The decade of winning players being winning managers
WHEN you’re driving from Clones to Tralee you’ve a lot of time to think and somewhere around Ballymahon a thought struck on Sunday evening. Every winning manager of the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship so far this decade has one thing in common: they’ve all also won the All-Ireland SFC as a player. Conor Counihan (2010), Pat Gilroy (2011), Jim McGuinness (2012), Jim Gavin (2013, 2015-2017) and Eamonn Fitzmaurice (2014) have each had the honour of raising the Sam Maguire Cup as a player and then as a manager. It’s a trend that has an 80% chance of continuing this season with Fitzmaurice, Gavin, Donegal boss Declan Bonner and Galway manager Kevin Walsh all having Celtic crosses in their pockets.
Only Mickey Harte hasn’t won the All-Ireland title as a player, and with Dublin’s dominance (under Gavin) set to continue - with Kerry and Galway looking best placed to stop their winning run - there’s every chance the decade could finish up with every winning manager since 2010 also being an All-Ireland winner as a player.
You’d think, then, that an All-Ireland medal as a player is almost a necessity for anyone with All-Ireland title winning ambitions as a manager, and maybe it is now, but it wasn’t always so.
Harte, of course, could be the outlier this decade and mention of the Tyrone manager brings us neatly back to the previous decade, the Noughties, when the Errigal Ciarán club steered his county to three All-Ireland titles. Interestingly, the last decade was dominated by All-Ireland winning managers who never won the Sam Maguire as a player. Indeed, one must go right back to the start of the decade for the one and only man who was an All-Ireland winning player and then a manager: one Páidí Ó Sé. That was 2000 but thereafter a Celtic cross wasn’t a necessary charm for the men who would lead their counties up the steps of the Hogan Stand. John O’Mahony (2001), Joe Kernan (2002), Harte (2003, 2005, 2008), Jack O’Connor (2004, 2006, 2009) and Pat O’Shea (2007) all worked the oracle in the bainisteoir bib without having won an All-Ireland senior medal as a player, or, indeed, in most cases, without having reached any great heights as an inter-county footballer, though Kernan did play with Armagh in an All-Ireland Final and O’Shea won an All-Ireland Club Championship with Dr Crokes.
The 1990s - like the 2000s - was dominated by winning managers who had little or no success as players, and certainly nothing close to All-Ireland SFC glory. Billy Morgan (1990), Pat O’Neill (1995) and Páidí Ó Sé (1997) were the only three All-Ireland medal holders to manage their county to All-Ireland success in that decade, with winning managers Pete McGrath (1991, 1994), Brian McEniff (1992), Eamonn Coleman (1993), Sean Boylan (1996, 1999) and John O’Mahony (1998) having little or no serious playing credentials, although Coleman did win All-Ireland Minor and U-21 medals as a player with Derry.
Perhaps the trend this decade explains why Mayo haven’t been able to get over the line and win that elusive All-Ireland title: they haven’t had a manager who has won the game’s ultimate honour as a player. Alas, it’s not as simple as going out there and replacing Stephen Rochford with a man who has marched behind the Artane Band on All-Ireland Final Day and then climbed the steps of the Hogan Stand as a winner. To refer back to Counihan, Gilroy, McGuinness, Gavin and Fitzmaurice, the crucial detail is that they have all managed the county they won their medals with as players to All-Ireland title success. And that, of course, is a problem for Mayo. Unless they’re going to draft in nonagenarians Paddy Prendergast or Padraig Carney - the only two Mayo men alive with All-Ireland medals - then we suspect their famine will continue.
Bringing in an All-Ireland winning player in the hope of managing them to All-Ireland glory won’t work either. Just ask Jack O’Shea about that one. One has to go back to 2001 for the last time an ‘outsider’ has managed a county to a All-Ireland football title, which Mayo native John O’Mahony did with neighbours Galway. Same as he did in 1998. Before that the only ‘blow in’ manager to win an All-Ireland football title was in 1982 when Longford native Eugene McGee managed Offaly to win the Sam Maguire...you know the rest!
It hardly needs to be said that neither O’Mahony nor McGee won much, if anything, of note as players, which means that no All-Ireland winning footballer has gone into another county and delivered an All-Ireland title as the manager. The closest anyone has got to that feat is Mick O’Dwyer who managed Kildare to the 1998 All-Ireland Final only to lose to O’Mahony’s Galway.
Whether or not the trend since 2010 means that having won an All-Ireland senior medal as a player is now an essential piece of kit to be an All-Ireland winning manager in the modern game only time will tell. The odds are that someone, apart from Harte, will come along in the next few years and manage their county to All-Ireland senior success who won’t have done it as a player. We use ‘odds’ deliberately because statistically there is a much higher chance that it should be a manager without an All-Ireland medal as a player who should be managing the All-Ireland winners this year. That’s because 27 of the 33 inter-county football managers at the start of 2018 don’t own a Celtic cross as a player.
Only Fitzmaurice, Gavin, Walsh, Bonner, Armagh’s Kieran McGeeney and the now departed Down manager Eamonn Burns have won the All-Ireland as a player, meaning there was a less than a one in five chance of an All-Ireland winning footballer managing his county to the Sam Maguire this year, and yet four of the six managers still in with a chance of winning the All-Ireland have that Celtic cross.
It will be most interesting to see who Dublin replace Gavin with when he eventually steps aside, and likewise with Fitzmaurice in this county when his tenure ends. With All-Ireland winners stretching back to their 2011 team it would seem there will be no end of candidates for the Dublin job who will have that Celtic cross in the CV. Kerry, as always, will have no end of All-Ireland winning players available to don the manager’s bib, and names like Maurice Fitzgerald, Declan O’Sullivan, Seamus Moynihan, Johnny Crowley and Colm Cooper will probably be linked with the position when it comes up.
Of course, good soldiers don’t always make for great generals and we can expect current minor and Under-20 managers Peter Keane and Jack O’Connor, who don’t have the Celtic crosses as players, to be strongly in the reckoning also. The only thing we can be certain about with regard to the next Kerry manager is that he won’t be an outsider, even if O’Connor pitched himself up as such in his autobiography.
As to whether or not someone can ‘do an O’Mahony’ remains to be seen, but the likes of Mayo, Cork or Kildare could do worse than make enquiries about Jack O’Connor’s or Jim McGuinness’s appetite and availability for a different challenge.