To B or not to B

To B or not to B


Edwin McGreal

“Are you up for the sack after that defeat McGreal?” That was the shout of Charlestown man Ciaran McBrien after our Junior team were beaten in the semi-finals of the Mayo GAA Junior B football championship semi-finals.
For those who don’t know Junior B is one of the most infuriating yet compelling levels of football going and we’ve witnessed both ends of the extreme.
The ‘we’ is Breaffy B and JP Gibbons, Anthony Lynn and myself are in charge of them. We’d high hopes of a good run in the championship but Davitts B had other ideas and beat us in the semi-final with an injury-time winner.
It was a game we probably left behind and Ciaran McBrien might have been right - we could be up for the sack but for one salient point. He too knows very well one truism of the GAA - it is much, much easier to get into a job than it is to get out of it. Offer to ‘give a hand’ for a year and you’ll end up wondering where the time went four years later.
Adamant claims that you are finishing up are met with almost feigned sympathy by the people whose job it is to get you to wait, the club ‘lifers’ who know human nature inside out and know that, despite the commitment involved, you love being involved. They play on that knowledge.
“Sure I know what you mean, you would get fierce fed up with it and no thanks for it either. What until you get to my age,” they tell you, arm either literally or metaphorically on your shoulder. They know what buttons to push. “Sure think about it for a while and see how you feel in the new year,” they coax. Before you know it, it is March and you’ve agreed to take the job on an interim basis until they get someone else. They never get someone else. And you’d be an awful man to walk out on a team in the middle of the year. Sure see out the year and that will be that.
And so the cycle continues. How do I know it? Because of experience and I’ve turned into one myself. If a Junior player is getting cold feet about committing for the year a trick I’ve learned is used.
“Sure come out for one game and see what you think and if you don’t want to play after that, that’s fine,” I’d suggest. There are two parts to this ruse. The first is that once a guy gets back playing, he finds it hard to walk away, his competitive edge coming back. The second is that no one wants to be known as the fella ‘who disappeared after just one match’.
So I should not seek sympathy and I am not. It just seems that I need to be a step ahead of the lifers to walk away. It took my departure to Australia in 2008 to last get away. What will I have to do this time? All advice gratefully received.