21-06-2025
Quotable bosses adding to the gaiety of summer
Have we entered the golden age of the gaffer in inter-county football?
The manager in its modern guise has been with us for just over a half century now.
Back in the Pathé News era when plummy-voiced old Etonian commentators chortled at the physical roughness of the Gael, there were noted figureheads whose duties broadly approximated to that of a modern manager. Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan in Kerry, John 'Tull' Dunne in Galway, Fr Tommy Maher with the Kilkenny hurlers.
However, the cult of the manager only arrived in earnest in the mid-70s, when Jimmy Gray decided there was too much anarchy on the Dublin sideline and installed the already legendary Heffo as chief capo. Kerry, always watchful regarding revolutionary developments elsewhere, stuck Micko in an equivalent role for the following year and we were away.
They've been with us ever since. A brooding presence, often portrayed as a destructive one. In the intervening decades, the inter-county manager has been blamed for ruining the club game, their players' training-life balance and the entire sport itself.
But, despite it all, they remain a vital presence.
For the past six months, the League of Ireland's current stable of managers have been hogging the headlines, cognisant of their responsibility to serve as hype-men for the product.
One manager, in particular. Since arriving into the LOI's managerial paddock in a blaze of publicity three years ago, Damien Duff has excelled in the rather vague discipline of 'mind-games', otherwise known as 'saying stuff'.
As a former player of Jose Mourinho's during Chelsea's glory years of the mid-2000s, he has learned from one of the greats.
But who is the Duffer or Jose of the inter-county managerial game right now?
A few names are jockeying for the accolade.
Clearly, longstanding Donegal messiah and disruptor Jim McGuinness is a compelling candidate. The Glenties grandmaster re-wired the entire sport during his first stint, such that they eventually had to form a committee of illustrious elders to rewrite the rules altogether.
In his first year back in 2024, he set about building a wall, if not around aul' Donegal, then at least around their training centre in Convoy, to prevent against Marcelo Bielsa-style spies surveilling their match preparation.
In 2025, he seems instead to be building an 'us against the world' mentality up there, if his pre-prepared monologue outside their dressing room last Sunday is any guide. Clearly, this intervention followed in the wake of some heavy research, given Jim's knowledge of the precise travelling distance between Hyde Park and Mayo's training ground.
"That would only happen because it's us," McGuinness argued, having apparently not plotted the exact distance from Valentia to Tullamore.
McGuinness' outburst was subsequently re-interpreted as an attempt to strong-arm the CCCC into placating him with a seven-day - rather than a six-day - turnaround this weekend. Sure enough, Donegal-Louth throws in at 4pm on Sunday.
In the game at large, much like Jose in his early years, McGuinness is regarded as a mystical coaching superbrain and a managerial svengali.
This was especially apparent when Donegal were scoring no goals during the league. In the case of the average hired hand on the managerial merry-go-round, a dearth of goals would be taken as straightforward evidence of his team's attacking limitations.
Not so in Jim's case, where the automatic assumption was that he must be hiding something. Something so clever that he didn't want to roll it out until the optimal moment late in the season, when the competition would have no time to react.
Or else he had run the numbers and calculated that pursuing goals was a waste of effort in the new scoring dispensation, and that he was simply quicker to realise as much than the Kerry lads, who scored them by the truckload during the league.
But Jim faces stiff competition for the accolade from within his own province.
While Joe Public and much of the sporting commentariat are calling for a statue to be erected to Jim Gavin, Kieran McGeeney has carved out a role as the FRC's dissident-in-chief.
During the league, Geezer regularly complained that no one was allowed utter a word of criticism about the new rules, something he has nonetheless been doing in almost every interview since.
As a stout defender of the modern game, circa 2024, McGeeney's issue seems to be less with the rules themselves than the 'in-my-day' pundits and former players whose incessant carping provided much of the impetus behind their introduction.
With Pat Spillane now positioning himself as cheerleader-in-chief of the new Gaelic football, McGeeney inevitably finds himself drawn in the opposite direction.
Having seemingly reconciled himself to the new rules, McGeeney is now peeved that they're changing again.
"Listen, honestly, they just seem to be able to do what they want," McGeeney said, on hearing word that the 50m penalty for interfering with a midfield mark was about to go, just before the knockout phase.
"Some teams tell them to do something, I'd love that direct line. Whoever has that direct line into Jim (Gavin) and Eamonn (Fitzmaurice), I would love that."
We obviously have no clue to whom Geezer is referring... other than to note that a certain inter-county manager, let's call him J'OC, branded the 50m penalty for the midfield mark "ridiculous" and insisted it would have to go after Kerr... his team... ironically got the benefit of it in a group stage game.
McGeeney followed that up with the pithiest explainer of the mechanics of the GAA tackle zone that we have read for some time.
"Everything is a foul. Everything isn't a foul. You just swing with the punches and do what you can."
While it isn't worded that way in the legislation, Geezer's summation certainly rings true in practice.
But McGeeney and McGuinness aren't alone among the contenders.
In the west, Pádraic Joyce has emerged as the king of the blunt speakers.
It became an article of faith for managers during the Alex Ferguson era that 'thou shalt not criticise your players in public.'
The Galway boss seems remarkably indifferent to that edict as he breezily offers stinging assessments of his players' performances in post-match scrums.
After the win over Armagh, Joyce said that Shane Walsh had been subject to much unfair criticism in Galway.
Some Galway supporters did offer up the rejoinder that perhaps Walsh's staunchest critic was none other than the Galway manager - Pádraic Joyce himself.
Sure enough, in a subsequent round of interviewers, Joyce responded to questions about Walsh's Man of the Match display by sighing that it had been "a long time coming".
And we're only three months removed from his famous "they missed about 2-10 between them" press conference after the league loss to Dublin.
If Galway's 2025 season was Ireland at Italia 90 - and they came pretty close to drawing all three group games - then Joyce is simultaneously its Jack Charlton and its Eamon Dunphy.
In the process, Joyce seems to have created a scenario where his players seem cheerfully immune to what their manager says in public, though his legendary status in the county has given him some leeway.
Between the 'mind-games', the megaphone diplomacy, the clap-backs at the pundit class, and the brief spot of caustic post-match analysis, the managerial paddock are spoiling us this summer. The media aren't complaining.
