When a man has to park his job, we’ve passed point of no return

DEREK McGRATH is a fine, honest, intelligent and articulate man, who is hurling to his core. Even though I might not always like the way his team has played, it is impossible not to like the man and the way he carries himself.

Yet, it says much about the madness of the GAA culture we live in that McGrath (below) could come out with a declaration this week that he has parked his job as a teacher for the rest of the season to focus on his position as the Waterford hurling manager.

To be fair, he is doing it for all the right reasons. He did not think it would be possible or responsible to teach his Leaving Certificate students who are searching for college points, while he is in the business of trying to win Allianz League ones.

He suggested that managing an inter-county team is pretty much a 60-hour a week job, and that his focus could not be on his paid job when his head was scrambled when devising a game-plan for what is, in essence, his hobby.

That astounds me. It is only a couple of decades ago that I held a job where I was responsible for 150 men in an engineering company and went home in the evening and worked my dairy farm.

Oh, and I still found time to manage the Limerick hurlers for four years.

And here’s the thing; we never missed a deadline in the company and the hay got saved, the cows got milked and the cat got kicked at home.

And the team? Well, they won a couple of Munster championships, a National League and you might have heard we had a couple of close run things in the All-Ireland final.

Now you are either thinking that I can knock out quite the tune when blowing my own trumpet or that I was a blood relation of Clark Kent’s with farm relief to boot.

Neither, actually. I managed, just like everyone else. We trained two nights a week and if there was not a game fixed for the weekend, we organised a practice match.

Again I know what you are thinking...why don’t I get back into my time machine and head back to a time that has no longer any relevance in this world. I find that odd, though. Is it not strange that those of us who managed our time so that we could work and play — what they might call today a ‘proper life balance’ — are deemed to be behind the curve, and the man who can’t do his job anymore because of the demands of his hobby is at the cutting edge. It freaks me that our game has come to this and it angers me that no-one sees fit to call stop. We have a professional industry thriving inside a part-time game and yet we think that is the norm. The GAA spent €23mil- lion last year in preparing intercounty teams but that is not even half of the cost involved.

The ones who really pay are the players. They are the ones who are getting out of bed at 6am to go the gym, who eat water-biscuits and dumb-bells for breakfast. Who train five times a week, play the other two days, and watch their young lives pass them by from inside a bubble.

For their troubles, they are resourced with career development programmes, mental health supports and counselling services for gambling addiction because the bubble is not for everyone.

I would not begrudge those players anything, but instead of dealing with the symptoms, should we not seek to address the root cause?

Would the GPA, the players union, not be better served in pointing out that what players need is not more support services but more of a life.

And that is the conversation we need to start having soon.

The GAA made a feeble effort at it when introducing a close season which was simply not policeable.

But the only ones that can ever call a halt to this are the players.

If there are managers out there who in effect see their position as a full-time one, and because of that they manage backroom teams who also see their roles as full-time, then the part-time players are the ones who have to play an excessive tune.

They train for longer and harder and yet get to play for shorter.

There was a time when you went for a hip operation it was the body’s way of telling you that it was pension time, but these days we have kids rolled into hospital for hip shavings and they are barely voting age.

And what is all this for? For all the money, the sweat, the tears, for all the nutrition sheets and gym timetables, for all the training weekends and shrink sessions, how much better are our games?

I caught an eyeful of the Dublin and Kerry footballers last weekend — a fixture that was once so compelling that hurling folk would suspend any prejudice towards the big ball code — and it was utter muck.

This applies in hurling as well; there is no payback for all that time that is being invested in the name of the game other than in the misery it has helped to create.

Surely, the time has come to stay stop when there are not enough hours in the week to pursue something that is supposed to be a break from the humdrum of our working lives and not an extension of.

A man should be able to teach during the day and manage a team in the evening.

And a player should be able to puck a ball and still have the time to live a life.

When we can’t do that, we have passed the point of no return.

There’s no payback for time invested