THEY'LL continue to meet now as lifelong friends but the last time they came together as the Tipperary management team was last Friday week in the Shannon Oaks Hotel in Portumna. Eamon O'Shea had made his way over from lecturing in NUIG, Michael Ryan had dashed up from his Ulster Bank office in Thurles, while Liam Sheedy came from Dublin where he'd spent a lot of his time these past few months in his new job with Bank of Ireland.

They talked about where they were all at in each other's lives and careers and well before the end they knew where their chat was heading, the same place they'd each suspected it would when they'd met up in Nenagh the previous week.

They couldn't go on.

It would tear them up, leaving that circle which for the past three years they've called the family, but when it came down to it they accepted there's the family and then there's family. One to provide for, one to spend quality time with, even if their kids and their wives enjoyed the journey almost as much as they did.

"It's just a side of your life," says Michael Ryan, "that at some stage you just have to take back. At the end of the day we're family men first. You're only passing through a role like this. I know the players will be hurt by this but ultimately it couldn't be a consultative process. We had to do this for us."

Team trainer Cian O'Neill, the one member of the backroom team that is likely to stay on and provide valuable continuity, only learned from Sheedy last Wednesday evening of his resignation but he had suspected Sheedy and his two selectors would. Back in June Sheedy confided in O'Neill that he'd been promoted in work to the position of national head of sales capability in retail and marketing, a job that would involve overseeing a team all over the country and require a lot of time in Dublin. The players only learned about the promotion when they were informed of Sheedy's resignation on Thursday.

"It showed how professional Liam was," says O'Neill. "He didn't want the team unsettled at that crucial part of the season. You look at Alex Ferguson and the season he announced he'd be retiring was United's worst season in something like 16 years. Liam wanted the team's sole focus to be the next match, the next ball. That's why his news this week was such a shock to the players."

What also raised eyebrows was the line in Sheedy's resignation statement that he and his selectors were investing up to 16 hours a day between their day job and their role with Tipperary. As a single thirtysomething, O'Neill finds that he can continuously combine preparing an elite inter-county team along with his responsibilities as a leading physical education lecturer in the University of Limerick, but he was continuously amazed by the dedication, all the hidden hours, family men like Sheedy, O'Shea and Ryan gave to Tipperary.

To begin with, match analysis. O'Neill has managed the Kildare minor footballers and has found theis is the most time-consuming aspect of the job. "You might have to watch the DVD of the game five or six times and then decide exactly what you want to cut – or code as we now say – and show the players. There'll be a sequence you'll want to show them in too. What's the best way, the best sequence, to get your message across? Liam and the selectors would have had great assistants like Damien Young helping them out on the technological side of that but all the same it would be Liam co-ordinating with them and Liam who everything would have to run through. You could be looking at the three lads, Liam, Eamon and Michael, taking a full Saturday just to get the right clips for that meeting. Right there alone is 12 hours on your day off."

Another word that would explain all the hidden hours – reading. Sheedy was always on the lookout for an edge – from inviting guest speakers in like Sean Fitzpatrick (he of All Blacks fame, we hasten to add, not of Anglo-Irish infamy) to eating up books.

Eamon Corcoran, a work colleague with Bank of Ireland and a member of the Tipp team that won the league and Munster championship under Sheedy in 2008, was similarly struck by Sheedy's appetite to acquire and divulge knowledge. "Every night you'd leave training with something new to think about. He'd always have a message, whether it'd be something from Lance Armstrong or something he'd read in a sport psychology book or a GAA book or something even from business. The research he'd have put into team meetings would be frightening.

"Even the nights he'd go to the gym. Every Monday night the lads would be in the gym and he and Mick would be there. I don't know of any other manager or selector that would be at every gym session but the boys would be there."

Ryan reckons there was hardly a senior club game in the county this past three years that either Sheedy, O'Shea or Ryan himself wasn't at. Friday evening, Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon; they were constantly on the lookout for potential, constantly monitoring form. There wasn't a weekday either where himself or Sheedy weren't on the phone to each other without having some issue to talk about, "whether it was about who was progressing, who wasn't progressing, who needed to be met".

But all that was fun. For the most part it was great fun. It wasn't great fun, mind, back in late May after the hammering to Cork by the Lee. Ryan would have seemed an obvious successor to Sheedy, providing the same kind of continuity that John Allen offered Cork in the wake of Donal O'Grady's resignation, but while his work and family commitments were the main considerations behind Ryan's decision to walk with Sheedy and O'Shea, he'll admit openly the Cork debacle influenced him as well. While Sheedy was largely immune to the barrage of criticism that defeat triggered, Ryan was stung by it.

"I'm in the heart of it here. I walk up and down the streets of Thurles five days a week and I can tell you it was a tough summer at times. Even up to playing Waterford [in this year's All Ireland semi-final], I was told by my own guys at home that we hadn't improved Tipperary hurling. I was, like 'Jesus, what have the last three years being about for me so?' And these were from people I liked, respected. It showed me that we have fanatical supporters and in our resignation statement we made a point of expressing our gratitude to them – but what the Cork game really emphasised to me was the responsibilities of what we do, that we must give everything we have to give."

And now, he feels he can't give it.

A typical day for Sheedy this past summer with the new job going up to Dublin involved being on the road by seven in the morning and not home from training until near 11 at night. For O'Shea, based in Salthill, training was almost a four-hour trip and next year he'll be expected to travel and write some more on his specialist subject, the economics of ageing. For Ryan there isn't a morning he's not up at seven either when he'll get in a bit of farming before his work as a senior regional manager with Ulster Bank.

"I have a good job and I'm bloody grateful to have it. My support has gone from two assistants to one. We're primarily in lending around the north Kilkenny and Thurles area, and with the way things are, we're not doing much lending, I can tell you. There's a lot of people we're meeting at the coalface who are genuinely suffering and our job is to make things easier and make things happen for our clients."

Eamon Corcoran doesn't envy Sheedy's successor. He felt sorry for Michael Doyle, a good manager in his own right, but who suffered in the comparison games with his predecessor, Nicky English, and unless Nicky was prepared to do a Jack O'Connor and go at it again, the Tipperary manager of 2011 will have some job measuring up to the man who was there in 2010.

"When the lads won the All Ireland," notes Corcoran, "it was striking that all the players ran towards the management team. In other set-ups the players look to run out the management team."

Ryan will envy them though. On Thursday he was feeding the cattle on his mother's farm when Tipp were drawn out of the hat to play Cork again next May and he would give nearly everything to be involved again. "For me it surpassed playing. You'll hear managers say being over a team can't beat playing but to me this was better, helping, influencing so many other fellas."

He'd give nearly everything to experience it again. But he can't.

And as O'Shea says and Sheedy concurred, "If you can't give this 100 per cent, then you just can't give anything."

kshannon@tribune.ie