SIDELINE CUT:If it is transformed into just another job, then GAA management will attract clock-watchers who give their heart while keeping their soul, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE NEWSPAPERS have been full of praise recently for the longevity of Rolling Stones bassist and sometime Kildare resident Ronnie Wood, hailing him as the ultimate exemplar of the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle. It is just as well he decided to throw his energies into rock music rather than into GAA management because there is no way he would have been able to sustain his various appetites under the controversial expenses structure that currently exists.

Wood is 64 years old, perfectly fine in the rock’n’roll firmament but sufficient to have you labelled a dinosaur in GAA management, which has, of late, been transformed into a young man’s game.

They say GAA management has changed beyond recognition over the past few years, and that has led to the situation where the issue of officially paying managers has become unavoidable. Thus, over the past few days, county boards all over Ireland have been diligently compiling and posting their submissions on the matter to be sent back to headquarters.

Practically all the boards are expected to vote for the second of three options, namely to persevere with the current amateur status and to implement the rules on payment more thoroughly.

In other words, they are voting to maintain the wink-and-nod culture and the shadowy tradition of under-the-table payments, forever conjuring up the notion of a perspiring, worried county chairman slipping an envelope of grimy notes under the table to the manager with his left hand while digging into the sherry trifle with his right hand at a buffet lunch in a midlands hotel.

Stories of counties slipping six-figure sums to managers are old hat at this stage. Equally, many county administrators have vouched that their managers were never paid for their labours and never received a penny more than they were due – and that many were hard pushed to even file for their mandatory expenses.

It became clear that when it came to GAA management, there was no hard and fast set of rules. Rather, like much of the country, it was like a cottage industry that thrived best in the black economy rather than under the fastidious eye of accountants.

This was all very well during the boom years, when the country was under a blizzard of cash. But in these austere times, the GAA has decided to sort it out. Can it?

There is one important thing to remember about GAA managers in all of this: the fellows are stone mad. Every last one of them is crazy in a way that, for instance, Mr Wood and his fellow Stones could never hope to emulate.

Most GAA managers present a perfectly plausible and often conservative veneer: they hold down responsible and often important jobs, they are God-fearing and their taste in music deceptively MOR (you’d be surprised how many GAA managers will break into a Shania Twain chorus during early-season moments of light-heartedness) and they will make self-deprecating comments about the state of their golf games.

They say most GAA managers know their way around a game of 25 and that virtually all of them are excellent at jiving. They are articulate, and friends will testify they are wonderful company and can move easily through all strands of society, mingling with presidents and taoisigh at All-Star functions one night and interviewing for another term at the county board meeting the next.

But all GAA managers have this strange light in their eyes that flicks on every so often – “Rasputin-esque” as one county secretary famously said of her manager.

They might be sitting down at one of those season launches at which they are obliged to appear and while answering some question about their own playing career will suddenly recall some disappointment they suffered in their teenage years or an unjust sending-off in the twilight of their careers and their eyes become filled with this strange and unsettling shine that anyone who knows a GAA manager will recognise.

GAA managers are full of contradictions: they are scrupulous, organised doers but they are also absolute day-dreamers, always believing they can achieve with their team what nobody else has in 125 years.

When you think about what GAA managers do, there is no avoiding the fact it is a crazy business. Out watching young men train in all kinds of weather for 10 or 11 months of the year. Late, lonely drives home afterwards.

Constant doubt. Constant worry and pressure – from the media, from their supporters, from their players, from the county board. The phone ringing 100 times a day, mostly from wives or children who can’t get through because they’ve been speaking with the county treasurer for the past three hours.

The GAA manager is at the very heart of the team. He is the figurehead and the voice. But he is remote from it too because he is not out there on the field. Even on days of triumph and glory, he has to remain something of a loner, a man apart, a perpetual worrier.

What is GAA management if not an attempt to stay young: to legitimately hang around the edges of the playing field years, and even decades, after Time has told you to go home?

All those nights managers spend huddled in conversation with their selectors on the sideline: it beats the pub. It beats the pub.

GAA managers change lives and they change places. They do. Heffernan in Dublin, O’Dwyer in Kerry, McGee in Offaly, McEniff in Donegal, Loughnane in Clare, Griffin in Wexford, Harte in Tyrone, O’Mahony in Galway, Cody in Kilkenny: all of these men changed something elemental in the psyche and self-esteem of the people within the county.

Look at Pat Gilroy and Dublin this year. To walk through the capital on the Sunday night of the Ireland final was to see a city lost in its own joy. It wasn’t just for GAA people in the city. The entire city felt it. It was a special night.

And Gilroy, like all managers, insists that those once-in-a-lifetime nights are down to the players. And they are, to a large extent. But it takes the manager, with his vision and energy and his manic ability to harness everyone into believing as fiercely as he does, which is the critical thing. More often than not, they fail. But they always turn up for more the next season, more full of zeal than ever.

So should they be paid? It is something of a standing joke that some managers have been benefiting from unofficial payments for years now. But when you scan the cast of GAA managers down the years, it doesn’t take long to deduce that money was never the primary reason why they were there.

No, they were there because they have this inexplicable howl-at-the-moon faith that they can guide their team and their county to a better place. If it is all regulated and official and transformed into just another job, then GAA management will attract a different breed: men who look at the percentages and clock on and clock off and know how to give their heart while keeping their soul.

If managers are paid, then the great eccentrics and visionaries – those glorious mad men – will soon disappear.