I must apologise for the brevity of my contribution this week. I am under pressure, and very serious pressure too, I must admit.
It is not my intention to be dismissive of you in any way by denigrating your importance to me or even to this column. But I am stressed and I can only hope you can find a considering thought for me at this precise moment in time.
I say at this precise moment in time because you see, a small but significant part of my pressure is but a fleeting panic, an ephemeral enticement to surrender to the weekly fear of placing my deliberations in front of you.
It is never easy for me to gather my thoughts in a manner that is both informative and even slightly entertaining, and I must admit to more than a modicum of torment in generating a different subject every Friday for your delectation.
I accept the slight degree of uncertainty contained in the first few paragraphs and I am trying desperately to reassemble or realign my train of thought in order to present even a reasonable offering for those at RTÉ.ie headquarters and to your good self of course.
Uncertainty is anathema to someone in my line of work. Uncertainty simply means that you do not know. In my profession knowing is important.
If people are meant to listen intently to whatever it is you are saying it is extremely helpful if they believe what you are saying. Professional football management is supposed to be based on men knowing what they are talking about after all.
Information is grand. Good information can be very helpful and in all sorts of circumstances. But information is not knowledge; it is merely words that offer assistance at a particular time.
However, if it is to be of substantial advantage, information should be based on knowledge. It is the attainment of knowledge that separates the good manager from the great manager. In a similar vein to knowledge and information, the essential contrast between the great manager and the good manager is established on experience and instinct.
To accumulate experience in professional football a manager obviously must have talent. But talent alone is not enough to allow one to stay the course in any demanding profession never mind the cut-throat business that is modern pro football.
The managers’ best friend is his instinct, which he develops in tandem with experience but, and it’s not a small but, the instinct must be the first of the dynamic duo to be in place. A manager without instinct is a ship without a compass, a soon to be lost soul drifting in an ocean of uncertainty.
I accept knowledge can be gained from books and centres of learning, but real knowledge, that indefinable ability to know that what you know is the dogs you-know-what, only really arrives with the distinct and utterly indisputable consent of instinct. I will leave it to you to decide which managers have knowledge to impart and which ones have merely information to pass on.
I did warn you that there would be a condensation, an abruptness to this Friday’s forum. And although I already have, I really should not apologise for this state of affairs because I am most genuinely under pressure, under siege actually, from some ultra coercive forces to get on the 1st tee by 12.45pm.
And if I want to get see Bray Wanderer’s take on Cork City this evening I simply have to cave in to this pressure.
