Managing to go with the flow

Seán Moran analyses the evolving role played by the men at helm of Gaelic games county teams

Managerial traffic is commonplace at this time of the year but the current round of appointments and vacancies is quantitatively different in that there's been an exodus of experience, particularly in football.

Sixteen managers have left their posts at senior intercounty level over the course of this year's championships. Of the 12 to have departed in football, five - Eamonn Coleman, Mickey Moran, Brian McEniff, Seán Boylan and Páidí Ó Sé - were directly involved in winning All-Irelands and a sixth, John Maughan, led Mayo to three All-Ireland finals.

This exodus represents a substantial drain of experience from the game. Leaving aside the phenomenon of Mick O'Dwyer, now embarking on his 10th successive year in management having gone straight from Kildare to Laois and what will staggeringly be his 29th season in charge of an intercounty team in the past 32 years, there is evidence of a contracting life-span for top-level management.

Should he decide to stay on, Armagh's Joe Kernan will hold the record for the most consecutive years, five, in charge of the same football team. Brian Cody is the longest serving of the lot and will, assuming as expected he does continue, be entering his eighth year as manager of the Kilkenny hurlers.

It's understandable that managers who believe - or are convinced - they've done all that they can do, will call it a day but it's now common for some who would be seen to have more to contribute to walk away.

Recognising when to get out is a valuable instinct but of late it's sometimes been at the expense of knowing when to stay put.

Even the intense agonising over whether to continue at the top of the intercounty game suggests the burdens involved in meeting the demands of management.

Cork's John Allen is expected to stay on with the hurlers whom he led to an All-Ireland in his only season as senior manager but he has been thinking long and hard about the matter.

Jack O'Connor, with one championship defeat in two seasons to his name, contemplated quitting. That one match was, of course, an outsize contest but that the stakes should be so high that the loser might feel he had nothing left to offer is a commentary on the pressure that the intercounty environment is generating.

The rise of Ulster counties Armagh and Tyrone under the influential management of Kernan and Mickey Harte as well as O'Connor's own turnaround of Kerry last year are only the latest factors to have focused intense attention on those at the top.

In the past there was relative indifference to who might take charge of teams.

Seminal figures in the game like Kerry's Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan or Cork's Jim "Tough" Barry were exceptions rather than the rule.

The attitude for much the GAA's history was that if the players were good enough, only active incompetence on the part of trainers would unduly influence a team's progress.

Not all went to the extremes of Offaly where a senior football team was once picked by the entire county board but the concept of management as opposed to simple training wasn't widespread.

That situation has changed so much that, nowadays, great successes are as likely to be associated with the team management as with the players. Even the players implicitly recognise as much by at times agitating for change, anxious that their considerable effort and sacrifice could be compromised by a management failure to maximise the team's prospects.

The desire for change has become the new opium among disgruntled counties. By and large the players won't change all that much but there is a fervent belief that a new man at the top will transform unpromising situations.

There are very few modern success stories in which the role of the manager doesn't feature prominently.

Even in the case of the one team whose talent made it untouchable for long periods, the influence of Mick O'Dwyer is widely credited with driving Kerry to eight All-Irelands in 12 years.

The messianic perception of managers is pronounced in the case of appointments from outside of the county.

It's worth noting that a litany of modern breakthrough stories in football have been achieved with the help of outsiders.

Clare (1992), Leitrim (1994), Cavan (1997), Laois (2003) and Westmeath (2004) all won provincial titles either for the first time, in Westmeath's case, or for the first time in ages. In each case an outside appointment oversaw the achievement: John Maughan, John O'Mahony, Martin McHugh, Mick O'Dwyer and Páidí Ó Sé, respectively.

At a different but not insignificant level the performances of Sligo and Fermanagh in taking major scalps in the qualifiers with the former taking eventual All-Ireland winners Armagh to a replay and the latter reaching the semi-final, were also achieved with Peter Ford and Charlie Mulgrew, from Mayo and Donegal respectively, in charge.

For some reason the same trend doesn't hold at All-Ireland level. Maybe the aforementioned type of breakthroughs are the preserve of counties with no recent tradition of success and where familiarity with elite-level demands - or more importantly, indifference to whatever inhibitions have held a county back - has to be imported.

Only seven of the last 50 All-Irelands in football and hurling have been under the baton of outside managers and curiously five of those have been with Offaly; the other two are John O'Mahony's with Galway.

Yet the same period also saw a stream of counties, Donegal, Derry, Armagh and Tyrone, winning All-Irelands for the first time, or in the case of Clare hurlers after a gap of eight decades - all under the management of locals.

Whatever their provenance managers continue to grow in importance at a time when it's clear that the administration and preparation of an elite intercounty team has evolved well beyond the stage where they can adequately be discharged by an individual and his selectors.

At the Cork hurlers' media conference before the All-Ireland final, Allen arranged his backroom team at the top table to make a point of acknowledging their input into the team. Including selectors, there were 13 people listed in the press handout as having a specific function.

Allen's success is widely recognised to be the facility with which he maintained the structures of the previous year after the departure of his predecessor Dónal O'Grady and adapted them to suit his own management style.

Billy Morgan, Allen's football counterpart in Cork, resumed intercounty management last year after a gap of seven years and admitted he was taken aback at how the whole role of management had moved on.

"I find things have changed from the professional point of view," he said. "I would always have thought of myself as professional the last time I was here but it's gone beyond that in terms of training methods, nutrition and sports psychology."

After this year's clear-out, Morgan is now one of only five current intercounty football managers to have won an All-Ireland, a virtual halving of the numbers compared to last year and a clear indication that times are changing.