Colin Sheridan: This season was a masterclass in management from Arne Slot
MASTERCLASS: This season was a masterclass in management from a coach most of us had never heard of fifteen months ago. That he achieved it with so little fuss is a testament to his understated genius.
Sitting in the Hogan Stand before Mayo played Tyrone in the 2021 All-Ireland Final, I must admit to succumbing to a shameful, if very fleeting sense of arrogance. How typical, I quietly thought to myself, that we would end up making history and ending the bloody famine, banishing the famous curse in front a diminished crowd in Croke Park and against a Tyrone team that was – up to teatime that evening at least - largely forgettable to me.
Such was my sense of grand delusion – a delusion perpetuated by a dozen tragic defeats – that I was already qualifying our inevitable victory as lesser because it was not against Dublin or Kerry in a third replay after extra-time, and not in front of 84,000 people, most of whom were returned emigrants home from Yonkers to bury the ghosts of decades past. So spoiled was I by myth and romance that I was preemptively bored by a routine victory over Tyrone, a team that had won more Celtic Crosses in five years than we had in a hundred. Like I said, it was a fleeting thought, one that embarrasses me now, and one that lingers when I consider the mundane magic of this season's Premier League champions, Liverpool Football Club.
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