The trouble for Alan Dillon was that he was no trouble

Dillon remained underrated both inside and outside his own county, right up until he announced his retirement yesterday morning, writes Kieran Shannon

Back in 2012, on the eve of the first Dublin-Mayo epic of this decade, James Horan was the guest on the Coach’s Couch, a weekly feature this sport section ran that summer.

Sitting where the likes of Liam Griffin and Sean Boylan had also made themselves cosy, the Mayo manager took off his baseball cap and shot the breeze in a manner that wouldn’t have been his custom with the media at the time, probably because it was a rare chance to talk about sports other than his own.