The news that Derek Lyng will remain as Kilkenny hurling manager did not come as a major surprise. There is a general sense that he has come close to getting the most out of a good group of players.
But there were grumblings about the All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Tipperary this year. They were a point up and a man up after Darragh McCarthy was sent off in the 58th minute, but they still fell short.
In professional sport, we see tough decisions being made every day. Just because a manager gets the sack doesn’t mean everything he did was wrong, but sometimes a nettle has to be grasped. As Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim said last week, “you can’t sack 22 players” (he can’t seem to talk his way into getting the sack either, but that’s another day’s work). So in sport, something has to change and often that is the manager.
The GAA appears to have stumbled upon a halfway house. How Kilkenny lost an All-Ireland semi-final from a strong position will have been the question that has stuck with everyone in the county. The players will take their share of the blame and the manager comes under scrutiny.
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The answer in a situation like Kilkenny’s can often be to shuffle the deck on the coaching staff. This week, Kilkenny have brought in Eddie Brennan and Niall Corcoran. There is no doubting their pedigree as new voices.
It could be the case that changes were going to happen anyway, regardless of results or performances. Brennan has intercounty experience as manager of Laois, guiding them to the 2019 Joe McDonagh Cup. He is looked on as a possible future Kilkenny manager.
If that’s the long-term plan, it’s a decent grounding. You get to work with the players regularly, but the buck stops elsewhere. It has all the benefits of working with top-class players and testing yourself as a coach, without the pressure of the public bearing down solely on you.
Lyng got the contract extension he undoubtedly deserved, but the reactions in Kerry and Cork to their All-Ireland final-day experiences provided further evidence of the strange role of the selector/backroom staff member in the GAA dressingroom hierarchy.
Kerry’s victory was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Jack O’Connor had to build a new managerial team almost from scratch last summer after their All-Ireland semi-final exit to Armagh. O’Connor has spoken in recent weeks about how lonely he felt after that defeat, exacerbated by the exit of Mike Quirke and others, and how much personal satisfaction he took from rebuilding it himself and reaping the rewards.
Pat Ryan denied it, but well-placed journalists insist that the Cork county board would have kept him on if changes were made to his selection team. He is an unstintingly loyal person and maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear he didn’t want to carry on without some of his backroom team.
If the re-staffing of his dressingroom was O’Connor’s biggest challenge as Kerry coach, why do so many county boards ask managers to do something similar? And are these changes always part of a plan, or do county boards just want to be seen to be making changes?
Are they thinking, “we don’t want to sack the manager, but we don’t want to maintain the status quo either”?
It has been allowed to develop that way because there is, at heart, a confusion about the exact role of a selector.
In a club dressingroom, their appointment can be hilariously one-dimensional. “He drinks pints with our best player” can be all the job specifications one needs, especially if said best player is prone to disappearing off the scene from time to time. At intercounty level, it’s more involved.
Sometimes a manager will surround himself with people he knows and trusts. In other counties, there will be geographical issues at play. It could be a simple question of: “Have we someone from the south of the county?”
That is a pretty deranged idea in the 21st century, but it is 100 per cent still a consideration in some counties.
Such thinking is a hangover from how intercounty squads used to be managed. Galway’s three-in-a-row All-Ireland winning team from the 1960s had a 13-man selection committee, for instance. This was a barely believable state of affairs that could hardly have projected a sense of unanimity, even if that group’s results suggested otherwise.
That can’t be how it works now, yet there is still a lack of clarity. If you’re not a forwards coach or a defensive coach, then what exactly is your job? That’s a question that some selectors would try and pin down before they ever walk in the door, but others are more than happy to do whatever the position requires of them.
Whether they are there for positive reinforcement, to challenge the manager or to be a conduit to the players, maybe adaptability is the key character trait required.
But if the answer to the question – “what does he do around here, anyway?” – is difficult to pin down, county boards can see such selectors as expendable. When push comes to shove, they’re often the first out the door.
