Demands of intercounty management taking heavy toll on men on sideline

When Tom Carr was manager of the Dublin footballers he made the point that intercounty management devoured your time. There were meetings and training sessions and individual chats with players and matches and travel, but more than all of that there was the surrender of head space.

Whatever he was doing, work or golf or anything, the concerns of managing Dublin were always creeping around in his thoughts. That was more than 10 years ago and Carr has since had similar appointments in Roscommon and Cavan.

Yet even since he left Cavan in the summer of 2010 the demands on intercounty managers have increased and expectations heightened in respect of what they are thought capable of providing for a team.

In the past five weeks or so half of the top teams in football have said goodbye to their managers. Given that there was no ambiguity about the status of Donegal and Mayo (together with Dublin and Kerry), it's a significant departure for Jim McGuinness and James Horan to bow out.

Both of their teams were within a score of the All-Ireland champions and they could credibly claim that they could still be contenders in a year’s time.

Yet no one thought it strange when the news emerged that they had called a halt after four years in charge. Both reasoned that they had done all they could do with the teams and that it would be better for the respective teams if someone else took on the responsibility.

Who could blame either of them? Their tenures coincided and they transformed the ambitions of their counties. Horan was unfortunate in that having radically readjusted the aspirations in Mayo, he was unable to take his team to the one frontier that would ultimately satisfy the county.

But during the four years in charge he turned Mayo from a mercurial presence on the national stage to something relentless, hard working and undaunted. Like the Dublin of the early 1990s they were genuinely one of the top two teams in the country for at least two years and toppled the reigning All-Ireland champions in three of those years, but unfortunately the identity of the top team changed without Mayo moving up on either occasion.

As all of this unfolded he had to put up with the usual intercounty stresses, chief among which is the blame game. Sport is such a binary pursuit, either on or off, successful or unsuccessful that critiques of players and managers are rarely nuanced.

Some criticism is pertinent – and presumably hurts all the more as a result – but frequently the public borrows the discourse of professional sports so that county teams are treated with the acuity and spleen brought to bear on publicly listed firms and commercial giants.

In the face of this is a manager, 100 per cent responsible for the fortunes of the team but also 100 per cent responsible for the demands of a job and in most cases the support of a family.

McGuinness’s achievements have been well saluted in the few days since he took his leave of the Donegal team. He has been in the happy position of winning the All-Ireland that eluded Horan but the burdens of management are all about the journey and not the destination, however great the vindication and satisfaction may be on arrival.

McGuinness and Horan didn’t put anything less into their championship defeats by Kerry than would have been the case had they won.

Their business if they’re driven to do that? To a point but it is sometimes forgotten the extent to which the GAA benefits from the arena in which inter

county managers invest so much of their time. The colour and excitement of the summer – and with it the preponderance of association revenues – come from the willingness of individuals to put large parts of their lives on hold.

Obviously this doesn't apply exclusively to managers. Just yesterday, one of the most accomplished footballers of his generation, Aaron Kernan, announced his retirement at the age of just 30, citing the need "to focus energies on other aspects of his life".

A day previously Aidan Walsh said he didn't believe it possible to play hurling and football at the highest level in both codes. He also felt that dual players were made scapegoats when something went wrong.

Senior intercounty Gaelic games have long since stopped being recreational despite the lack of pay for play. Pressures are severe and unreasonable.

One reaction to this is the shorter shelf life of players and managers. There are exceptions – Brian Cody and Mickey Harte are well into double-digits of years in management but such situations aren't common and likely to become less so.

It is small wonder so that the trend is for county panels and managements is to turn in on themselves and shut out the outside world, locked in on the sharp focus of winning and in that way justifying themselves. smoran@irishtimes.com