O'Rourke was hard done by

Cavanman's Diary

While the GAA is a massive organisation on this very small island, its international footprint lags well behind genuine global sports like soccer. It’s likely that, worldwide, there are more soccer matches played per hour than there are Gaelic football matches per year.

Maybe it’s only natural, then, that Gaelic players, officials and coaches are, like teenagers, easily influenced. Tactically, Gaelic football is decades behind soccer, as can be seen when one successful team makes a tweak in how they prepare or play and, comically, almost everyone else, right down to junior club teams, imitates it.

The soccer influence is all-pervasive; county boards have even begun to ape Premier League clubs in how they run their social media accounts, with inane graphics of players kissing the crest on their shirts and so on now commonplace.

It was interesting, then, that a few weeks before Colm O’Rourke was announced as Meath manager, he referenced professional soccer in an interview with RTÉ.

“My beautiful wife Patricia has a very negative view toward managing the county team and with good reason when you see the upshot of Andy McEntee going and the social media abuse than has taken place,” O’Rourke said.

“People who put in enormous time at their own expense - it’s not like Pep Guardiola getting £15m a year - and then being subjected to that sort of thing by unnamed people…”

It was Enoch Powell who commented that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs” and that truism is equally applicable in professional soccer management – and, increasingly and shamefully, Gaelic football management, too.

O’Rourke, a man with a keen appreciation of history, has now found that out to his cost as his tenure as Meath manager has come to an end in sorry circumstances.

He went for the Meath job three times and was turned down on each occasion. Eventually, he was belatedly handed the bib marked bainisteoir.

His first season, 2023, was difficult as he tried out new players and sought to construct a winning squad. Meath trounced Cork in their first match but by the time their last match of the year, the Tailteann Cup final, came around, only six of that team were still on board, which underlines the point. O’Rourke and his selectors took the brave option, went with youth and were clearly planning for the future.

They used 42 players over that first season and handed out 13 championship debuts. No county could realistically expect instant success with that sort of profile, particularly one which had little underage success on which to build.

At the end of that year, ahead of the county convention, Meath distributed their secretary’s annual report to the media. O’Rourke contributed his own piece, detailing the year from his point of view.

In it, he didn’t shy away from introspection. The league, he wrote, “finished with a whimper”.

“The championship match against Offaly brought us to rock bottom. One of the worst performances in the first half of that game by any Meath team ever,” he admitted.

But there were positives, he believed. “I am optimistic for the year ahead,” O’Rourke wrote, “as I see a new enthusiasm, commitment, and dedication to the cause. Most players are also at an age where they should improve.”

The secretary, in his own comments, thanked O’Rourke.

“Your strategic approach in managing the team amidst a significant turnover of players and guiding them to success in the Tailteann Cup is truly commendable,” he wrote.

“Thank you for your unwavering dedication and for instilling a renewed sense of optimism and confidence in Meath football. We are indeed fortunate to have your expertise, passion, and leadership.”

Nine months on, give or take, those words ring hollow. Meath, it seems, believe they were not fortunate to have O’Rourke as manager at all.

Last Monday, it was announced that he had opted not to seek re-election but there was clearly more to it. His selectors had stepped down and he was told he must announce their replacements months in advance of the return to training. His hand was forced and he fell, based on this spurious deadline.

When he was appointed, O’Rourke was handed a three-year term with a review pencilled in after the second year. That review was carried out as planned but the Management Committee of the county board were kept out of the loop and now, it appears, won’t get to see a copy.

O’Rourke himself issued a statement to the Meath Chronicle.

“In the last month I have had discussions with two coaches who were highly recommended, one from inside the county and one outside, who would be happy to get involved with Meath but who are unwilling to commit publicly until their duties with their present clubs are finished,” he said.

“I admire their loyalty and as county training does not resume until late November I was prepared to wait.

“However, as I cannot fulfil the requirements as set out by the review committee, whose brief I considered was the manager only, I am withdrawing with regret from the process.”

So, that was it. Back to square one for the Royals. Twenty-five years on since their last All-Ireland, it is hard not to see comparisons between the decline of Meath and that of Cavan a couple of generations back.

Cavan made many missteps during the famine years, chief among them an inability or unwillingness to recognise the mess they were in and that it would take time to untangle the knot. Cavan, in the decades post-1969 when the county won its 38th Ulster title (we’re now on 40), steadfastly refused to accept the new reality of where they were at.

And if you don’t know where you are starting from, you’ll only ever reach your destination by happenstance, flailing in the darkness, hoping to strike it lucky.

Meath are following their neighbours’ well-trodden path. On that road, there are a few milestones: patience is replaced by panic; managers are chopped and changed. Good men are discarded, their reputations sullied. They become a sort of Sisyphus of the Size 5, always starting again.

Transparency is needed in such situations. What were the contents of Meath’s review? At a county board meeting, it was revealed that it involved speaking to members of management teams from other counties. There was a survey of the players, too, which was said to play out poorly for O’Rourke.

Did he lose the dressing-room, a dressing-room full of young players he had himself blooded? It seems so; it would take a complete suspension of disbelief to accept that not adhering to a deadline to appoint backroom team members months before training will begin is the real reason O’Rourke has been jettisoned.

Just a short time after being lauded, O’Rourke, one of Meath’s greatest players and a successful manager at schools and club levels, was deemed surplus to requirements. The whole sorry mess is an embarrassment for a county with such a rich Gaelic football heritage as Meath and begs another couple of questions.

Is two seasons long enough to build a new team in senior inter-county Gaelic football right now?

If we are to pretend it is and O’Rourke just failed, fair enough, but then the appointment itself must be viewed as a disastrous blunder. And then, the question must be asked, who is accountable for that?

In the desperation for quick fixes, common decency has become a devalued currency in Gaelic games. Maybe it’s the ubiquitous Premier League coverage which has influenced players, officials and supporters but the manager was not the main problem in Meath, just as it rarely has been in Cavan – but we’ve turfed them out anyway.

“As we look to the future, we see not just a team, but a community bound by a common goal - to raise the standard of Meath football and to achieve the levels of success that our county’s rich history demands,” noted the secretary’s report last year, again adopting the sickly-sweet corporate lingo beloved of the professional ‘franchises’.

How a high-summer managerial coup, informed by an anonymous survey of under-performing players, is part of that, God knows.

When Meath won the Tailteann Cup, O’Rourke and his players were lauded. In his post-match interview, the manager, who always liked to add a sprinkling of Latin to his Sunday Independent column, added some colour when he announced, “Nunc est bibendum”, meaning “now is the time for drinking”.

After the events of the past couple of weeks, and forgive us for the dramatic flourish, another Latin phrase comes to mind; “mors certa, hora incerta” - death is certain, its hour uncertain.

After this latest shambles, Meath’s decline as a football superpower appears to be terminal.