All-Ireland glory grand delusion for most

Sideline Cut:As the drum rolls in honour of the beginning of another football championship, so all managers must clear their throats and solemnly declare that the All-Ireland is about winning.

Deep in the well of their subconscious, the football men who will stride the sidelines in Clones or Croke Park or Cavan or wherever this summer know this is simply not true. They know their task in the championship is to defer the inevitability of losing for as long as possible.

We tend to think of the All-Ireland championship as this great unwieldy beast of a competition that arrives just before summer and is still going when the air turns frigid, the swallows head south and coal fires flicker in the living room. But in reality, the championship is two, three or, on a good year, four very distinct Sundays. As the late John McGahern once said, "The day is the whole show."

And the appeal of the championship is it offers a grand day out. It might be a quick scoot up the road to the county ground and back to the local in plenty of time for The Sunday Game. About 10 years ago, a bunch of us watched Donegal duly dispatch Antrim on a scorching day in Ballybofey.

The plan was to hightail back down through Barnesmore Gap in time for an evening swim. But there was an obligatory stop off at a pub on the diamond in Donegal town. Among the patrons was a publican from our own town - also father to one of our number. He was holding court at the bar and had arranged for four pints to be delivered in our direction almost before the door was closed. These were duly delivered and murdered and in the rush to get to the sea, our group proceeded to leave the pub without returning the courtesy of the round. At the bar, SF waited until we had opened the front door and were about to step into the street so that when he addressed us we could neither leave nor graciously retreat.

"Are ye away, lads?" he roared with mischievous glee. Then he took a meaningful look at the near-empty glasses beside him at the bar and advised, "Well, the next time ye come to town, be sure to bring a pound between ye."

There was no comeback. We stood there in mortification for what seemed minutes as laughter rang around the bar. Then we then headed down the road in shame.

Or the championship might mean the altogether more laborious and emotionally heightened trip to Dublin ("Are ya for up?" as the saying goes). In the part of the world I come from, there are only two practical approaches to going to see the county team play in Dublin. The first is to plan the trip like a military operation, leave at dawn, motor along obscure, hazardous but allegedly shorter Border routes, park the car on Dorset Street facing west, sandwiches, meet whoever outside The Big Tree or Gill's pub, watch the match and leave like a tornado, the aim being to be hitting the Meath border by the time the post-match interviews are on the radio.

It is that or you make a weekend of it.

Once, a taxi driver from home replied to an enquiry as to the success of a championship weekend in Dublin: "Brilliant. We did the town. Bad Bob's, the works."

And Bad Bob's followed by the works, whatever they may entail, is about as much as most people can expect from the All-Ireland championship. That is as good as it is going to get. Because of that, nothing announces the onset of winter so resoundingly as the feel of O'Connell Street at around eight o'clock on All-Ireland football final evening.

The day, the show, is done. The vast crowds have disappeared, the balloons and bunting of the relevant counties hang forlornly outside the Royal Hotel, and always, always a tipsy fan stands swaying on the boulevard outside Supermacs, glassy-eyed, emotionally overwrought, clueless as to where his friends/family/children have disappeared but past caring about anything other than his bacon supreme.

Unless your county has won - which often translates as "unless you are from Kerry" - the night of the All-Ireland football final has about it the small kiss of death. Another opportunity has passed.

Still, for a few weeks anyways, it could be said that a quarter of the counties competing in the All-Ireland entertained dreams or delusions of actually going all the way.

It is the manager's responsibility to somehow balance that mood of childish expectation with the temperate voice of a kindly parish priest. Although the cult of manager in Gaelic games goes back to the great rivalry between Kevin Heffernan's Dublin and Mick O'Dwyer's Kerry, the idea of the manager as an omniscient figure has never been more in vogue. It is almost obligatory to note that such and such a manager is almost pathologically organised, supremely cool under pressure, has a Masters in psychology, nutrition and religion, is a chess master tactician, is both ruthless and compassionate and is friendly to everyone but true friends with very few.

The modern manager must be all things to all people. And it would seem that most contemporary managers are hugely energetic, blindly optimistic, dauntingly organised and able to operate on the sort of minute daily timetable more readily associated with George Bush or Tony Blair.

They are all very different people, the men who will take charge of the counties in this year's football contest.

But it should be noted they are all probably a tiny bit crazy. Even the most analytical and statistically driven are absolute dreamers. The dream they peddle is the All-Ireland title is a democratic competition, available to all counties.

For the past few weeks, we have watched the putative leaders of our nation indulging in all kinds of unseemly high-jinks on the campaigning circuit, from waltzing to carol singing to posing. This wilful abandonment of dignity is, apparently, the price one must pay to achieve high office and to persuade the people to follow you. How the politicians must envy, therefore, the natural pull of the leading football managers. It is remarkable to behold the genuinely sensational impact a manager can have on the sense of well-being and pride in a county on the back of a few great summer Sundays.

They say nothing beats the thrill of playing. But walking off the field after a close win, the sun on your back and the sound of pure ovation and thanks ringing in your ears cannot be bad either. And for most counties, the appeal of the championship boils down to those wonderful self-contained days of unexpected euphoria.

In some vague way, all of Ireland is contesting the Sam Maguire but in reality, teams compete and people follow the contest for more complicated and greater reasons. But at least this evening, all counties and all teams are truly equal.

The eve of another All-Ireland and as managers make their cocoa, sharpen their pencils and plot a path towards sporting greatness, that big, handsome elusive cup is out there for the winning.

And then, some Sunday sooner or later, you realise, yet again, it isn't.