Managers get hired, fired up and fired

It's been an interesting week on the managerial front. The concept of the manager as "supremo" was originally - and still is in some quarters - reviled as smacking too much of a foreign code and its first coming is sometimes incorrectly dated as 30 years ago this season when Kevin Heffernan masterminded Dublin's return to eminence.

But the idea of one person running the fortunes of a team stretched back a long way and the genre included Kerry's Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan who led the county to eight All-Irelands and was as far as could be ascertained in Kerry last week, the last coach/trainer/manager to lead the county to an All-Ireland final without having a senior medal himself.

It's not surprising that someone with strong views on how the game is played should want to be surrounded with sympathetic individuals who can discuss problems intelligently and advise but equally it's natural that anyone in such a position of responsibility should want the final say in matters of team selection and preparation.

This trend has hardened into the norm and with the growing pressures of the modern game, managers know they will receive excessive credit for success and disproportionate flak when it all goes wrong. No wonder then they want things done their way.

As one All-Ireland winning manager bluntly put it when asked about the qualities he would seek in choosing selectors: "Yes men." That prescription is even more valued these days when the pressure at the top of the intercounty game is high enough without having tensions within the camp.

Such tension can still arise and only last week word emerged from Tyrone that Mickey Harte's and Paddy Tally's once textbook partnership in football preparation had foundered on disagreements too profound to allow its survival.

The outside world exerts enough pressure of its own. In the past 10 days or so we have seen how the role of the county board can make life intolerable for a team management. So even with progress on the field and the backing of the players, Gerry Fahy couldn't get a whole-hearted endorsement from Offaly officials.

The public at large rarely credit or blame anyone but the person in charge, regardless of the circumstances in which the job has to be done. There is a bottom line and when it is breached public access radio and Internet outlets hum with disapproval, significant amounts of it unreasoned and at times vicious.

On Monday night's Marooned, a documentary on Páidí Ó Sé's first year in Westmeath, on RTÉ 1 we had a reminder of the circumstances in which he had made the move: basically on the rebound from Kerry. Even at the end of the programme by which stage he could reflect on a stunning achievement, he was still wistful about his own county.

His hurt was manifest, his sense of betrayal still vivid. Yet virtually everyone, apart from himself, knew that his time was up in Kerry. Eight years and the county restored to its place at the top of football: it was an honourable legacy.

But the end still rankled and not just in Ventry. At Kerry's All-Ireland press night, chairman Seán Walsh was asked had he felt under pressure because it was he who had informed Ó Se that it was time to go - not that he was fired but that he wouldn't be getting a renewal of his expired appointment. Despite that he had only been doing the county board's wishes, Walsh was still animated on the issue.

"There's good in I side-tracking the issue. I definitely did. Myself and Páidí Sé were great friends and it wasn't an easy thing to do to change the management but that was the decision. Páidí's done very, very well in Westmeath and we've done very, very well at home. I'd like to leave it at that."

The Kerry chairman had always been supportive of O Sé, a support that at times compromised his administrative function but his fervent wish that changing the guard could be achieved in an amicable fashion wasn't to be. So what was to many people an obvious course of action was beset with wounded pride and hurt feelings.

Intercounty managers are, as is frequently laboured, amateurs. They don't as a rule live in millionaires' mansions, electric fenced off from their abusive public. That there's no big pay cheque to cushion disappointment is slightly irrelevant. The best managers are driven by their own intensity and very little a boorish supporter says can hurt more than what goes on inside.

Think of that tableau of Billy Morgan, prostrate behind the goal when Mikey Sheehy looked to have snatched the 1987 Munster final away from him. It was repeated by Brian Cody as this year's Leinster title was whipped away from his Kilkenny team.

Think of Cody wired in Thurles like a human generator crackling electricity into his already charged-up team. Losing and the prospect of it transformed him.

What public criticisms of his handling of this year's All-Ireland are going to come near that impact? It's not - as is sometimes said in a well-meaning way - that his three All-Ireland victories should insulate him against the hurt but rather that his internal pain, for however long it lasted or continues to last, simply swamps the mud slinging.

One losing All-Ireland manager once said to me, shaking his head that I, a journalist, couldn't really understand what it was like to lose at that level.

Damn right I don't and have no wish to learn. The corollary is that I can't experience the high-octane rush of winning. Also true but I'll live with the middle ground.

smoran@irish-times.ie