against quoting Patrick Kavanagh we’d be holding up a line or two of his now and wondering what he had to be moaning about. Prunty pitches and an hour to Dublin? It’s the great Irish dream.

The GAA brass were there and they must have stopped to wonder about this extraordinary association they preside over. Kavanagh should dominate Inniskeen but football shoulders him over the sideline. When a community gets together €3.5 million and develops a campus for a club which hasn’t mustered a senior county title since 1948, you know which way the obsession runs.

I don’t know the story with Inniskeen but imagine that the passion of the late Paddy O’Rourke has been passed on intact and that the mini leagues and juvenile section is thriving. The club won the All-Ireland intermediate club championship back in 2006 and reached the county hurling final the same year. Now they have facilities the equal of almost any in the country.

They are a nice template for the debate over paid managers within the GAA. The sidelines yesterday were patrolled by Mickey Harte for Tyrone and Seamus McEnaney for Monaghan and in GAA nirvana that is how it should be. Every GAA community should produce its own eager novices who will go away and learn how to become gurus and then extract the best from the local broths.

It doesn’t work like that of course. Again we don’t know the situation in which Inniskeen find themselves, but suppose with their splendid facilities, their intermediate success, their breakthrough in hurling, their burgeoning mini leagues and their thriving juvenile section they feel that it is time to push on as a club? Suppose they are blessed with great committees and good fundraisers, a keen supportive community and promising players, but not a single decent piece of managerial material? Maybe there’ll be the usual couple of big mouths who like the idea of the bainisteoir’s bib and the chance to do things the way things always have been done (20 laps and a game of backs and forwards), but nobody with the know-how, the commitment, the knowledge, the communications skills, the time to run a senior club team?

Or maybe there is a fella who just got a physical education degree but can’t get work and he’s going to take his degree and his enthusiasm off to Sydney or Melbourne in three weeks time?

It would be madness for Inniskeen not to take a little of the funding and appoint a good manager, wherever they could get him or her from. It’s that or waste a mountain of good work and waste the careers of a generation of players.

Now, maybe Inniskeen are fine for managers or maybe there are people in Inniskeen who are swooning and fainting at the suggestion, but you get the picture. The sort of expertise it takes to manage teams properly is in quite limited supply and it is a commodity which must be exportable and transferable for the GAA to survive.

If Inniskeen Grattans so need they should be free to turn to a guru from, say, Carrickmacross (teeming with gurus to the extent that culls have been mooted) and offer to pay a certain amount of money (or diesel) in exchange for coaching expertise. Were they able to do this above board they might be able to ask that the senior team be trained for this money for three nights a week and that other coaches in the club be trained in the business of how to coach for another night a week.

The failure to address the issue will probably end in tears with words like “fiasco”, “shambles” and “hypocrites” being handpassed about in the headlines. The GAA will let its amateur principles be used as a shelf to showcase its sins of ambiguity on. TV3’s revelation last week about county boards conceding they had paid managers was about as shocking as word seeping out that the world isn’t flat, but there will continue to be a drip, drip, drip of such stories until the GAA decides to make honest men of it’s bainisteoirs.

Wouldn’t it be great if the hurling development work being done in places like Carlow and Dublin were augmented by having high-profile managers working full time within the county. What would it be worth to the GAA to have Anthony Daly on a full-time, five-year contract in Dublin, with an office in Parnell Park and a working week which involved overseeing the game’s development and developing Dublin’s coaching resources for several hours every day and looking after the senior and under-20 sides in the evenings.

Would players drop tools because a manager was getting paid and they weren’t? We doubt it. Players drop tools when they perceive they have a management set-up which won’t meet their ambitions as sportspeople. They know that the physio, the guy who works for the sponsor, the person who does the accounts for the county board, the county secretary, the games promotions officers, the Croke Park brass and so on are all untouchables tainted by taking money for GAA work.

And they live with it. And if they get managers who are better trained, better qualified and better able to make them get the best out of themselves, they will happily live with that too.

The GAA is in a good place at the moment all things considered. The infrastructure in place at Inniskeen is wonderful, but around the country that same spirit of volunteerism and community is producing an extraordinary patchwork of sporting facilities which provide life blood in communities.

However, bad times are drawing in. The GAA is already losing good people. Why not batten down the hatches? With the good guys inside. The GAA has never been afraid to blow away the old shibboleths. We were told that sponsors’ names on jerseys would bring the earth to an end; that soccer and rugby in Croke Park would bring a plague of locusts and so on. This is an easy one. Regulate what can’t be stopped or controlled. Open up the era of the full-time manager.