Dear Noel,

Our club is in crisis. The team manager walked out last week when four players said they couldn’t make it to training because there were cattle on the road. They all live within three miles of the pitch. Yet, two other fellows came from Dublin and managed to get there on time.
Morale is at an all-time low. We haven’t won a game all season. The two lads who came from Dublin have said they are going to transfer next year. I’m chairman, and I need to show leadership here.

Can you tell me if it’s possible to get satellite images that would prove, for once and for all, if there were cattle on the road that evening?

     - Seamus, North Tipp.

Dear Noel,

We’re into our first county final for over 40 years on Sunday week. Have you any tips as to how we might prepare for such a big occasion
It’s an U10 final, and we’d all like to get behind the lads.

I was chairman back in 1967 when we got to our last final, but society has changed so much since, I might be out of touch. I’d appreciate any help you can give me Noel. This is a big occasion for me and the club.

     - Criostoir, club chairman, West Limerick.

Dear Noel,
I brought the lads away for a training camp in Playa des Ingles last month. The club officers came along, too.

Things got a bit out of hand. Nothing major – just a few unexpected brushes with transvestism, two lads invited by the apartment manager to find accommodation elsewhere, some ground hurling with a Camogie team from down the country, complaints about the rattle of the steel cogs in the corridor at night, a burger thrown at a moustachioed bar singer from Co. Mayo just as he was winding up for the last chorus of Peaceful, Easy Feeling.

Nothing you wouldn’t see in any small town in Ireland any weekend night.
But the chairman’s made a song and dance about it. He’ll resign if players aren’t suspended. In hindsight, the lads probably shouldn’t have fired him up on the carousel in Waterford Airport.

If the players are suspended, we haven’t a hope in the divisional junior championship this year. The chairman has forgotten that both training sessions went great in Playa des Ingles. You can’t make hermits out of lads either.
What should I do, Noel?

- Lar, club manager, Co. Carlow

Dear Noel,

I’m chairman of the club. We couldn’t get a manager this year. Eventually, a colourful local Teagasc Advisor took it.

Before last Sunday’s game, he jumped up on the table and read a passage from a Robert Service poem – that piece about “hunger not of the belly kind,/that’s banished with bacon and beans.”

The week before he got them to visualise they were Shackleton and Crean reaching their Promised Land. Our sub goalkeeper ordered a pint from Crean halfway through the exercise. He swore the television ad came into his mind.

Now the manager wants a trip to London so the lads can see Les Miserables. “It’s a story of a people coming to the light,” he says, “and that’s our motto for the year.” His motto could swallow our Lotto.

Last night our veteran wing half-back drove up onto a ditch on his way to training. He says he was ‘entering the Alpha level’ with breathing exercises, as instructed by the manager, when he dozed off. Now he wants the club to pay for the damage done to his front grill.

This manager could ruin the club. What should I do? We’ve won the first seven games of the season, and top of the all-county league table for the first time in years. There are over 30 lads at training every night. Should I let him go? Maybe my view of the world is too linear – I’m a primary school Principal.

- Louis (name and address with editor.)