Getting right man at the helm no easy task

Kilkenny’s Brian Cody is but one extreme in the managerial game. Few of the other appointments for 2011 will inspire such acclaim and high hopes

THE HIRING season is nearly over. Such a description may seem somewhat inappropriate in the case of Brian Cody, who was on Monday night ushered in with due reverence to the ante-room of the 13th season of his managerial career. Yet it’s unlikely Cody of all people has forgotten the way things were when he was first appointed 12 years ago. He came into the position with no conspicuous track record at club level but with the goodwill of the county as someone whose hurling bona fides was beyond reproach.

He was succeeding Kevin Fennelly, who was glad to get out after a year despite having run an ordinary enough team to the 1998 All-Ireland final, and before him Nickey Brennan (now the GAA president emeritus, as it were), who walked away to the dissonant accompaniment of crowd abuse.

No one back then spoke of courtly flourishes when new managers were being appointed. From the intervening 12 championships Kilkenny have emerged with the Liam MacCarthy on seven occasions, a record only topped in the modern era by Mick O’Dwyer’s eight football All-Irelands in the same number of seasons with Kerry and in hurling history 100 years ago by Kilkenny’s seven in 10 hurling championships.

Cody may have benefited from exceptional playing talent but putting together multiple All-Ireland wins is a rare enough achievement – only O’Dwyer and his most celebrated predecessor, Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan, have greater success at the highest level – and the burden of expectation is correspondingly high.

Nonetheless Kilkenny is but one extreme in the managerial game. Few of the other appointments for 2011 will inspire such acclaim and high hopes.

Ironically it’s the All-Ireland champions, Tipperary who have had to choose a new manager and backroom team and although optimism is at least as abundant in the county as it is over the Urlingford border, grafting a new management into place to take charge of breakthrough champions is a delicate process.

Cork successfully managed to achieve back-to-back success in 2005, having replaced Donal O’Grady with John Allen but that was more of a management buy-out than a takeover. Kerry accomplished the same feat in 2007 after Pat O’Shea had succeeded Jack O’Connor after what was a clean break between distinct managements.

In Tipp’s – and Declan Ryan’s – case though the team is not as experienced as the above sides, both of whom featured a number of players with two All-Ireland medals won with different managers.

The challenge of taking charge of champions and trying to guide them in the direction of retaining a title is one aspect of intercounty management but there are other less glamorous tasks being organised in the final months of the year.

New managers coming in to take charge of teams that aren’t so successful have to contend with the closed season, which prevents collective training until the new year, the challenge of getting all the best players in the clubs to engage with the county and then pursuing promotion from whatever division they’re in.

Pressure comes at all depths. It’s likely to prove intense for Séamus McEnaney in the seasons ahead, assuming he is ratified by the Meath county committee this evening. Already the county has been full of noises, protesting at the prospect of an outside appointment and the process is anything but assured.

It’s just the latest in a sequence of car-crash administration by the county when it comes to appointing managers. Yet on this occasion Meath did the right thing. A sub-committee was empanelled to consider the vacancy and make a recommendation on who should succeed Eamon O’Brien, terminated despite taking the county to an All-Ireland semi-final and – albeit notionally – a Leinster title.

The proposal that McEnaney should get the position wasn’t too much of a surprise given his extensive intercounty experience with Monaghan but neither was the opposition to the idea.

McEnaney’s entourage of specialist assistants is expensive but it’s no more than most top counties have in place to maximise their chances of achieving success. The county might feel they can’t afford subscription to that elite club but would that be the actual reason for rejecting him? Perhaps the opposition is more based on the fact that the genuinely elite counties never go outside their boundaries to recruit managers. In the 40 years or so of the modern game only one county in hurling (Offaly) and one in football (Galway) have won All-Irelands with outside managers. And by doing so here Meath may feel they’re accepting a loss of status.

Yet what was the point of asking Liam Keane, a formidable GAA administrator, Joe Cassells, an All-Ireland winning captain and former selector, and county chair Barney Allen to spend time formulating a recommendation if there were to be de facto prohibitions on certain candidates? Maybe McEnaney’s voodoo won’t extend to Meath but it’s hard to see why he shouldn’t get a chance, having satisfied the examiners.

The final round of appointments won’t quite be the end of managerial business for the year. Within the next few weeks GAA director general Páraic Duffy will be presenting to the Management Committee and Central Council his discussion paper on the payment of managers, an issue he raised in his report to last April’s annual congress.

Were anyone taking an inventory of the energy, time and commitment that intercounty managers invest, they couldn’t fail to be impressed. Allowing that performance is a matter between the committee that makes the appointment and the manager or coach in question, how reasonable is it to proscribe the remuneration of those involved?

The practice takes place on such a widespread basis that the restatements of amateur principle on the issue are beginning to resemble the interminable family planning debates of the 1970s between moral arguments and those wanting to regularise what had become commonplace.

Duffy’s motivation for embarking on the project was specifically to address the hypocrisy of maintaining a rule more honoured in the breach than in its observance.

Having extensively canvassed opinion within the association, the director general has come to a conclusion, which he is unsurprisingly playing close to his chest given the capacity for mischief in leaking a discussion paper without being on hand to explain it as soon as it hits the public arena.

Given that saying one thing and doing another has almost become a cultural norm within the GAA the debate in the weeks ahead will be, ummm . . . interesting.