Burke is slipping back into neutral now after a season which saw the Rossies exit at the All-Ireland quarter-final stage to eventual finalists Armagh, but the Kildare native believes the shelf life of county bosses is continually shortening due to the demands involved.
“I’m enjoying the break now after a few weeks in the doldrums. It really is a roller-coaster, it’s too intense. It’s unbelievably intense and you don’t get time to breathe at all,” Burke told The OurGame GAA podcast.
“Particularly when you’re like us and you have a few hairy weeks mid-year and it doesn’t help things either and things get tough and tougher. There’s no let-up. There’s no breathing space at all. You come out of a Division 1 campaign and then you’re straight into a Mayo and a Dublin and then back to Mayo.
“It’s unforgiving, and literally for a couple of weeks after, your body just breaks down and you’re literally shattered. Whatever adrenaline you’ve been working on kind of works the opposite way and it gives your body a bit of a kicking.”
Burke, who led Kildare to an All-Ireland U-20 success in 2018 and also enjoyed success as the Wicklow senior boss, insists county managers must be wired differently to survive what the job throws at them.
“We’re all the same really. I’d say the vast, vast majority of these managers in Division 1 or at that level of football are lunatics because you can’t do it any other way, you have to be full-on. You have to be all-in and you have to be pretty selfish, which isn’t a nice word but that’s how it is,” he said.
“You have to give it everything for the seven, eight or nine months and take a month off to sort yourself out again, but yeah, the intensity is unbelievable. They need to look at it because Jesus the shelf life in this
gig is getting shorter and shorter, I’d say.
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“Particularly in Division 1 and for a couple of weeks when results aren’t going your way and the media are on your back and morale is low, the public and your supporters [are on your back] and you’re trying to ignore all this and sort all that out and prepare for a Kerry or a Dublin as well in three or four days.
“That’s not easy, but then again, that’s where you want to be, that’s where the learning comes and that’s where the enjoyment comes operating at that level. It’s very, very enjoyable too, but you’d definitely be needing the downtime at the end of it.”
As regards a solution to the break-neck county season, Burke feels some “breathing space” is needed with players not alone in suffering due to the hectic schedule.
“They have to look at the structure of it, it’s too tight. They need to either find another week or two to give us a bit of breathing space, it’s crazy that every seven days you’re turning around and facing another top, top team and trying to prepare and there’s no breathing space,” Burke said.
“I know if you top your group [in the All-Ireland stages], you get two [weeks], but is two weeks enough to get Seán Kelly right or get Damien Comer right? Is it enough to get your best players right for an All-Ireland final?
“Are we squeezing ourselves too much? You’ll see the injuries and players missing out, but there is a strain on the backroom team, [and] a strain on the management team as well.
“It comes out in different people in different ways. We don’t pull hamstrings, we just wreck our own heads.
“You’ll never really see it outside of the players unless you see an explosion of emotion, that’s the management or the backroom team. That’s their build-up of fatigue. Players will pull up whereas people involved, and there are upwards of 20 people in most of these backroom teams, they all have different ways of showing it.”
