Billy O Loughlin is the man for the job.
Liam Kearns is surely a safer bet than TO’S. The fact O’ Sé was Offaly coach this year when they were relegated, knocked out of Leinster by Wexford and hammered in the Tailteann by Westmeath would lead you to be slightly cautious of his merits. Liam Kearns is a perfect fit for a young Offaly team brimming with potential.
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Agreed. I think Offaly dodged a bullet here. He was defensive coach. I’m not that into football but even to my eye that Westmeath match was a defensive shitshow.
Kearns seems to be a perfect fit for a poor enough team with a few good young lads coming through
We’ve had a few of those lads over the years - we’re still where we are.
Anyone able to post this?
Sure we always have great young lad coming through,where they go to I don’t know.I think the whole underage thing in Offaly is being a bit overblown tbh.One swallow never made a summer.
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Offaly are the real deal. A Leinster within the next 5 years. It’s coming.
‘40k a man’ - The high costs in recruiting a county manager
Between selectors, training sessions and underage development, ideally county boards look for a manager who will leave a structure in place for after they leave – a legacy manager is the holy grail
Between selectors, training sessions and underage development, ideally county boards look for a manager who will leave a structure in place for after they leave – a legacy manager is the holy grail
August 27 2022 02:30 AM
A few years back, a delegation from a county board travelled to a hotel a couple of hours away to wrap up a deal for a new senior football manager.
All ground work was done. Terms broadly agreed. The trip was made in expectation rather than hope.
Between travelling, meetings and speaking to various stakeholders, the person driving the recruitment process reckons he invested over 40 hours working to enlist this particular candidate
They discussed selectors. A training base. A dynamic with the U-21s. Short- and medium-term targets.
All was agreed.
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They ate lunch. Organised a local media event and a presentation to club managers.
And then, just as the delegation, chuffed that their efforts had come to fruition, they took turns in shaking their new manager’s hand, he ordered dessert.
“By the way, I’m going to need another 40 grand for my trainer.”
Square one.
“The hardest two jobs of a county chairman are: finding a new senior football or hurling manager, and deciding who gets All-Ireland final tickets,” says former Wexford GAA chairman Derek Kent.
“That’s one part of the job you definitely don’t miss.
“There’s no right or wrong way to do it,” says current Leitrim chairman Enda Stenson, who struck gold last year when he convinced Andy Moran to take his initial steps in management from Mayo to Leitrim.
“It just depends on the circumstances of the county at the time.”
How challenging is it for a county to identify and recruit a suitable manager in the current environment?
Five of the seven serving or ex-county board members who spoke to independent.ie about their experiences did so on the proviso of anonymity. Some told stories as if splayed across a therapists’ couch, relaying a buried trauma.
It’s an increasingly recurring headache.
As it stands, there are seven inter-county vacancies in football. By the time 2023 begins, 12 of the counties will have shiny new football managers, the same number as at the start of this year.
That’s a churn of two-thirds of the counties in Ireland within roughly one year.
Wicklow are looking for their third senior football management in ten months. And that’s only the half of it.
Since the end of the inter-county season, six of the 11 Liam MacCarthy Cup counties from 2022 have had to source some fresh managerial meat.
The task is simple: find someone capable, interested, affordable and agreeable by the county’s clubs. And do it under constant public scrutiny.
“Social media has changed everything,” says Stenson.
“You have to be very strong-willed or singled-minded in the pursuit of what you’re doing to block all of that out.”
Broadly speaking, there are three ways to proceed.
The county executive will either accept nominations from clubs, establish a sub-committee, or drive the process through itself.
Unsurprisingly, the theory and the practice don’t always align.
A number of those who have been involved suggest the exercise is “too democratic”, leading to situations where clubs nominate candidates – some of whom even get interviewed before the executive push through their preferred choice anyway.
The illusion of democracy.
Last year, in his Irish Times column, the now freshly minted Mayo manager Kevin McStay gave an interesting insight to the smoke-and-mirrors act that occasionally comes with these situations.
In 2013, he received a phone call from someone involved in the search for a new Kildare manager.
He was informed of a meeting that was happening that evening where it was expected that a candidate would be chosen.
“I was told that my name had been included on a list that had been drawn up a few weeks earlier,” McStay wrote, “and this call – the first call I received from the board – was to check if I had any interest in the position.”
McStay was, in fact, interested. But there was a caveat. Quite a significant one.
The caller informed McStay that the board had already decided who their new manager would be – and it wasn’t him.
Effectively, the phone call was a ticked box, so that delegates could be told that all the nominated candidates had been contacted.
A year later, McStay applied and interviewed for the Mayo job. On this occasion, he was the only candidate. Yet within 24 hours, he was being informed by people outside the appointment process that he would not be getting the job.
Since then, Mayo’s managerial appointments process has been formalised.
McStay’s candidacy was approved on Monday within the framework of a management appointments policy that forms part of the Mayo GAA Operations Manual.
These were established under the chairmanship of Liam Moffatt and had already been used for the respective appointments of Maurice Sheridan and Seán Deane to the U-20 and minor football manager roles.
And yet, even if propriety and transparency are fundamental in Mayo now, the way in which candidates and their management teams quickly became public knowledge drew plenty of comment.
Point nine on the Croke Park guidelines around managerial appointments, published in 2009, states that “a key deliverable in this exercise will be to maintain the confidentiality of the process.”
By contrast, on the morning of McStay’s appointment, the Dublin County Board announced that Micheál Donoghue had agreed to take over as their senior hurling manager, along with details of his backroom team, and that Shane O’Brien would serve both as selector and U-20 manager.
Prior to that, there had been no public acknowledgement of who had been nominated, what the process was or when it would take place. Donoghue’s appointment was a welcome surprise for Dublin hurling people.
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“You’re always weighing up whether to go for the tried and trusted or the high risk,” says Kent who, in his time as Wexford chairman, appointed – among others – Davy Fitzgerald and Paul Galvin.
“And you’re always trying to gauge who is interested for the right reason.”
There are other ways to go about it.
On Tuesday, Billy Lee stepped down as Limerick football manager after six years.
That outcome would have come as a surprise in 2017, when he was invited to be part of the committee tasked with finding a Limerick manager.
“We went through a couple of names on the first night,” he explained. “On the second night, I was either late arriving or the lads decided they’d get there before me. Whichever it was, the question was put to me that night would I do it . . .”
In 2008, Cavan enlisted an external recruitment company, SportTrackerjob, to help find a successor to Donal Keoghan.
Peter Quinn, the former GAA president, was the company’s chairman and they counted Pete McGrath among their employees, but the fact that Cavan ended up with Tom Carr suggested that regardless of the mechanics of the process, the pool of potential managers remains the same depth.
One officer recalls contacting a counterpart in another county, both of whom had been linked in media reports with the same possible manager.
Effectively, it was a courtesy call, to see if the candidate was playing one county off the other in search of favourable terms.
“No. We’ve no interest in him at all,” came the reply. “We’ve someone much bigger lined up.”
Six weeks later, the other county had yet to make their appointment. When they did, the man who came in had no previous inter-county management experience, little national profile, and lasted less than a year.
Who was spoofing who, and to what extent, is still not entirely clear.
Never far away in all of this is the murky issue of cost/payment.
These may be viewed as two separate issues: the cost of a management team versus straight payment to a manager. But for county boards, they are more or less the same thing.
“You’re getting a package,” says an ex-county board officer. “You’re not just getting a manager. And that means the board can agree on what it costs and not concern themselves with who is getting what.”
One officer from a county outside the top two divisions in football revealed that, his management team comes in at around €100,000 cost to the county board, before any player travel expenses or nutrition costs are factored in.
This, he is certain, represents value for money for a county of their stature.
Equally, he says, there are counties whose managerial outlay will total multiples of that figure.
“Forty grand a man,” he reckons the price of one particular elite county set-up to be.
Increasingly, county boards are factoring in longer-term considerations when considering new management.
“Ideally,” says Stenson, “what you’re looking for is someone who will leave a structure in place for after they leave. That’s nearly more important.”
Kent agrees. A “legacy” manager is the holy grail in all of this.
Getting Galvin was, he insists, “a great appointment” even if his reign was so short-lived.
“The papers were full of Wexford football. When did that happen before? We had won five of seven league matches. And then Covid hit and he had to go.”
Bringing Fitzgerald to Wexford to manage their hurlers required slightly less imagination, but the result is one he still reflects on with satisfaction.
“We needed a lift and he gave us one,” Kent recalls. “And you can see the effects still. The numbers of kids hurling and the profile of the team, even now.
“That’s the big success of Davy in Wexford,” he adds. “Because really, the truth is you just never know how any appointment is going to work out.”
It’s ridiculous.
I was thinking about this morning on my weekly plod around the parish.
It’s an industry and it’s the tail that’s wagging the dog.
Give the cunts 1 training session per week and leave it at that.
The tactics would suffer but the entertainment would be unreal.
Kent didn’t appoint Davy.
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You’ve it nailed there.
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After all his big licks about Vicki and the girls heading off
Ger Brennan lined up to become new Monaghan senior football manager
Ger is a great sort and one of the games greatest thinkers.
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Must be stepping up to managing a boys u16 team
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It seems Willie Maher will replace Cheddar
Some exodus of the pundit class of late.
Lee Keegan will be the senior pundit next year at this rate.
A fair commute from Crossmaglen to Aughrin.
Edit: Only 2 hours and 6 mins according to google maps.