It takes a special team to make a team like Mayo look so old, spent, lost.

Some years some titles should be valued that bit more than usual, having been that bit harder earned.

Now that the furore over the handpass limit in football is over, it’s back to that perennial old January reliable: Fixture overload, player welfare, and possible burnout.

Considering how he loved throwing in an old Cloughie anecdote in his last gig, and he now occupies Old Big ’Ead’s old chair at the City Ground, we’ll start with another Martin O’Neill yarn from their time together, albeit one less romantic than the ones he was inclined to recount in recent years.