Despite having stood up in the Mansion House in 1991 to make one of the most eloquent speeches I have heard about winning and losing and why each matters, Tom Carr has never been good at endings. His playing career, which deserved the crown of an All-Ireland, ended badly after he kicked Brian Murray in the National League final of 1993. Carr got a massive ban and never really made it back to prominence.
His managerial career will probably end tonight in equally unsatisfactory circumstances, knifed by the county chairman who sang his praises all summer, held up and supported by the players who have been through thick and thin with him, subject of sharply divided loyalties from supporters who generally expect more than can be delivered.
In the end, of course, remarkable though their display of loyalty has been, it doesn't matter much if the players want Tom Carr to stay. It is reassuring that they do, in the sense that we know he's not making them push their cars around car parks; but the county board, for all its flaws, gets to make this call. Delegates should take into account that the manager has the confidence of his crew, but players alone can't decide who will manage the county team. If that becomes the case, the position of managers becomes instantly untenable.
What is disappointing, however, and what gives Carr and his players a justifiable sense of grievance, is the manner in which he has been stabbed from behind the curtain. As long as the county board and county chairman fail so dismally to organise football and hurling in the county on an effective basis, they lack the mandate for messing people about this way.
Carr has had to learn a lot since the manager's job landed at his feet. He is an intense man by nature, and he has had to learn to step back and take things easy sometimes, not to be perpetually at full throttle. He has had to learn that just because you pour your heart and soul into something you love doesn't mean people will thank you.
He has lightened up, and occasionally during the last four years Dublin have put together passages of football that made one think that the good times were around the corner. Occasionally.
Personally, I don't know how good a manager Carr is or how good he can be, but I don't believe anyone else does either. He has been growing into a job that you don't get time to grow into. He understood that constraint, but, fundamentally decent person that he is, he expected his contribution would be assessed in the context of Dublin GAA as a whole. He expected he would be treated with decency.
What is the context? He inherited a mess of a team weeks before the championship, and his grim task thereafter was to assess the abilities of old comrades. Cut them loose? Ask them to stay? He had to get the players back in the habit of respecting a manager. For a man who in his playing days was a lone wolf amongst gregarious colleagues, that was tough.
Tougher still was finding replacements on the rather arid Dublin club scene. Every Dub has his opinion about two or three players whom they absolutely, definitely know would have made the difference had they been on the panel. In truth, most have been tried and found wanting, or at best found to be no better than what is there.
Carr's difficulty is the county's difficulty. Dublin has inflated expectations. The senior footballers should win All-Irelands while the structure beneath them is made of paper. Heffernan did it, but I suspect Kevin Heffernan would have been the greatest soccer manager ever if he had tried soccer, or the greatest rugby manager if he had turned to that. He was a one-off.
In the real world? The Dublin under-21 set-up is traditionally a shambles (not because of the efforts of the people who run it but because of the half-heartedness of the county board). No All-Ireland wins ever, no final appearance since 1980. Dublin have no minor All-Ireland since 1984, a remarkable statistic made all the more distressing by the fact that this year's team, hailed as being the first in a long time to be decorated by natural forwards, failed to score from play in Saturday's All-Ireland replay.
The first year of Tom Carr's reign, after the team had been knocked out of the championship, I remember a reporter asking him rather stridently what was wrong when a county of over one million people couldn't win All-Irelands year in and year out. Carr sighed and explained it patiently. But, of course, we aren't a county of one million GAA people. More than anywhere else, the GAA is something of a cult activity here. Huge tracts of the city have been ceded to soccer and to rugby, and the GAA shows few signs of regaining that ground.
In that context Tom Carr works. I don't think he or his selectors would argue that they have been a spectacular success at defying the odds in the past few years, but they have done enough to merit being treated with openness and honesty. They have assembled a good defence; the search goes on for a couple of scoring forwards.
I spoke at length with Tom Carr at the beginning of the summer. He was as frank as ever. He recognised the pressure he was under. He felt undermined by John Bailey's attempt to get rid of him in the spring almost as soon as the chairman had hung his hat again in his old office. The timing and the manner of that move hurt. Carr recognised that if nothing was won in the summer it might be time to go.
Yet Bailey was singing a different song in high season, offering for public consumption his view that the manager was doing a fine job. Carr began innocently to think about finishing that job. Last Wednesday night the jagged knife went in.
There was no need for the lack of decency and principle we have seen in the past week. If Tom Carr goes tonight (joining decent men like Tommy Lyons and Dave Billings in the therapy room for people who have been messed around badly by the county board), John Bailey should go too, because no longer can any manager of a county team count on him.
