Colin Sheridan: How would Pep handle a full-time job, five kids, and Mayo manager’s gig?
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola
All of us have been there. A question, innocent at the time of launch, hangs in the air like a mortar round suspended in time. With every passing, painful moment, the tension swells as the realisation hits the questioner and their target; this conversation no longer represents an unmemorable, mundane verbal rally of no consequence. It has become loaded, tense, difficult, and, dare I say it, interesting. What should have been a forgettable scene from a forgettable movie becomes a Hitchcockian cliffhanger. It happens in boardrooms and it happens in bedrooms and it happens in virtual press conferences.
Last week, it happened in Mayo, when sports editor Mike Finnerty asked James Horan how he had coped, from a personal point of view, with the fallout from last September’s All-Ireland final defeat to Tyrone. The context for the rather standard question was a virtual Q&A between Horan and the local press pack ahead of his team’s season opener against Donegal. There was a selection box of routine answers for Horan to choose from, from the passive “you live and learn” to the dismissive “we don’t listen to outside noise”, either of which would’ve been lost in a podcast released later that week as a preview to the season. Horan, though, chose the road less travelled; “I’ve thought about it, reflected on it and moved on, Mike... I’m happy with where I am,” Horan opined, before pointedly asking a question of his own:
On paper, it reads as nothing extraordinary. In reality, however, it was an odd rebuke, made odder because there were no obvious stakes at play between the parties. This was not a presser held in the immediate aftermath of a brutal defeat. This was late on a Monday night in January, hours after the local papers had gone to print for the week.
A conversation that should’ve meant nothing more than background noise for the washing of the dishes, instead ended up providing an awkward yet insightful window into the pressure of modern-day management. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and Horan, like almost all managers and coaches and players on elite sports teams, must sometimes feel the hand he’s been dealt by his critics is a raw and unjustified one.
Thinking it, however, does not make it so.
It’s worth pointing out that Finnerty is an editor, journalist, and broadcaster of huge experience and impeccable character. Horan knows this, and though only he can account for his thinking at that moment, it is more likely his beef was not with Finnerty, but with the world in general. A world that falls in and out of love with his Mayo team on a biweekly basis. A world that spins Aidan O’Shea stories like a ’70s DJ. A world that requires constant narrative, regardless — or often because of — the rather boring reality.
Just as Finnerty’s reputation as a scribe is unimpeachable, Horan’s resume as a player and coach is in the bracket of elite. He may not have the All-Ireland his efforts as manager arguably deserve, but he has proven himself, season after season, to be the man most likely to land the big one for Mayo. That rep took a hit last September, and clearly it still rankles. Why wouldn’t it? He’s human after all.
Few managers seem to be above the hurt. Last Saturday, Pep Guardiola’s Man City team drew at home to Southampton. Afterwards, Pep told Sky Sports’ Patrick Davison: “We made one of the best performances of the season.”
This, about a team who regularly trounce opponents playing some of the most sophisticated football ever conceived. Davison, like the rest of us, wasn’t having it. “Really?”, he countered in disbelief. “That good?” There followed a stare from Pep that would fell a horse, and a pause so grand you could’ve parked the Evergreen container ship in it. His eyeballs fixed on Davison, Guardiola exaggeratedly leaned into the microphone, never breaking his stare.
“By far...” said Pep, two words laced with arsenic, the overexposure to which can be fatal to sports reporters.
Guardiola may be a footballing genius, but his ability to bait the media with sarcasm poorly disguised as enlightened acceptance of substandard results is fooling nobody. It is, however, entertaining. Reporters must know and surely hope that an audience with Pep might yield such morsels of off-field theatre. The play of his team may be brilliant but boring; his press conferences at least account for a little more drama.
One would wonder how he would handle a full-time job, five kids, and the Mayo manager’s gig. My guess is there would be many more stares, silences, and sinister leans to microphones.
For Guardiola, Horan, et al, their reaction to irritable questions only serves to highlight the perpetual pressure they are under. From owners. From fans. From media. From themselves, and though the media and critics are just as fallible as the coaches they question, the terseness of the responses that are all too often offered to them serve nobody if they become the norm. Embattled and with a chip on your shoulder may get you through one game, but is virtually impossible to sustain you over the course of an entire season. It takes both sun and rain to make the flowers grow, after all.
