Kieran Shannon: Amorim action in dropping Rashford speaks louder than words

A lot of managers can baulk at that, fudge it, seduced by the illusion of talent and skill. Plenty of Manchester United managers have over the past decade (just as for a long time another declining empire – Cork hurling – would, prior to the advent of Pat Ryan). As Gary Neville observed after their win over City on Sunday, “For far too long we’ve seen players mope around that pitch and still continue to get a game.” Anthony Martial played under five different United managers before finally being moved on during Erik ten Hag’s tenure. Marcus Rashford, by virtue of outlasting the Dutchman, is now on his sixth since breaking into the senior squad.

At the weekend, Amorim let him and everyone know there will hardly be a seventh; however it works out for Rashford, Amorim intends to be the last manager he’ll have at Old Trafford. Just like Tuco in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly advised the corpse of a procrastinating adversary he’d just killed, “When you have to shoot, shoot – don’t talk”, Amorim hasn’t hesitated. Instead of just talking about the kind of hard-working team he wants, he has selected it.

Pat Gilroy came to a similar realisation in assessing the fallout from the Startled Earwigs game of 2009.

Bernard Brogan had entered that All-Ireland quarter-final against Kerry in pole position for Footballer of the Year and ended up not even winning an All Star. Even then another manger would have concluded from that season that for all Dublin’s failings the one thing they had going for them was a bona-fide marquee forward in Brogan.

But that’s not how Gilroy viewed it. In many ways Brogan to him personified Dublin’s problem. In the Kerry game Brogan’s marker Tom O’Sullivan had scored before Brogan or any Dub had, not a hand laid on him as he came up the field. If Brogan remained as he was, Dublin were going nowhere, or at least not to where Gilroy wanted to take them. Like Amorim would say, “Even with the best starting team on the planet, without running, they will not win anything.” 

That winter Gilroy made that clear to everyone in the Dublin setup, particularly Brogan. The boys in blue from 2010 on would be decisively blue collar – every single one of them, Brogan included, if they wanted to play for him. Which is why at the start of that year, Brogan didn’t.

“We dropped some very good players during that period,” Gilroy’s consigliere, Mickey Whelan, would write in his book Love Of The Game, “putting an emphasis on everybody working hard when we weren’t in possession, including corner forwards.” When Dublin played Kerry in the opening round of the 2010 national league, the only forward to start both that day and in the Startled Earwigs game six months earlier was Paul Flynn. Brogan was on the bench, stuck watching play ahead of him Alan Hubbard (predominantly a back with Ballymun), David Henry (usually a back with Dublin), a couple of grass-eating newcomers called Michael Darragh Macauley and Kevin McManamon and on the frees a largely-forgotten player called Blaine Kelly.

Kelly was hardly as talented or as lethal a finisher as Brogan; hardly anyone in the country was. But for Gilroy that wasn’t the criteria by which he was picking the team. “He wanted lads who were tackling,” Brogan would reflect years later in his book, “and Blaine was making more tackles than me.” What Gilroy got was something that Bobby Knight, the legendary basketball coach of Indiana University and who coached Michael Jordan in the 1984 Olympics, had long undertood and once articulated as only as he could.

“You can talk about all the motivational speeches and phrases in the world but the greatest motivator of all is your ass on the bench,” he’d tell a bunch of giggling journalists. “There is no better motivator.

“Ass meets bench, bench retains ass. Ass transmits signal to brain, brain transmits signal to body. Body gets ass off bench and plays better. I mean, it’s a hell of a sequence of things that takes place.” 

It would take place in Dublin. In the early months of 2010 season Brogan was dogged by Gilroy – sent home from training one night, lambasted in front of the group, benched for the first three games of the league. But that bench and his ass sitting upon it sent a message to Brogan. “If I wanted to start, I’d have to tackle like a demon.” Brogan would finish that year as the Footballer of the Year, providing the launchpad for a decade of dominance.

He’d come to realise the genius in Gilroy’s madness. “He wanted to make it clear that no one was sacred, nobody’s place on the team was secure,” Brogan wrote in The Hill. “By dropping me he’d sent out the message that he could drop anyone; by insisting I had to tackle, it meant everyone had to tackle. By taking away what I loved most – playing football, as much of it as I could – he gave me back so much more.” 

On Sky after Sunday’s game Gary Neville pointed out that being omitted from the match-day squad for the Manchester derby could prove to be a very healthy development for both Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho. Just as Brogan had to walk in and tog out before everyone else one rainy miserable night in Ballymun, training on their own last Sunday morning could turn out to make them “the very best players”.

Because like Knight inferred all those years ago, you can have the best sport psychologist in the world on your books but the most powerful form of reinforcement in sport is selection or deselection. Ass on bench sends a powerful message to the brain and the body – and to everyone else.

United don’t just have a manager who will talk about hard work.

They have one who will pick it and reward it.