LOCKER ROOM:The management of a senior intercounty team is an extraordinary feat for any amateur to perform, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

NOT LONG after Dublin won the All-Ireland final of 1976 the players were summoned to a meeting in a central Dublin hotel. At the meeting Kevin Heffernan told them he was stepping down as manager. Before they left the Gresham that night the players had selected Tony Hanahoe to be their new manager. It was under the aegis of Hanahoe that Dublin won the memorable 1977 All-Ireland. At some stage after that, in a manoeuvre borrowed from Lanigan’s Ball, Hanahoe stepped out and Heffernan stepped in again.

It was all very civilised and under the enlightened chairmanship of Jimmy Grey the Dublin County Board felt no need to interfere in the running of a happy and successful team.

Of course Dublin were top of the heap at the time. Except in Cork, where putting manners on lads is a priority, success rarely makes a failure of a home where there are medals crowding the mantelpiece. It would be interesting though to look back and wonder what might have happened had the Dublin County Board decided it wanted to try a bit of croppy lie down with its most charismatic team ever.

That was all so long ago and in GAA terms the long ago is the least likely place to find signs of enlightenment. The Dublin County Board was happy though and felt no need to interfere in a situation where players were happy too. Since then what we call with casual hyperbole “the cult of the manager” has taken root. Heffernan and Mick O’Dwyer were the first managers deemed to have achieved cult status and since then just about any manager who wins an All-Ireland is elevated, in the media at least, to the rank of guru.

We forget, of course, that by default somebody must be left standing and some county has to win the All-Ireland every year. We know only that it won’t be Mayo. There have been years in both football and hurling when we really should (by public vote or through Joe Duffy) have just said that given the poor and uninspiring standard of play no prize will be awarded. Instead we crown somebody guru every September and a host of the other counties slavishly follow the style of the guru for the next 12 months.

The manufacturing of so many gurus, of course, has the downside of inevitable and widespread disappointment. There is no warranty with a guru. History has proven this is more likely to be a problem in hurling where both within the blue-blood counties and without there is a belief that the mysteries of the game are so vast as to be unknowable to all but an elect few Brahmins.

The whole business of players discontent with managers is so much more pronounced in hurling than it is in football for that simple reason. There is a suspicion that you need certain credentials granted by Hogwarts to turn players into All-Ireland hurlers.

In reality what you need is what the Americans used to call people skills. Sometimes you are the right fit. Sometimes you are not. It’s about intuition.

Hence Ger Loughnane, who brought an infinitely less gifted Clare team to a couple of All-Irelands in the 1990s, departed Galway with his tail between his legs. Babs was not the right man for Offaly or for the modern day Tipp players. Michael Bond could intuit what was happening with Offaly and pitched his sail to ride the winds. Justin got so far in Waterford and no further. John Meyler got the heave in Wexford. Mike Mac has his back to the wall in Clare. Gerald Mac got the shoulder in Cork and the man has yet to live who will make all of Limerick happy now that the memory of their three Under-21 All-Irelands in a row is receding.

Hurling is a strange game. Brian Cody, whose guru credentials none of us can question, once said after a helter-skelter match in Croker that standing on the sideline there was very little which could be done to influence the outcome, the game unfolds so quickly and is over sometimes before you have discerned a trend.

This was the sort of admission that only an outrageously successful manager in Kilkenny could make. The game does run at electric pace and on the crazy days when two teams throw everything at it you can spend a few minutes watching your corner forward to see if he is afraid of the corner back or what and meanwhile your own corner back might get taken for 1-2 because your centre back is allowing himself to get pulled hither and thither into the space being left by the midfielder who is occupying the spot left by the right wing forward who is going back to sweep and preventing any ball from reaching your corner forward in the first place.

Hurling is strange because in the absence of a transfer system the counties who have their structure right and their hurling culture in order will inevitably float to the top again and again. Very few of the revolutions we have seen over the years are sustainable because the energy fades or football reasserts itself or the guru goes past his expiration date.

And yet every year with increasing frequency we see these outbreaks borne of discontent or heartache in hurling counties. The fall guys are usually men in their middle years or beyond who fail to connect fully with the dressingroom. Men who have a bit of success under their belts and have lost the ability to re-invent themselves.

And that’s the lesson perhaps for the GAA. The management of any senior intercounty team is an extraordinary feat for any amateur to perform. A panel of 30 or more players has to be kept happy along with a county board and the clubs. The details of every row you have or gaffe you make gets recounted in 30 homes that very evening after training and then gets exponential circulation the next day.

And in a structure where there will be just one winner and 31 failures every year you have to keep selling yourself to your players and to your board and to the public. You have to apply discipline but act with humility. You must endure the input of every dog and divil who stops you on the street.

We need to hit a new age of enlightenment when it comes to the appointment of intercounty managers. Cork were on to something when they appointed players’ reps on to the committee which appointed new managers, but the system was doomed when the players chose to take the positions themselves and the county board chose to ride roughshod over the committee anyway.

Ultimately though, as every season’s unrest proves, it is the players’ game. They own it. If you give your time voluntarily and if you come to believe you are wasting that time it is your right to withdraw your services and submit to golf. Nobody has any contracts.

And that is the next step surely. Contracts. Job Descriptions. Now is the wrong environment to be considering this in but what is wrong with management contracts within the GAA? Suppose the association came up with the notion of a three-year contract which required a county manager to take a sabbatical from work and devote himself not just to the senior intercounty team three nights a week but to overseeing the structures of the sport within the county, to making sure all parts of a standard template were functioning. In the winter time the low profile work of coaching the coaches and spreading the guruness would be his bread and butter. In the spring and summer the county team would have first claim on his time.

He’d have some security. A county like Roscommon might be able to afford the enthusiasm and organisation of an Anthony Daly or a Liam Griffin. And county boards would be a lot more careful about who they recruited and who they didn’t recruit.

Croke Park could appoint somebody with the expertise to standardise contracts and advise on recruitment etc. Whatever the rights or wrongs of every dispute which distracts us in the winter the GAA can’t go on like this. High performance expertise in, say amateur boxing, has been bought and paid for with obvious results in the last few years.

The GAA does an under-the-table version of the same from club to county level anyway. Flooding that whole murky area with light would serve everybody well.