Aims unclear as hiring fair continues

Seán Moran On Gaelic Games: The old tradition of the hiring fair is being re-enacted across the country with hopeful spailpíns lining up to be taken on by various county boards.

Many of the senior team management candidates are strong personalities with the potential to get the best out of players and frequently with a distinguished record of contribution to football or hurling. But their terms and conditions will be nearly as precarious as those governing the hapless labourers of old.

Where does it bring the counties involved? What dreams are teeming through the heads of the officials who make these appointments? The lack of publicly acknowledged aims and goals make adjudication on the success and failure of managers a distinctly vague process and when this is combined with the absolute power of county boards to hire and fire, managers are on a hiding to nothing.

There is only one senior All-Ireland in either code and at the start of the recent championships it was possible to draw up a short list of one - Kilkenny - in hurling and three - Kerry, Galway and Tyrone - in football. As things panned out, and notwithstanding Armagh's unexpectedly vigorous campaign to retain the Sam Maguire, each assessment was ultimately correct.

What about all the other teams? What were they looking for from the season just concluded? For other counties there are degrees of improvement and attainment that can be gauged below the level of All-Ireland success but for top teams anything less than ultimate success doesn't really satisfy. And for less elite sides the gap between them and the top is a galaxy and the gap between them and the bottom is largely irrelevant.

Two current managerial vacancies illustrate two problems with wider significance for the GAA. First up is the desire for instant solutions. What, for instance, are we to make of Westmeath's frenzied desire to sign up Páidí Ó Sé with his lengthy Kerry term of service barely cold in the grave? You don't have to be unsympathetic to Ó Sé's sense of distress at the messy conclusion of his term or the sheer wrench of having to give up something that was so close to his heart for eight years to feel that this is ill advised.

John O'Mahony, with Mick O'Dwyer the most successful exponent of exporting and applying management techniques at intercounty level, made a point of leaving a year between the end of one appointment and the taking up of another - 1991-92 between Mayo and Leitrim and 1997-98 before Galway. This allowed a cooling off period and diminished any sense of grievance between one county and the next.

Even O'Dwyer - in whose footsteps Ó Sé seems fated to wander - left Kildare after a consensus had accepted he had done all he could do with the county and if the move to neighbours Laois might be seen as uncomfortable there was little or no ill will in Kildare.

Ó Sé appears to be set on leaving all of a fortnight between his departure from Kerry and arrival in Westmeath. Aside from the logistics involved - and Ó Sé has never been afraid of that type of inconvenience when pursuing his football passions, as his stint with UCC long ago proved - how can he have the intense interest, the passion for this latest challenge?

Westmeath, for their part, feel the sense of under-achievement after winning minor and under-21 All-Irelands (with surprisingly different cohorts). It must be tempting to view the appointment of such a high profile football personality as the missing ingredient.

But experience suggests that the more visceral and impassioned type of manager translates less well than the more clinical and methodical version. It's hard to think of anyone whose football personality is more ingrained with his own county than Ó Sé's. It doesn't look like an enthusiasm that will adapt to the midlands at the click of a finger.

Does this matter in a broader context? Yes because the well being of Gaelic games needs counties like Westmeath to exploit patiently whatever few breaks in the weather they can get. In this developmental context the county's nerve looks to have cracked.

Case two is the Dublin hurlers. You feel that Kilkenny have been a little scratchy about the suggestion that their hurling success derives from a disregard for football and there were some grumblings about how cherished Tyrone's hurlers felt.

Aside from the fact that the Ulster county contests the National League and actually produced a Railway Cup player (Vinny Owens), the broad point has some merit. Strong codes push around their weaker counterparts and that's generally given that few counties have precise parity of esteem between football and hurling.

For as long as the Dublin hurling renaissance has been projected as coming soon to a nearby horizon the question of dual players has eclipsed any optimism.

The wrangle that has engulfed the hurling team with the departure of Marty Morris, citing lack of support from the county board, is typical of the situation.

Recriminations on either side have streaks of substance but for players caught in the middle there is one central truth: it wouldn't have happened in football.

Morris has the support of players and a year of reasonable progress under his belt. A similar problem in football would be sorted. This strong undercurrent - that hurling is a poor relation - is contributing to the situation where it appears increasingly likely that the best hurlers, including newly nominated All Star Conal Keaney, will gravitate to the football panel.

Tommy Lyons's insistence that he won't allow dual players is in a way peripheral. It is plain nowadays that the two games can't be mixed at the top level even if the wish to try is indulged. How the GAA is going to cope with the growing incompatibility of its constituent codes is one of the biggest problems ahead.

In the meantime the hiring fair proceeds. Some new managers will do well with thin resources; others will do poorly with good material. All but a tiny few will have to come to terms with failure. And fundamental problems will remain.