SHOW SOME respect
The pressure on men like Niall Carew is so great it is no wonder they lose reason
WE HAVE seen it happen before and we are betting so have you.
A rock of sense leaves our fair Emerald Isle and heads across the Atlantic for a short stint only to return speaking in a foreign tongue.
The worst case we ever saw was a young fellow who left us with a broad Kerry accent while wearing sensible breeches but returned a month later for 10 o’clock Mass looking like Crockett out of Miami Vice, complete with linen suit, collarless shirt, ear ring and wrap around shades. He did not just put people off their holy communion but also off their sacred wine when he ventured down to the local later.
‘I’ll have an ice-cold beer,’ he twanged.
‘You will have to wait until December so,’ growled the innkeeper, aware like the rest of us that only a month earlier this new-found sophisticate would have happily swilled luke-warm porter out of a rusty trough.
Against that backdrop, the postmatch comments of Niall Carew, a manager who normally has a good grip on reason, can be forgiven.
Perhaps it was over-exposure to those Italian-American pizza hangouts that are dotted around the Bronx, or maybe it was just the lingering aftertaste of that Sopranos box set that he consumed on the flight over, but when it comes to best quote of Championship 2017, he is the early pace setter.
‘They talked themselves up quite a bit. That can go two ways. A lot of our lads were coming in after playing in Connacht finals and have a medal. (New York) probably didn’t think of that and showed a little bit of disrespect going into the game,’ suggested Carew after the game.
Talked up? We scratched over what the exiles said in the pre-match press conference and the closest to an inflammatory remark we could find was the bog-standard declaration of belief that they could go and win that game.
Apparently, in doing so they disrespected the Sligo football family and now they sleep with the fishes.
We know it wasn’t meant like that; Carew, not least from his time spent with Waterford, would have a lot more empathy with football’s disenfranchised than most out there but it was indicative of the pressure the Sligo manager was under heading to New York last weekend that he leaned on such emotive language afterwards.
But, then, well he might. After all, the last time a Sligo manager returned from a foreign land a beaten docket, he was savaged for the nation’s amusement on national television that night.
Kevin Walsh was gone within a game of Eamon O’Hara’s brutal analysis of the former’s management skills on the night that Sligo were felled by London and five years of service was ushered out the door with a bilious farewell.
He wasn’t the first and he certainly won’t be the last. Who would care to wear Peadar Healy’s, Kevin McStay’s or Stephen Rochford’s managerial bibs this footballing summer? Now, don’t all be putting your hands up at once.
At the same time last week that Carew felt the weight of half the world being eased off his shoulders, John Mullane was stirring an old debate when suggesting that the time had come to incorporate managers into the PAYE sector.
It is an old argument which was recently refuelled by the revelation that Mullane’s brother-in-law, Derek McGrath, had availed of parental leave in his teaching day job so he can focus on managing the Waterford hurlers.
It is not uncommon for those at the highest level who have gone to the trouble of computing the amount of time they invest on what is supposed to be a hobby only to find that it runs north of 60 hours a week.
So that’s your regular day job, multiplied by another job and a half on top, and that is only time. That’s not taking into account the fishbowl that you end up paying rent to live in, or the criticism you take behind your back or the bile that surfs the social media waves every time the intelligentsia cut loose on their smartphones.
Put like that, it would be hard to begrudge payment to those who march our sidelines this summer. Except, of course, in some instances remuneration of sorts is already likely to be in place, one which is washing through the game but far out of sight.
On that basis, you could argue it is another reason why the GAA should
There’s the Kerry fellow who came back like Crockett from Miami Vice
move to regulate payments to all inter-county managers rather than seek to enforce a principle that is beyond policing.
But then, of course, capped payments would hardly meet compliance in a culture now so wild and free that it is beyond law, or at least the one which the GAA seek to enforce order with.
What then would there to be gained by putting managers on capped fulltime wages where job security hangs on one bad result, or one county board’s chairman’s bad night’s sleep.
And given the intolerance that they often have to deal with, how would their lives be made easier by providing a baying public another stick to beat them with? It wouldn’t work.
This, as wholly imperfect as it is, makes more sense no matter what tongue you speak in.