Shrinking pool of candidates willing to take on the task of intercounty management

Slowly, oh so slowly, the managerial merry-go-round creaks away.

In Donegal, not only are the county board not saying who is in the running to succeed Declan Bonner, they’re not even telling people who is having a say in who is in the running.

In Monaghan, two months have passed since Séamus McEnaney handed in his bainisteoir bib and they are no closer to appointing a new man now than they were then. Billy Lee’s departure from the Limerick job during the week leaves six counties still out there shaking trees.

Liam Kearns has taken up his fourth intercounty gig, this time in Offaly. Pat Flanagan has been nominated for his fourth also and looks set to take the reins in Roscommon.

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Kevin McStay (Mayo) and Colm O’Rourke (Meath) are both swapping The Sunday Game couch for hardy dugout benches having spent the best part of half a century between them applying for their native postings. O’Rourke, and Conor Laverty in Down, are the only ones appointed so far who will be heading into their first intercounty job.

The jungle drums in Donegal are talking about Martin McHugh, whose last spin on the intercounty wheel came to an end 25 years ago this week when he resigned from the Cavan job.

Brendan Hackett has been mentioned in dispatches with regard to the Monaghan vacancy – like Flanagan and Kearns, it would also be his fourth intercounty job if it came to pass. Andy McEntee was only five weeks out of the Meath job when he was announced as Antrim manager.

All in all, it becomes clearer with each passing season that the pool of candidates willing to put themselves through the ringer of intercounty management really isn’t all that deep.

Philly McMahon wrote in his Indo column recently of his surprise at getting a call out of the blue from a county wondering would he be interested in taking on their senior team. When he said thanks but no, the county board chap asked if he knew anyone who might from the players he had played with.

Granted, it’s not exactly a high-end recruitment strategy but it does give a sense of how short the long-list is when the Situation Vacant sign goes up. The Avengers Assemble-style tickets seen in Mayo and Kerry over the past two off-seasons are wild exceptions to the rule. The awful truth is that unless you’re in the chase for Sam Maguire, these jobs just aren’t very attractive.

In Longford, Billy O’Loughlin was never short of signs that intercounty management was a five-sided Rubik’s Cube. Maybe it was the fact that he was spending up on 20 hours a week in the car before he ever got to see a pitch or a ball or a tactics board. Or the dozens of calls and texts and WhatsApps that came his way every day of his short tenure, far more of them bringing problems than solutions.

Or maybe even just the day it struck him that when he counted up the number of players around Longford who had turned down the offer of joining the county panel, he got up as far as 16. Sixteen players, including all six starting forwards from the previous year’s championship defeat to Meath. A couple of changes here and there is around level par for any forward line between seasons. All six? Bogey city.

All the same, O’Loughlin loved it. If he’d been able to find a way at all, he’d have stayed on for at least another year. But he works for a Dallas telecoms company that builds cell towers all over Texas and he has to spend chunks of his year Stateside. No way around it. One year with Longford and now he’s an ex-intercounty manager.

“I knew it would be a huge task going in,” he says. “I did my college thesis on volunteerism in the GAA and even at club level or underage level, it’s such a huge commitment for anyone who gets involved.

“But intercounty is the pinnacle of it and it’s a massive thing to take on. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I would have loved to have kept doing it. But it takes a lot out of you.

“You’re basically dealing with anything up to 60 or 70 people who are looking to you for a decision on everything. And that’s even just in a small, middle-tier county like Longford. I think we had 14 or 15 in our backroom team and they were a massive, massive help.

“You need to rely on good people. It was no surprise to me at all to see the candidates for the Mayo job all coming with backroom teams filled with All Stars and All-Ireland winners. Any manager needs that level of support.

“When your shoulder is to the wheel in the difficult months of January and February, when you’re in the muck and the dirt, you need a lot of experience around you. I certainly had that. I had Paul Brady and Aidan Kilcoyne and Mickey Hannon. They were a massive, massive help. Intercounty experience is what every county is looking for.”

Finding it is the problem. Especially when so many of the coaches who are already on the scene are more interested working as right-hand men than grand poobahs. Jack O’Connor’s backroom team this year in Kerry famously included Paddy Tally and Mike Quirke, both of whom were managers in the previous season’s championship.

It was a stockpiling of managerial arms that would have been unthinkable even just a decade ago and yet it’s happening enough now to call it a trend.

Stephen Rochford was touted as the favourite for the Roscommon job this time around but he’s thrown his lot in with McStay, coaching a Mayo team he has already managed to two All-Ireland final defeats. Ryan McMenamin managed Fermanagh for two years but he’s Mickey Graham’s number two in Cavan now.

“You’re finding that the guys who go into management are well-seasoned and experienced,” O’Loughlin says. “They know what’s ahead of them, particularly when it’s not one of the top two or three jobs and it’s one of the jobs that might not look that appealing. So it is a very, very shallow pool of managers who are willing to put themselves forward.

“In the GAA in general, there’s probably a huge overreliance on people’s altruistic nature too. Obviously there’s expenses involved with managers and management teams as well and that’s really where the nuts and bolts come into it. The bigger counties can better attract the top talent in terms of being able to cover all that.

“Taking on an intercounty team is a serious task. There’s no one reason why there’s such a small pool of people out there for these jobs, but at the same time it’s probably fairly obvious as well. It’s a massive thing to bring into your life and into your family’s life.

“You can only stand back and admire the managers who are willing to subject themselves to it, especially when there’s a relatively low prospect of success in most cases. Only one team can win the All-Ireland every year. To keep throwing your hat in when you know it’s probably not going to be you is seriously admirable.”

For O’Loughlin, life is very different now. His work colleagues in Dallas don’t surface until the afternoon-time in Laois so he gets out for nine-to-12 holes of golf most mornings. He’s still playing for his club side Arles-Killeen and was in the maw of it all last weekend when they plundered a last-minute goal to stave off relegation in the Laois championship.

“Paul Kingston scored 1-10 of our 1-10 total, including the last-minute goal,” he laughs. “We’re nearly more of an over-35 team these days but we hung in there and got out with the draw. Donie Kingston and Donie Brennan were on the team too, loads of intercounty experience. We probably have far too many chefs in the kitchen!”

O’Loughlin’s year as an intercounty manager was exhausting and engrossing and all too short. His life and his career left him with no choice but to move on and leave it behind but if and when the planets align in the future, he’d bite any county chairman’s hand off for the chance go again. If it’s a narcotic, sign him up as an addict.

But, as plenty of counties are finding this off-season, temperance is looking more attractive all the time.