Irish Sport Manager

The county is yours. So is the blame.

You're the bainisteoir. Not a chairman, not a director of football. The one in
the county jacket on the sideline, appointed by a board that expects a
championship and will settle for a decent run at it.

There is no transfer market. Every player you can pick was born in your county
and plays for a club inside it. You get the thirty you get, and you answer for
the ones you leave out.

Four codes, one sideline

Pick your code. The other three keep running on the same calendar, with the real
dual counties, the real dual players, and the fixture pile-up that comes with
them. You manage one. You can look in on the rest.

The season as she is played

January shields under sodium lights. A league where the table pays your bills.
Provincial championships, round-robin groups in the summer, preliminary
quarter-finals, depending on the code. Four national championship finals, one
for each code, at the National Stadium in Dublin, in front of 82,500. Level at
the whistle and you go to extra time, then to penalties.

Match days you actually manage

Watch it live. A ticking clock, the ball moving, a replay for the scores that
matter. Make your switches while play runs. Burn your subs early if you have to.
Pick your moment for the speech at the break, and stand over the result after.

A system, not a formation

Restarts, shape, press and tempo. Four levers, and every one of them buys you an
edge in one place by paying for it somewhere else.

Name a free-taker, a long-range option, a target man. Put a marker on their
danger man, tight or goal-side, and find out whether he's the kind of player who
does that job. Change it mid-match and it takes hold at the next passage of
play, not the second you click.

You pick from what you have

Players come up from real club country. Surnames that belong to a ground, a
Power where the Powers are from. Call a club player into the panel. Teach a
corner-back to play midfield if that's what you're short of. Watch the training
injuries. Answer a disciplinary charge inside two days or the proposed penalty
stands.

What you know about a player is what your selectors have seen. If nobody has
watched him, the numbers in front of you are a guess.

A quiet word

Praise a purple patch. Demand more from a player in a slump. Reassure the one
losing every Sunday to the panel. Argue over a dual player's weekend with the
other code. Talk somebody out of the boats for one more winter.

Once a month each. Go at them more than that and they stop listening.

The county happens to you

Between the Sundays the post arrives. A wedding the night before a championship
match. A J1 summer in Boston. The river in the street and the parish out with
sandbags. A greyhound running Thursday.

Ten days to answer, and the answer runs through everything else. Write your own
events in plain JSON and put them on the Workshop.

The name on the door

There's no official license here. The governing body in the game is the Home
Games Association, the HGA, and the competitions, trophies and venues are its
own. The counties are real and so is the calendar. The parishes are real
places. The clubs and the players are invented.

Careers with consequences

Board confidence, sackings, and the job market that comes after them. Have a
good year and another county's board makes a quiet call. Have a bad one and
read about your own position in the paper.

A cup buys you time. It does not buy you the job.

Irish Sport Manager is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by the
Gaelic Athletic Association, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association, the Camogie
Association, or any county board. All governing bodies, competitions, trophies,
venues, clubs and players in the game are fictional.