Iāve been vindicated yet again.
PR disaster from the Galway lads there. Surely they have some lad in the GPA who could have run an eye over it.
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Itās like when you are having a fight with the missus and you say something stupid like Iāve done loads around the place and she looks for examples and your like well I threw on a wash during the week and cooked dinner one night and and andā¦ loads of other stuff.
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Iād say thats half the problem right there, rather than the solution
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And the moment youāve said it, the horror descends when you realise how idiotic it sounds and the barrage comes. Best say nothing, and be thoughtā¦
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āI put out the binsā
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Only after I told you to do it
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That made me laugh alright. Thing is the little bookworm gimp could have been pacified by the manager or one of his selectors being proactive. All it would take is rocking up beside him when heās doing his warm up stretches or whatever and having a 2-minute chat with him to give him some pointers. The nerd possibly wanted a 1-to-1 sit down using SWOT analysis though. There are inter-county managers who refuse to talk to certain players though.
Mick O Dwyer was a fucker this way. If you were in his good books he was all about you, but if you were out of the starting 15, forget about it, he didnāt want to know about you.
Managers of squads full of class players can manage in a different way. Players know thereās a strong possibility of winning something so they knuckle down and get on with it, even if they think they should be treated better.
It doesnāt work when, say, Liam Dunne decides heās not going to speak to a raft of players all season. But someone else with access to better players (and a winning track record) can be fairly distant/ruthless without things falling apart. I donāt know if Cunningham was ruthless or just a bit incompetent.
The other thing now is GGA players are no longer solely farm hands and manual labour types. Some of them spend around 15 years in university (e.g. Bryan Cullen) and are well educated so they question things rather than accepting them blindly.
The guys that matter are the ones that play.
Fair point, but this was Laois, so it doesnāt exactly work. All you got was lads getting rightly pissed off and going on the beer when things got tough. The Laois way really.
Sounds like Laois lads are mentally weak.
Maybe if Cunningham had given that useless cunt some more responsibility, like setting up the cones before training, things could have been better?
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Or may play.
Any good manager should be able to select and manage his squad.
Itās not fucking rocket science.
The type of lad who is precious enough to take a little bit of emotional neglect from his manager to heart is the type of lad I donāt want in the heat of the battle.
Put your head down and work harder, suck it up and get on with it. Thatās the mindset of champions and it doesnāt seem like that culture is there with Galway, there seems to be a rotten sense of entitlement with them.
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Maybe so, but as saf said, some players need an arm round the shoulder, and some a boot up the arse. Any decent manager should see this and act accordingly.
The nicest shyest most uncertain type can get white line fever and be ferocious and uncompromising in the heat of a proper game.
Saw a sports psychologist who worked with Tipp speak about that - managers speak to their best players as they know they wonāt have to drop them and donāt like speaking to anybody they may have to axe
We all do it. Cognitive dissonance innit
We prefer to think of it as alcoholically strong.
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Many great managers donāt. The attitude of the Galway players say a lot about their barren spell. Managers will generally have little interaction with peripheral figures, I lost count about the number of Celtic deadwood who moaned about OāNeill ignoring them. Juninho, Laursen, Hedman etc all moaned about him during his tenure in this regard.
Itās about accountability and the Galway players want none of it in the face of failures.
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