You’re not being screwed over.
It’s not anyone else’s fault.
There’s no agenda.
You’re on the bench because, like it or not, you have given the manager a reason to put you on the bench.
There are three different types of the worst substitutes:
- The one who’s just been dropped and spends the hour before throw-in shaking the head, eyes wide, jaw open. This is genuinely unbelievable. What on earth is the manager thinking?
- The player who’s nowhere near the team but grunts on the bench that the manager isn’t giving out fair chances.
- The one who suddenly develops an injury at the naming of the team – too embarrassed to own up to the simple reality that you’ve just been dropped.
11 types of sulkers on your GAA team when they find out they've been dropped | SportsJOE.ie https://t.co/cTNRKxqUyy
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) May 8, 2017
Can anyone in good faith and good experience claim that either of those methods have ever worked even slightly?
There’s a pitifully weak and poisonous culture creeping into some GAA teams throughout Ireland when people can’t have a bit of self-reflection and ask the easiest question of all: What is it that I’m doing wrong?
Why is the manager dropping me?
What am I going to do about it?
It’s tough to face up to the harshness that it’s your fault you’re not on the team but that’s the crux of it because, whether you want to believe it or not, the manager isn’t out to get you. The manager actually wants to win more than you do and the manager will pick the team that they think is the best to do just that.
If you’re not an obvious part of that winning formula, you’re doing something wrong. It’s your fault.
The 17 people you'll find in every single #GAA warm-up https://t.co/t73NAYO53m
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) July 21, 2016
Yes, there’ll be some tough calls at times. Yes, you might even actually be unlucky to miss out but that sort of luck never defines a player or a season.
The reaction does. How do you react?
Do you sulk? Shake your head. Whisper in the background that the manager is a gobshite or do you pretend to be injured and don’t even take the chance that you’re given with whatever little time?
Or do you front up and do something about it? Are you brave enough to evaluate your own weaknesses honestly and ask some bloody blunt questions of yourself to figure out why the hell you’ve allowed yourself to fall into that position?
Do you refuse to yield? Come back stronger? Prove the manager and everyone else wrong and make damn sure that they never have an excuse not to play you again?
Or do you just blame someone else and, in the process, basically give up?
It’s not an easy thing, being left out of a match day team, and it’s definitely not easy when sometimes you genuinely think the manager hasn’t got a clue and sometimes they don’t.
But there’s always something else you can do – something more. There’s always another yard you can run, another rep you can lift and there’s always another ball you can go after with even more menace. Nobody mistakes those calculations and, sooner or later, they add up properly.
Unfortunately, so many young ones nowadays are hiding behind excuses and finger-pointing. They’re not on the team because of whatever injury or whatever stupid idea and, even more unfortunately for managers, their decisions are called into question on a daily basis but that’s presumably what leadership is all about – making the decision you think is best no matter what others think.
So you have parents coming up and whinging to you, you have people actually exiting WhatsApp groups in a strop and players even quitting panels altogether because they don’t have the balls to ask themselves why is it really that they’re not on the team.
They don’t want the answer and they don’t want to do their bit to rectify it.
They want everything handed to them. But when that doesn’t happen, they give up.
If you do the work, you’ll get the rewards. If you’re not getting them, you need to work harder. That’s it. It’s simple. It’s on you. No-one else.
