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passing, painful moment, the tension swells as the realisation hits the questioner and their target; this conversation no longer represents an unmemorable, mundane verbal rally of no consequence.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:
