By by Billy!

[darbyo]

Well your right about him being the boss, Orangeman, but it still raises questions about his reign don't you think.
Anyway here's the Tribune article, titled BILLY IDLE 

THERE'S no easy way to tell a legend that his time is done, that it's time for a new start and a fresh approach for all concerned. Especially if that legend's a manager.

Four years and four All Ireland final appearances on and Paidi's departure from the Kingdom still jars in parts of west Kerry. As mild and rational an observer as Dara O Cinneide is quoted in the marvellous Princes of Pigskin: A Century of Kerry footballers as saying that his Gaeltacht clubman was "treated like shit by the county board".

Even though Paidi's term was up, even though Kerry were just after been hammered by Tyrone, even after those references to animals and Nelson Mandela, and even though his flareup with Sean Walsh on the phone was triggered by O Se's insistence as to why Walsh was so eager to give him some news in person.

In Cork such acrimony and dirty linen has been spared a public forum. No one called Morgan to say he wasn't wanted, no one called to arrange a meeting to say the same in person. Instead he was afforded the dignity to say it was his idea to walk away, that it was over a matter of principle and the right to pick his own selectors. But whatever way you view it, the board got exactly the process and outcome it had envisaged and desired.

The fact the board hadn't contacted him since the All Ireland regarding his future . . .

only his suspension . . . was the killer. That indifference, that vacuum, more than the board's intransigence on the selectors issue, was what sealed Morgan's decision. In doing so he saved everyone a lot of hassle and embarrassment. In the coming days, a board member was going to break the obvious and bad news to him anyway.

It seems excessively drastic for another manager to get his team to the last game of the year only to be dismissed after losing it to Kerry, but the Cork board had major reservations about aspects of the side's lead-up to the final. For all the good work Cork did under Morgan's second tenure, the biggest indictment of his time in charge was his treatment of Daniel Goulding, the county's first legitimate and natural corner forward in nearly a decade, and ultimately it probably cost Morgan his job as manager.

Eight days before the final, Cork held a final A versus B trial game in which Anthony Lynch would sustain his hand injury. Morgan's other four selectors had picked Goulding on the A team and James Masters, just back from a jaw injury, on the B side. Morgan though insisted the two players swap and when Morgan was challenged, most forcibly by Jim Nolan, he reminded the room who was the manager.

For Morgan to go out on such a limb for a clubmate was a huge gamble and it didn't pay off. Within the first 10 minutes, Kerry players were struck by how vulnerable and tentative Masters appeared and duly targeted him. It wasn't fair on Masters that he was out there, it wasn't fair on Goulding and the board saw that it wasn't fair on the selectors either.

It wasn't the only way they had been undermined. In Morgan's first two years back, Colman Corrigan and Sean Murphy served as selectors before stepping aside in 2006, yet after this year's All Ireland semi-final win both were receiving kudos around the city and county for apparently masterminding Meath's downfall. The day of the final, Corrigan was on the line instead of the stand, carrying water. Was he a member of the official party or was he not? Had he a greater standing and say than the official, nominated selectors?

In Morgan's home club of Nemo they say you have to attend an AGM to find out who the official selectors are, such is the liberal way the likes of Dinny Allen and Jimmy Kerrigan might be drafted in to give their tuppence worth, but in Cork there was always going to be less tolerance for such a loose arrangement and practice. Morgan had become the first manager in the county's football history allowed the right to appoint his own selectors and in as political and traditional a culture as Cork, it was considered a massive privilege.

Four years on and the sense on the scene was that Morgan, to use the vernacular, had "flahed" that privilege.

A majority of the players wanted Morgan back but this wasn't 1991 and these players didn't have that kind of standing with the public and the board that Morgan's old team enjoyed. Any statement would have had a turkeys voting on Christmas vibe to it anyway; a third, possibly even half, of that squad could be culled in 2008. And for all his reputation for being a "players' man", Morgan's famed loyalty also amounted to a distrust of some of the key younger players in the squad. Goulding and fellow under-21 star Eoin Cadogan both nearly walked from the panel during the summer, as much out of a lack of communication from management as lack of playing opportunities.

The history of Gaelic football, let alone Cork football, will be very kind to Morgan, even his second tenure. It's fashionable to say it was Tompkins who won those All Irelands for Cork but Nemo didn't have Tompkins when Morgan brought them to All Ireland after All Ireland decade after decade. In his most recent spell, he stopped the losses to the Limericks, Roscommons and Fermanaghs but Kerry continued to have their number.

Just as pertinently, the side remained unloved if admired by the Cork public.

In the summer of 2005 Morgan appeared to be moulding an exciting side, with Babs Keating proclaiming that Cork's performance against Galway was the kind any coach and county would be proud of. Keating was right, but sadly, after Cork's subsequent capitulation to Kerry such a display of flamboyance was one Cork never again emulated or even aspired to.

The problem the board now have is they only know who they don't want, not who they do want. The next management team is likely to be announced at a county board meeting on Tuesday week, yet Frank Murphy only returns from holiday next weekend, and while the prime kingmaker is away, the search for a king is stalled.

There is no heir apparent. Teddy Owens would offer continuity, but Bob Honohan, another kingmaker, indicated in an interview for his book Rebels with a Cause that a fresh start would be his option. Con Counihan is a credible candidate but after been virtually promised the job four years ago, might still feel burned. Under-21 winning manager Tony Leahy could struggle to give both the time and project the aura needed at this level while the job might have come a few years too late for John Fintan Daly, who in 1994 coached the county's previous All Ireland under-21 champions.

A dark horse might be Eamonn Ryan, coach to the ladies footballers and a miracle worker on the local scene, but the board might feel it's time to appoint someone who's not in his 60s.

Regardless of who gets it, two big shadows will hover by. The legend who he must succeed and Kerry who he must still beat.

[orangeman]

Thanks Darbyo - brilliant article - a man that is so passionate will alwys have his faults but I can forgive him that !