Colin Sheridan: During the off-season all perspective is lost in Mayo

Mayo manager James Horan talks to his players: The only thing more draining than watching Mayo lose All-Irelands is the fallout afterwards. There is little duality of thought; only absolutes. You are either with us or against us. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach

F Scott Fitzgerald got a lot wrong. He probably fell for the wrong woman, for starters. Poor Zelda was about as reliable as a junior footballer back from a summer in Boston with a chip on her shoulder — and she was twice as bad on the beer.

However, every now and then the great American dreamer got it right. A case in point was his assertion that the sign of first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. He argued that we should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Ironically, Scottie himself was unable to. Not permanently at least. He died at the age of 44 after a heart attack likely caused by his chronic alcoholism. He left behind his final novel, The Last Tycoon, uncompleted. Clearly, Fitzgerald struggled with the duality of thought he so admired in others.

In his seminal essay ‘The Crack Up’, he bared his flawed soul and was ridiculed as a result. His old friend Hemingway mocked him for his vulnerability. John Dos Passos was sympathetic but patronising. Hemingway’s sneering, in particular, crippled Fitzgerald and, if anything, accelerated his decline. It turns out that documenting your existential crisis for all to read on the pages of Esquire in the 1930s was akin to telling your father you didn’t want to go to the bog to bag turf because you were ‘emotionally fatigued’. Harsh times, even for the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby.

What pre-empted that crisis of confidence in Fitzgerald, I wonder? Was it the onset of another GAA off-season? To me, the only thing more draining than watching Mayo lose All-Irelands is the fallout afterwards. There is little, if any, duality of thought. Only absolutes. You are either with us or against us.

It’s not just in the Heather County, either. All across the land, as club championships take precedence on the field, off it there is more theatre unfolding than a Greek wedding.

In the space of a fortnight, Kildare got ‘it’s-not-you-it’s-me’d’ by their galáctico manager Jack O’Connor. At the same time, in Kerry, Peter Keane got “it’s-not-me-it’s-you’d’’ by his county board. There are whispers of a velvet revolution in Galway. All the while, Dessie Farrell in Dublin is tiptoeing back into his bedroom like the teenager who was about to get grounded for staying out late only for his sister to walk into the house with a nose piercing.

Last week, Kerry GAA resembled one of those 1980s Apple computer launches. You know the ones: packed auditoriums hopping mad with dudes in bootcut jeans and psychedelic sweaters, all going ballistic at the unveiling of a new microchip.

The unveiling of that microchip in the guise of the aforementioned O’Connor was about as surprising as a wet day in Dingle. The intrigue lay less in who the new manager was, but who he was taking with him.

The addition of Mike Quirke and Diarmuid Murphy on O’Connor’s support team has been hailed as a huge boost for a county that considers Celtic crosses a birthright.

The whispers that former Down boss Paddy Tally is also set to join the ticket is likely a direct counterpoint to the inclusion of Donie Buckley on the brains trust that Stephen Stack, O’Connor’s competition for the job, was assembling, which was, ahem, stacked with star power in the guise of Séamus Moynihan, Mickey Ned O’Sullivan, and Dara Ó Cinnéide. There was even talk of a vocal coach and a culture consultant.

This, unlike any that has come before, is the era of the backroom team. So much so that Buckley has become less of a man and more of a metaphor. An aria. A wolf whistle. A byword for fixing broken things.

For about three years, men across the State on the verge of being dumped by their paramours, have used his name in a desperate attempt to save their relationships.

“You want to break up with me? What if... I brought Donie Buckley on board? Would that help?”

In Mayo, where Buckley made his name — and in doing so, the cult of the backroom team was birthed — some nonsense of a story emerged of discontent behind dressing room doors. That is not to say there was no discontent.

Imagine a management team not having a disagreement as an All-Ireland is being lost in front of them? You’d bloody well hope they were disagreeing, otherwise there’s more wrong than everybody thinks.

Perhaps that will be the next addition to the backroom team — a mediator. Senator George Mitchell coming out of retirement to join the Mayo backroom team to resolve selection disputes, fashion choices, and mid-game positional switch disagreements, and settle the great ‘where do we stop on the way home’ debate.

Amidst all the madness, there were two exceptional pieces of critical thinking that deserve a broader audience. Billy Joe Padden, writing in The Mayo News, and Anthony Hennigan in the Western People didn’t so much argue both sides of the same coin, but contend that it’s OK to hold two opposing viewpoints, and retain the ability to function. (I have not checked in on either, but assume both are still functioning.) Thereby, the two of them — albeit as the sum of their parts — passed the Fitzgerald test of intelligence.

Off-seasons are tumultuous times. It’s like the few days after Christmas when the turkey buzz has worn off, and siblings suddenly get sick of each other. Things are said. Scabs picked. Backroom teams dismantled.

All it really proves is that, when we emotionally invest in something, roll the dice, shoot our shot, we are all F Scott Fitzgerald baring our broken souls on the pages of Esquire. Some will love us for it, others will loathe us. There are no absolutes, only perspectives and opinions, and hearing the other side sometimes hurts.

That, my friends, is the consequence of caring.