PLAYERS RIGHT TO PULL RANK
Fermanagh’s ousting of McGrath is about ambition, not selfishness
PLAYER POWER remains a phrase spat not spoken by many in Gaelic games. It is, to them, a two-word attack on a century-old class system. This constituency is convinced that county squads unhappy with a manager are motivated to push for change not by ambition but some ill-defined lust for power.
This ignores the problems unique to every county squad and prefers a unifying theory that attributes blame to a cabal obsessed, whether they are a Connacht hurling team or an Ulster minnow, with the same goal: control.
That a man as honourable, successful and significant in football as Pete McGrath is involved, made the latest manager-team schism particularly painful to observe. McGrath made his unhappiness clear in an interview in the Irish
Daily Mail in the aftermath of his departure from Fermanagh.
But it is difficult to see what the players have done wrong.
There was unhappiness in the squad with the appointment of McGrath for a fifth season.
This is after a year in which they played nine matches between League and Championship, and won only two of them.
Both of those victories came in a League programme that ended in relegation to Division 3.
It is at this point opponents of the players say they want someone else to pay for their inadequacies, but that makes no sense; it is the desire to improve that is always the trigger for action.
McGrath admitted he was aware there was unhappiness in the squad before his ratification. ‘I called another meeting of management the next night to discuss this and the potential threat this represented and we felt that whatever issues there were, they were ones that could be dealt with,’ he said.
That was not the case, but the Fermanagh players followed protocols agreed between the GAA and the GPA for resolving disputes between managers and squads.
The outcome was the departure of McGrath. A manager walking away is almost inevitably the end when players are unhappy.
An often deliberately simplistic case is made by critics of supposed player power that playing squads want nothing more than to take control and put yes-men in charge. This is reductive. Look at the two recent controversies surrounding tier-one teams who pushed for change.
In the winter of 2015, both the Mayo footballers and the hurlers of Galway revealed their unhappiness with managers.
This brought calumnies down on the heads of these players, representing as they do counties distinguished by their failure to win All-Irelands.
Yet last season, under new management, the Mayo footballers ran Dublin closer than anyone has man- aged in a final for a generation, bringing them to a replay they lost by a point.
It can be persuasively argued that it was a catastrophic management mistake – dropping a goalkeeper who would end the season as an AllStar – that cost them a first All-Ireland in 65 years, rather than the alleged weaknesses of players.
This year, the hurlers of Galway, under Micheál Donoghue, have been magnificent. They are strongly fancied to win a first AllIreland in 30 years, and this using a game-plan that demands sacrifice from even the biggest names.
If the Galway unrest was about a handful of rampant egos putting their needs above the fate of Anthony Cunningham or the welfare of their team-mates, then why would these same players submit with obvious relish to the industry required of them now?
If they were the troublemakers their critics alleged they were, then surely they would have insisted on a patsy replacing Cunningham, a placeman who would do as directed by power-mad agitators.
It didn’t happen because that representation of the players was preposterous.
Managers make tremendous sacrifices but so do players and we have to accept now, if it wasn’t absorbed in the aftermath of the Cork strikes in the last decade, that the players are the most valuable resource in the game.
It is players that children want to sign their jerseys and it is the footballers and hurlers they want to stand with for a selfie. If they are dissatisfied, then there is a problem.
Its small playing numbers means the ambitions of a Fermanagh football squad must be plainly hedged by realism.
That should not oblige them to be happy with whatever they get.
A line worn smooth by use in these rows is that there are no winners. That’s not true. Players win. History shows us, though, that their fans and the wider county can, too.
Because whatever hope a team has when united, they have none when the players have no confidence in their manager.