Meath are catapulted into the real world

On GAA: For Meath football the past week has been a bit like Planet of the Apes, as the local GAA fraternity, usually exemplars of the phlegmatic, have found themselves in a weird and terrifying place only to discover that it's not some distant galaxy but the future.

There might have been a slightly happier ending in Navan during the week but only time will confirm that and there's plenty of takers for the prospect of something less pleasant somewhere down the line.

One club activist expressed the angst and ambivalence in the county in advance of Monday's resolution and summed up what was ultimately the governing mood.

"I think for a lot of people the worst thing is how public the whole thing has been. We never had to suffer this sort of thing before. It was what happened in other counties. There is probably a feeling that Eamonn Barry showed poor judgment in trying to make the appointments he did but at the same time I think most clubs would want him to stay on because trying to find a replacement would be a disaster."

How did it get to this? It's only four years since Meath were Leinster champions and All-Ireland finalists, apparent contenders for a few years yet.

The passing of the Boylan era a few months back was mourned because of all he had achieved but there was equally an undercurrent of relief that the task of reconstruction might now begin.

Onlookers have observed - and even the Meath officers have accepted - that sheer lack of familiarity with the process of changing senior managers and resolving inevitable personality differences has complicated matters for the county. Boylan was for the most part extremely adept at handling people and very few fires broke out under his command so the need to extinguish them was never evident.

Little wonder then that the whole matter has been handled so clumsily when the new manager turned out to be someone with whom the county chairman Fintan Ginnity didn't get on and who was sufficiently unwise to provoke a crisis only weeks into his appointment.

Although the terms of the rapprochement are objectively humiliating for Barry there is equally a sense in which he has been fireproofed for a while now that a fairly serious attempt to unhorse him and reverse the decision of the county committee has come to nothing.

It hasn't been just the suspicion that the county executive saw an opportunity to terminate an appointment they didn't want in the first place but that some club delegates who had been in favour of Barry's taking on the position were having second thoughts in the light of the new manager's acknowledged error of judgment. That the antipathy between him and Ginnity should spill over into a confrontation after just one challenge match under his belt has created anxiety that the next spat is only a matter of time away.

There was also the background shadow of the nomination process. None of the big names from Boylan's All-Ireland winning teams were willing to contest the position against their former boss. By the time he had walked away nominations had closed. Whether this was frustration or relief to the likes of Colm O'Rourke, Gerry McEntee and Colm Coyle doesn't really matter but their absence created the possibility of a white knight bid should Barry have walked the plank.

There was no question but that Barry deserved to be given a chance to do the job. He had a good club record with Dunshaughlin's three-in-a-row team, which he took to Meath's first Leinster club title in over 20 years. He had also contested the managerial position in Boylan's final three years.

But managing at the top is further removed from the club scene than it ever was. Intercounty managers are just that: managers of huge backroom teams. Armagh's Joe Kernan told Saturday's National Coaching Conference about the delicately balanced organisation he runs, with specialists in charge of every aspect of team preparation. He co-ordinates this effort and takes the final decision on everything.

Kernan told the conference that it's hard to let people go from the set-up but that he sometimes had to because they wanted to do too much rather than stick to their defined role.

One former All-Ireland winner described in outline what an intercounty manager has to do nowadays to compete with the Armaghs and Tyrones of the world.

"To manage an intercounty team these days you need top-class medical back-up, top-class physio, top-class sports science back-up. You need to have a connection to wealthy people who you can call at the drop of a hat and ask them for funds for anything the team or players need - people who trust you and will find the money without question. You can't be running to the county officers every time you need money."

Into this world comes Eamonn Barry with a major upheaval already behind him and the Nine Theses of Ginnity nailed to his forehead. It's hard enough to get things done when you're on the same page as the county officers - as Boylan would testify in recent years - but when you're dealing with the county officers through a middleman it's a lot worse.

Eamonn Cregan - who had All-Ireland credentials - ran foul of his county officers in Limerick and he went through the same phases as the Meath manager: confronting the problem, backing off and relenting. Unsurprisingly it didn't work out. This week's keynote mood in the county was unease. Even Barry sceptics recognised that the attempt to dismiss him had triggered a demoralising stand-off. There will hardly however be soaring expectations of the season ahead. Barry knows there are worse ways to take on your debut season as an intercounty manager. But he also knows there are better.