LOCKERROOM: For the GAA team manager, modesty and humility are the stock in trade, to be set aside, if at all, only for 20 minutes on certain September Sundays

YERRA, SOME things these days smack, as we used to say, of a foreign code but others things remain comfortingly distinctive.

For instance, there was an odd and basically harmless little soccer story drifting around the web and the papers there for a while. Roy Keane - when asked, pointlessly really, who he thought would win the Premiership this season - plumped after a few seconds' thought for Chelsea.

This would seem to most of us like a reasonable and harmless response to a harmless question and if there was a story to it at all it would have been the bravery involved in the reporter asking Roy to engage in the sort of pointless speculation that engages the rest of us mere mortals when we aren't bitching about the weather.

Roy replied evenly without dragon fire issuing from his mouth, but apparently his utterance of the word Chelsea was paydirt.

For a few days news of Keano's treachery ran as a sort of "invitation to divine retribution" story. "Keane risks wrath of Ferguson with Prem pick."

We waited for Fergie to smite his former son with a tartan-patterned bolt of lightning or a thermonuclear blast of hairdryer venom. When nothing of the sort happened we resigned ourselves to the thought that Fergie probably didn't care that much after all (or that the Ferg realised that when it came to treachery Old Trafford's treatment of Keane at the end of his useful footballing life took the biscuit and released Keane from any obligation to say Manchester United any time he was asked to pick a winner in anything).

The thing is that Roy probably didn't feel he was doing any sort of disservice to the dark empire of Old Trafford. Roy reckons he could have been a decent corner forward, and growing up in Cork he absorbed enough of GAA culture to know that by tipping Chelsea he was putting untold pressure on Big Phil Scolari and the boys. Scolari would have no choice but to come out and laud Ferguson and all his deeds and insist - no, absolutely insist - that the Red Devils were favourites for everything. Ha!

This genius for putting incredible and unbearable amounts of psychological pressure on the opposition is what separates the GAA man by several stages of evolution from the soccer species. Self-effacement and monastic adherence to the laws of modesty and humility are the basic requirements for all GAA managers.

There is a brief period once a year when the GAA manager may strut in full plumage like a moonwalking peacock and be forgiven. The display season takes place between the final whistle of an All-Ireland final and the players reaching the dressing-room after the presentation. It lasts about 20 minutes, and obviously, to gain the licence to strut, your team need to have won the thing.

In this time period it is permissible for the GAA manager to shake his fists in exultation at the stands, at the media and at the feckers in the county board. He can use the window of opportunity to tell the media know-nothings he was certain all along this would come to pass. He may use the time to reclaim the smudged reputations of players who "yiz all wrote off" and to point out in as many ways as possible without actually saying it straight out that he is the special one.

There it ends though. After that he must button it. If he is a former county player gone to manage in pastures new (and more financially rewarding pastures at that) and he is asked to give his opinion on a match involving his own native county, he must assume the position.

He must do as Roy does. He must write off the chances of his erstwhile colleagues as comprehensively as possible without being offensive about it and without using the phrase "couldn't kick snow off a rope".

He must play his own crowd down, never stick his head above the parapet. The opposition are the greatest team he has ever seen. They'll take some beating. He hopes to god his lot will be able to keep the ball pucked/kicked out to these giants. Those who break this rule of self-effacement are generally punished by the gods (Dinny Cahill, Babs Keating, Tommy Lyons)

This is a small thing but we wonder how long it will last as a piece of our self-effacing culture. Players must, after all, be fluent in trash-talking these days before they get to wear the county jersey, but managers are stuck in the dark ages of braggarty where the showboat has yet to be invented. The manager must at all costs steer clear of the mortal sin of being full of himself.

The GAA has taken measures to ensure this will always be so. Making managers wear those humiliating little bibs with the word "bainisteoir" on them has been a pre-emptive step in opening up the war on the sartorial front. The next step is to make inter-county managers wear name badges that say "Hi, I'm Mickey/Jason/Banty."

The GAA manager is being left behind here. Somewhere along the line Premiership managers became so full of themselves they can no longer in good conscience wear tracksuits to games. Does Arsène Wenger even own a tracksuit? The modern Premiership manager enjoys a nice cotton twill in a dignified charcoal with a silk tie in tasteful chartreuse. His GAA counterpart, regardless of age or attainments, wears tracksuit bottoms, a polo shirt with the sponsor's name on it and his bib.

There have been brief and futile attempts by managers to free themselves from the tyranny of the polo shirt in recent times. Art McCrory and Brian Mullins took the millinery route for a while, protecting their pates from the glare of the sun with fishermen's hats, while John Maughan wowed the GAA world for a while by answering the question "Who likes short shorts?" with an emphatic "I like short shorts." The tanned twin towers that were the Maughan legs threatened for a while to diminish the gravity of his achievements as a manager and there was relief all around when the legs were put away for good.

The GAA manager may yearn for the feel of a well-cut Armani or a nice Louis Copeland on his back but the fear of having his suit collection audited by the Revenue as well as the likelihood of derision from the stands keeps him in line.

And anyway, the lighter fabrics couldn't survive the media press conferences. Of late Croke Park has been experimenting wantonly with the dry-as-dust, stage-managed press conference where we all sit in tiers of seats and ask our dumb questions in front of each other. Occasionally, though, we still get to give the managers a good, old-fashioned pummelling.

Pat O'Shea, for instance, emerged from the RTÉ studio yesterday and we grabbed him, flung him roughly against the wall and pressed against him, a great sweaty mass of journos and tape recorders and clichés.

Grand it was to be part of tradition. We will never get to do this to Fergie or Arsène or Big Phil or Roy. The GAA manager must remain socially immobile and most 'orribly 'umble forever. His mobile number on all our contacts lists, his polo shirt sweaty and frayed and his self-esteem hidden and subverted forever.

'Tis part of what we are.