Emmet Moloney writes for the 'The Irish Farmers Journal' and is a former sports columnist with 'The Kerryman'.

The cult of the GAA manager has grown to dangerously high levels with expectation and recrimination far above what is reasonable, writes Emmet Moloney...

It’s time to talk about winning well and, more importantly, losing well. And the blame game. I bring this up because I have paid particular attention to how both Tipperary and Kerry have dealt with their All-Ireland final losses and, of course, how the Cats and the Dubs enjoyed their thrilling victories.

In our celebrity dominated world, a GAA manager gets the blame and the praise for everything in equal measure. He’s the public face of an entire team and while it’s human nature, it is wrong and it is hurting our games down through all the grades. Simply put, the stakes are now too high.

Declan Ryan is a man I don’t know but greatly admired on the hurling field. Nearly every Tipp man and woman I met in the aftermath of the All-Ireland final had nothing good to say about him and laid the blame for Tipp’s defeat solely at his door. When you’re beaten in 12 or 13 positions on the field lads, there isn’t much any manager can do about that. It never ceases to amaze me that these same people have only good things to say about a manager at twenty-five past three, but by five o’clock, he hasn’t a clue.

Jack O’Connor is another man I don’t know but have respect for, even if I’d disagree with his methods. He’s a man who wants his county to win All-Irelands. We can all surely identify with that. But talking to some Kerry people after the match you’d swear it was O’Connor who kicked the last three scores for Dublin to lose it for the Kingdom.

These men have families and they give a commitment to their counties that goes way beyond two hours a night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the odd match on the weekends. While they knew exactly what they were getting into, abuse of that kind is never right and it is never justified.

The same people who called for Declan Ryan’s head after the All-Ireland hurling final would have been the ones ringing Rome and looking for him to be canonised after the stunning Munster final performance. Jack O’Connor has won three All-Irelands with Kerry – that too suggests he knows what he is doing.

Are they perfect? No, of course not, but it doesn’t stop the imperfect out there, expecting perfection every time.

Declan Ryan and Jack O’Connor are big enough to look after themselves and they’ll bounce back. Luckily for both they are in charge of Tipperary and Kerry. So we won’t overdo the sympathy! They’ll have their day and probably sooner rather than later. But they are human like every other manager.

This year, the likes of Mickey Harte, Conor Counihan, Donal O’Grady and Mick O’Dwyer did not manage their teams to an All-Ireland. Does that make those men, all former winning managers, failures? Of course not. But it will make a few of them doubly determined and perhaps a little wiser come 2012. That’s four men; Cody and Gilroy make six. There are about 60 inter-county managers out there. Only those six are really safe from the harsh stuff, maybe Anthony Daly as well. The rest need a very thick skin.

What happens at the top always eventually filters down. There are club managers who can’t go for their quiet pint anymore because they’ll be dragged into discussions, arguments and who knows what. And this is why the stakes have gotten too high. Far too many managers out there in the GAA world initially take on teams to help out in the club and to bring a few players through, but they end up trying to be Brian Cody. It’s the cult of the manager and it’s not good for our games.

Only one team can win any competition. That doesn’t make all the others failures. I’m not talking about senior inter-county hurling. I’m talking about U-21s, minors, U-16s and lower.

Nearly every club in Ireland can tell a story of internal bickering this year. The minor manager wanted the U-16s but the U-16 manager didn’t want them playing or training the week of their match; the seniors took players from the intermediate/junior panel and as a result players cannot now play that grade next year; the footballer manager wants a hurling game put off ... etc. The list is endless. The one abiding thread running through all these disputes is that the managers in question mostly want to win. That’s their defence and that’s their motivation.

We’re turning managers into win at all costs personalities because it seems that no manager wants the abuse and criticism that comes from losing. There are that websites now offer total anonymity to whoever wants to grind his axe about a manager’s apparent failings. Forget your Brian Codys and your Pat Gilroys, the minor club manager can get the lash as well. Good luck to him if his own child is playing because that’s the first stick he’ll be hit with.

So what happens then? Well, a lot of managers fall into this blame trap as well. They try and pass this buck onto referees, officialdom, the recession etc.

This is the biggest problem the GAA has with managers at the moment: the pressure. Forget whether some are being paid, a large majority of them are being put through the ringer every time their team loses a match.

Let’s call a spade a spade. On the inter-county front alone there are probably 25 football managers whose team realistically has no chance of winning an All-Ireland any year. Next summer, quite a few of those managers will take a page from the Jim McGuinness book and decide that while their county can’t win, they won’t lose by as much as they used to.

It will be a form of self-preservation. It will be a form of ego at work. It’s not going to help the game. Our games should never be about the end justifying the means. This is going to happen in football.

We can’t row back to a simpler time and we can’t expect a fairy tale situation where everyone claps everyone else on the back and there’s never a harsh word spoken. We really can’t do any of that. But we can apply a bit of common sense. We can acknowledge that there can only be one All-Ireland winner, one county champion. We can stop thinking that anything less is a disaster of a year.

The solution is not to ignore winning. The solution is probably to appreciate it more. To catch Emmet's latest column, get 'The Irish Farmers' Journal' every Thursday...