Declan Bogue

ROLL UP, ALL you prospective intercounty managers, and allow me to present a handy, cut-out-and-keep guide to what is in front of you should you manage to deftly step onto the carousel.

Before you get the gig, you have to know how to get it. But in this respect the game is already rigged. Sorry folks, but chances are, the county board already have their man.

This might seem confusing. When the previous lad left the job, you might have noticed your name being mentioned in the local or national newspapers, depending on how big the job is.

Some people from the county might even have made contact to see if it was something you were interested in. But do not be fooled! Sometimes, some county boards will do this to get a stir up.

In this event, they might decide to do a round of interviews.

But if they already have their man, it doesn’t matter how proficient you are at the slideshows, the interviewing panel will barely stifle their yawns as they crunch their knuckles and what’s for dinner once they suffer this ordeal.

Say you get the job, though. On day one you might be handed over to some local, sympathetic media who will lob their iPhones in a semi-circle around you and twitch awkwardly in plastic stacking chairs as they ask you a variety of jarring, unrelated questions.

Beware the chin-stroker who wants to ask ten questions about kickouts. Or even worse, the journalist who feels, such is their knowledge of football or hurling, that they are coming to the table as your equal. That you would happily sit down with them for a few hours, to pick their brains about what is needed for the county.

Under no circumstances, is it acceptable to use the word ‘philosophy’.

On Day Two, somebody of your acquaintance will draw to your attention a Twitter or Facebook thread under a clip of one of your interviews. The first few comments might wish you all the best in the role. Someone will then post 15 crying laughing emojis, leaving you to merely guess as to the context.

Another with the clown emojis. Jesus suffering Christ.

Sensing a natural shift in the mood, half a dozen will frame your previous coaching jobs as abject failures. Inevitably, another will call you a dick.

Respect is in short supply as a manager. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO

And now, to finances; both your own and around the team. Again, there are different approaches.

If you work at a regular job, then you might expect to be recompensed for the time that you are putting into your ‘hobby’. Some of these payments will be above what you are entitled to.

There are freaks out there, say for example Pete McGrath during his time in charge of Fermanagh, that would continually fob off team liaison officer when they pestered him to fill out a mileage form.

Instead, he preferred to shoulder the financial burden of a few weekly 154-mile trips himself.

A thoroughly modern arrangement that is becoming widespread is the manager utilising his charm to extract a stipend from dozens of local and international businesses to pay for the running of the team; once they have skimmed their own wage off the top of course.

Which is great in that it gives the manager all the time in the world to deal with team affairs, but not so good when it comes to career prospects or, y’know, curtailing a God Complex.

That’s all before we get to a single game being played.

A loss, even in a pre-season tournament, will be dissected and pulled apart. There’s a lot of dead silence in your common or garden Podcast if somebody cannot get carried away with a result from the FBD League or Walsh Cup.

Come the league, it’s full bore. You have a cast of columnists lined up to put the shoe into those that lost, every Monday and Tuesday. One loss is bad. Two, catastrophic.

Three? Well, the season’s gone already.

And really from that point on, it gets no better, really.

Brendan Rodgers once likened soccer management to stepping into a river of shit that is ankle deep on your first day. The trick to the whole thing was to make sure it didn’t come up over shoulder-height.

Even that’s not enough. Look at the example of Pat Ryan.

Cork haven’t seen the whites of Liam MacCarthy’s eyes in two decades. Under Ryan, they became the most fashionable team in hurling, playing the kind of stuff that brought a new generation along and tears to the eyes of those that thought they had seen it all.

Think about the much-forwarded and idiotic What’s App message passed around after the All-Ireland hurling final, detailing so-called dressing room bust-ups among a man as reasonable, respected and loved as Ryan.

The accusations of rampant ego in senior players, demanding to make choices?

The whole thing was so damned stupid and idiotic that it is incredible that anybody could actually be as silly to believe it.

And yet there are.

Ryan’s response, outlined in an interview with John Fogarty from the Irish Examiner, was laden with his repulsion.

“…the disgusting point from my part is that they were totally made-up stories, and then individual names were attached to it. And, look, absolutely, under no circumstances did anything like that ever happen in my time with three years involved with Cork.

“I’ve had absolutely no run-in or argument with any players. I’ve had plenty of good discussions with our leadership group. Plenty of honest chats. Same thing with our management group. You know what I mean?

“All those things were absolutely total garbage. And, look, to be honest, probably the most disappointing thing is that you had people that should know better who were actually thinking that it might be true. Not alone that, who goes in and has a big bust-up with a six-point lead?”

All the same, it took somebody to sit down and compose that opera in their head, before typing it out and sending it on.

So unlikely was the actual message, it put me in mind of a club mate who, around a decade ago, had it on the highest authority that Donegal were in complete turmoil. The crescendo of their unrest was, as he put it, ‘Ryan McHugh boxed the head off Michael Murphy in the carpark after training.’

We presume that you are familiar with the physical profile of Ryan McHugh (lean, average height, somewhat . . . willowy, perhaps?) and Michael Murphy (a traditional four-bedroom Irish country farmhouse). And you can get on board with the idea of McHugh inflicting a beating like Sonny on Carlo in ‘The Godfather’.

Ryan McHugh and Michael Murphy. I mean... Kieran Murray / INPHO Kieran Murray / INPHO / INPHO

It sure is funny. BUT THIS MAN BELIEVED IT.

The point is that there are hardly any rewards in intercounty management. You have to make it your life, or else players even more attuned to work ethic than Tom Brady will smell a rat. You can forget about a social life. Spending family time is practically impossible.

You can finish second in the biggest competition of all, and yet the world will laugh at the tactical naivety of your Pat Ryans and Jim McGuinness’.

At the very top of the food chain where the All-Ireland winners reside, they are off for their holiers.

Kerry are heading off to American and the Caribbean, calling in at Nashville where they will have their choice of reekingly cheesy or else seriously cool music, with a diet of grits, biscuit and bison.

Tipperary will be making their way to Cape Town to enjoy the big game Safari and a place drenched in history.

The rest, as Anne Robinson might say, leave with nothing.

And yet, county boards still have plenty of ambitious dudes, some suckers, some serious operators, to line up to sign up to this way of life.

“The game done changed,” said Cutty in The Wire, only for Slim Charles to reply, “Game’s the same. Just got more fierce.”

Both statements are true.