Shrewd Sheedy times his exit to perfection

SIDELINE CUT:In the thankless, mad world of intercounty management, quitting while at the very top seems a wise choice, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE ABRUPT departure of Liam Sheedy once again highlights what must be the strangest pastime in modern Ireland: managing an intercounty hurling or football team.

The revelation that the Tipperary manager and his selectors, Michael Ryan and Eamon O’Shea, were clocking up 16-hour days was not really news. Since 1995, when Ger Loughnane happened to hear Kate Bush singing Running Up That Hill on the radio and came up with a new and pulverising training regime for the Clare hurlers, the demands that managers have placed on themselves and on their teams has gone through the roof.

I have spoken to a fair number of GAA managers down the years and have reached the conclusion that they are all – in the most flattering and wonderful sense – mad.

Many hold responsible posts in teaching or banking or business, most would be broadly classed as conservative. Some are pioneers, others fitness enthusiasts. Most are family men. But when it comes down to it they are much more eccentric than anyone you will find in the rock ’n’ roll firmament these days. When it comes down to it, GAA managers are the last romantics.

Because it surely takes a kind of lunacy – does it not? – to accept the offer to manage a hurling or football team. Unless that team is the Kilkenny hurlers or the Kerry footballers, you are almost certain to fail and even then, the chances of falling short are fairly high.

Most counties have never won an All-Ireland title and may win provincial trophies once in a blue moon, so from the beginning, the first role of the manager is to sell to his team the delusion that, this year, it can be different. That somehow he can transform their usual fate.

The old methodology of basically running players into the ground until they were too tired to think, let alone wonder if the manager was any good, has been discounted. Modern managers dip into philosophies of all kind.

The core requirement of fitness remains a central part of all GAA teams. But the manager has become much more than the guy who blows the whistle and names the team on Thursday nights. He has become a sort of a guru and patriarch to his team.

Alex Ferguson of Manchester United and Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers are probably two of the most influential managers in world sport.

The two men are products of their own environments: Ferguson from the tough Glasgow suburb of Govan and Jackson, the Montana preacher’s son who found fame in the messy New York City of the 1970s, and their background shines through in their management styles.

Ferguson is a direct descendent of the line of austere and brilliant Scottish managers quick of wit and short of temper. Jackson is part mystic and part ruthless sonofabitch, a guy who lights joss sticks to fill the Lakers dressing room with incense before games and who gives his players reading material unsolicited.

A recent documentary about the Los Angeles Lakers showed Jackson – an unfeasibly huge man – standing on the tarmac of an airport runway and musing about the cities visited during his five decades of involvement with the NBA. Aged 65 now, this may well be his last season as a coach and he admitted he wonders if he would ever return to these cities.

Jackson is a nomad and encourages his players to see their season together as a “journey”. And they do that partly because like most athletes they have a superstitious bent and believe Jackson has a sort of other-worldly knowledge. But the main reason they follow him is because they know he knows how to win championships.

The thing is, Ferguson and Jackson are paid handsomely for transferring their aura and knowledge onto the DNA of their teams.

For GAA managers, it is different. And forget about the mileage allowances and the commonplace stories of under-the-table payouts; those are rows for another day. Strip it all away and you still have to be slightly out there to want to manage a team.

We only ever see them on match days, striding up and down the sideline in day-glo bibs, having urgent conferences with their mentors and obsessively consulting their stop watches. But the truth is they have little more impact than the man selling ice-creams on the day of a match. Most of the time a manager can make a substitution that most of those watching in the crowd know is coming or will make a switch that may or may not work.

Beyond that, he is little more than a glorified cheerleader, helpless to really prevent what is happening in that place that Nicky English used to refer to as “between the lines”. No, the manager does not really earn his reputation on the glamorous days when the cameras are focused on him. He earns it through the long, hidden days of the season when he either succeeds or fails. And during the tedium of organising weekend training sessions, drawing up drills, getting to training first and leaving last. And through fretting about players – worrying about their form, their injuries, their jobs, their lives, their insecurities and whether, after the months and months of lung-busting honesty they have given you, you are going to be able to give them a game at the end of it.

Managers earn their stripes by driving home late from county board meetings or away matches on Sunday nights and it is raining and there isn’t even Val Joyce for company anymore. Or while being told how shit they are by some voice in the stand.

And they earn it by trying desperately to get an edge, by borrowing from those distant luminaries like Jackson or Ferguson, by getting former GAA gods in to speak, by organising weekends away, by understanding when players need some downtime, need to be young. In most cases too, part of being a great GAA manager is explaining to your own kids why you are going to be home after bedtime for the 10th night in a row.

From the outside, being a manager is about that time we all see in the first and third Sunday in September, in the last few seconds of a match when the winners and losers have been decided and the lucky one gets, for a fleeting second, to feel like god; to feel as if in some small way they have masterminded this moment. And in a way, they have.

The great GAA managers are never forgotten because they take hold of a county and achieve something that had been hitherto next to impossible. They walk into a dressing room with some crazed light in their eyes and announce that this year it is going to be different. It takes a kind of god complex to step forward from the crowd and to wear those shoes but more than that, it takes the stubbornness and patience to deal with the million and one small obstacles that present themselves every year.

After that, it is down to the talent of their team, to good and bad luck, to freak refereeing decisions, to that ball that just went wide – the usual dramas. There is no one quite as hollowed out as a GAA manager who has just lost a big game. And sooner or later, they all lose big games. It is very rare that a manager has the opportunity to bow out after a perfect season. So in years to come, this may well be regarded as one of the smartest calls Liam Sheedy ever made.