A genius stroke or a grave misstep?

IT wasn’t quite on a par with Kevin Keegan’s infamous 1996 “And I’ll tell you, honestly, I will love it if we beat them. Love it.” rant but it was as close as we’ve ever got to Jim Gavin blowing his top. By now you’re either well versed on the Dublin team manager’s postmatch press conference last Sunday or you couldn’t give a damn, but you can’t deny it didn’t grab the headlines on Sunday evening and on into this week.

Gavin has always come across as a private man and reluctant interviewee. A colleague recently described interviewing Gavin as trying to play handball against a haystack. You get the idea. If Jim Gavin wasn’t a clean-cut military man born and bred in Dublin, he could easily have been a Kerry man. When it suits he can talk plenty without saying anything. Whatever the equivalent of the ‘yerra’ is in Dublin, Gavin strains every utterance through an invisible filter so that all that falls from his silvery tongue is banal platitudes and aching clichés and repetitive nothingness. And that’s not necessarily a criticism of Gavin as a team manager: many GAA managers operate this way, except that Gavin does it in a very measured, deliberate way so one is left in no doubt as to just exactly what he is not saying.

Which is what makes last Sunday’s comment so out of character for him. Without rehashing the whole thing, Gavin clearly felt the need to add his tuppence worth on the whole Diarmuid Connolly saga, and when he wasn’t going to come out and tell us that Connolly is the consummate pain-in-the-ass-butyou-still-gotta-love-him type of player then Gavin was only going to defend his player, albeit without condoning the clear infraction of the rules the player committed. Fair enough, to a point, but much of what Jim Gavin said last Sunday was way off the mark.

From his laying the blame for Connolly’s suspension at the feet of The Sunday Game, and especially Pat Spillane, to his notion that Connolly’s good name was attacked is simply wrong. His claim that he struggled to “give [supporters] a balanced and proportionate opinion” after they “came to me and asked me what’s going on, and why is this imbalance happening” is nothing short of ludicrous.

His assertion that Dublin GAA “received advice from senior counsel that if this went to arbitration [DRA] the case wouldn’t hold, but Diarmuid didn’t want that to happen. He just wanted to move on in the best interests of the team. That’s what he decided to do” is questionable at best. It seems incredible that the legal advice was that the suspension wouldn’t hold up if put before the Disputes Resolution Authority, yet a player who has gone that route before wouldn’t do so again with a three-match suspension hanging over him.

Whatever about the message Gavin felt he had to deliver last Sunday, and to whom, it says much about the messenger too. Is Jim Gavin felling the pressure? Is he or his players starting to crack under the weight of going for a third All-Ireland title in a row?

You wouldn’t think so on the back of Dublin’s 31-point win over Westmeath last Sunday, but forget about that. Tom Cribbin’s side were never going to be anything other than cannon-fodder for the Leinster and All-Ireland champions.

But has Gavin seen something in his team - in the process - that he doesn’t like? Did the League Final defeat uncover a few cracks that Gavin is now trying to seal up or paper over with a deflection tactic, uncharacteristic of the man but one that he deemed necessary, no matter how much it might have dulled his hitherto squeaky clean, uber-cool demeanour?

It seems ridiculous that the back-to-back All-Ireland champions - a team if not universally loved are certainly universally respected - would feel the need to create a siege mentality, if, indeed, that’s what at play here. But maybe Gavin has sensed a touch of complacency creeping in, and feels he has to set his players up in an ‘us against the world’ situation.

Of course, he hardly constructed the whole Connolly pushing the linesman scenario on which to cultivate the siege, but once the opportunity presented itself maybe Gavin saw the perfect opening.

Maybe we’re getting a little carried away here. Maybe it’s as simple as a manager adhering to the ‘duty of care’ these people feel the have to their charges, and Gavin - for all his intelligence and intuition - simply made a ham-fisted balls of it and allowed emotion rule his usually cool head for a moment.

Maybe there is no conspiracy theory. Maybe Gavin simply took umbrage at what he felt was the unfair treatment of his player and responded. Maybe Jim is actually a cranky old so and so more than we imagine and that unwavering facade he presents to the media is just that, a facade, a pretence, an act.

Either way it’s hard not to imagine Eamonn Fitzmaurice not allowing himself a wry smile last Sunday evening as the country devoured itself over Gavin’s comments.

It’s not that long since the Kerry manager addressed the media and vented a little on the “narrative” he felt was being peddled by former Dublin players turned media pundits, regarding Kerry’s ill-discipline and cynicism.

Fitzmaurice took a calculated gamble to break from his normally cool, unshakeable demeanour and call out what he felt was an agenda by some pundits and media. Whether it had the desired effect for Kerry’s subsequent meeting with Dublin the League Final is open to question, but the point is Fitzmaurice felt he had to say something.

It’s what managers do. They either create some heat or diffuse heat from a situation. At the top end of management it’s as important a tool as planning game tactics and man managing individuals.

Jack O’Connor, Jim McGuinness, Davy Fitzgerald and Mickey Harte have all had their spats with the media during their management careers. Even the normally unflappable Brian Cody had snarled at a microphone or two in his time. It’s a game played within and around the game, and one which managers are quite happy to engage with and manipulate when it suits.

Whether or not siege mentalities and media bans work is a moot point: the issue is that sports people and team managers clearly believe they’re worth engaging in. Elite sport is all about inches and percentages and incremental gains. If you’re closest rivals are training just as hard as you and taking the same supplements and wearing the same gear and doing the same analysis, then you have to find that extra edge somewhere.

Jim Gavin has proven himself to be an excellent manager. The record of the Dublin teams he has managed speaks for itself. For the most part his players have conducted themselves as top sportsmen should, the odd indiscretion aside.

He was wrong in much of what he said last Sunday but we have to assume he knew what he was saying and why. If Dublin defend their All-Ireland in September Gavin will be rightly regarded as the best manager of since Mick O’Dwyer. Whatever edge he hoped last Sunday would achieve will have worked. A genius stroke.

If Dublin fall between here and the Hogan Stand steps maybe this rant will be viewed as a grave misstep. An ill-advised move.

Time will tell.