Behindthegoal wrote: ↑Sat Aug 02, 2025 11:30 pm
I’d like to see him in there as much as the next man but I have it from good word that
its irrelevant what he does the bridges have been burned. It’s the culture of a team and everyone being in it together it only takes one man to drag that down when he’s not selected etc and start getting into other lads heads that’s why other players who I won’t name have also been let go. I think there’s about 15 lads who weren’t part of last years squad doing gym work in case they get a call in November and he’s not part of that so he won’t be involved we just need to move on until there’s new management to open up this debate again
Then it's up to management and the player to be grown ups and rebuild new bridges. Every year is a new project, there will be new players on board, and there are a variety of reasons why a certain player might not have been ready to be the player he needed to be at one time, but the situation has changed a few years later.
Once again, there's no problem bringing in any player with a warning that his attitude has to be spot on from the start. But the trick is in the name - management. It's not management if you'll only deal with players who will do everything you ask without batting an eyelid, and they never put a toe out of line. 100%, there are players where the juice is not worth the squeeze, in the sense that they are impossible/toxic, or even they are difficult, and if everything goes right, they aren't going to be anything more than just a bit part player at best. There are players that bring the acrimony out into the public domain, in which case absolutely, you can't let them near the dressing room at all, because they will undermine the trust and togetherness therein.
But there are also players that have a burning competitiveness inside them and while it's hard to handle, it's a force of nature and you want it on your side. On this very thread we are hailing perhaps the greatest force of nature I ever saw in an Offaly jersey in my lifetime, Ciarán McManus. I don't think I've ever seen any player bend games his way out of sheer will and grit the way I've seen him do it, and I will forever be grateful that he was one of us.
And if you ask any of the management team from 1997, he was not easy to work with. He's an emotional guy, and those emotions, for good and for bad, were never far from the surface, on and off the pitch. I know of one game in particular where things got very heated between them.
But this was a good management team who understood that this guy was one of our best players, and that any angst and contrariness he showed came from the right motivation. So they worked with that, and both player and management were rewarded for it.
The thing to remember too is that when a player gets cut from a panel for reasons that aren't directly football related, it tends to be big news. Jim McGuinness cutting Kevin Cassidy, Brian Cody cutting Charlie Carter, Liam Cahill dropping Cathal Barrett, we all hear about those ones. And in a lot of cases, it's justified. But if it gets to the point that the list of players that you won't consider picking, or the list of players that won't play for you starts to get to a half a dozen names and more, then you have to start looking in the mirror and ask if you maybe need to find another approach short of the nuclear button.
By definition, we don't hear about the situations where players are difficult to handle behind closed doors or they bring different baggage with them, but management decides they need to invest in them. And I guarantee you, every panel has one or two of those.