John Maughan: I’ve changed because the science has changed me. I was a bit mad in those days

Thirty years on from guiding Clare to one of the most fabled provincial breakthroughs ever, John Maughan returns to the Banner this weekend, still at this inter-county managerial lark, with an Offaly team he’s helped galvanise.

CENTRE OF ATTENTION: For many years, John Maughan had no desire to get back on the managerial carousel but he doesn’t regret his decision to answer the call from Offaly. Picture: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

Once 12 o’clock in the day would come, you’d start thinking about training. ‘Oh Jesus, tonight’s going to be tough.’ You’d eat no dinner because it would be only coming back up. You’d start off with 20 laps. If you went down to a county team now and said, ‘Right, lads, 20 laps to warm up’, they’d tell you, “Fuck off, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘But the thing about it was you were mentally tough from it. You didn’t want to be the one that was going to give up. We had a sub on the panel called Liam Conneely. He was working in Sligo and he’d still be down in Lahinch at seven o’clock for training. One night he was frothing at the mouth during a savage run. He was actually in a state of delirium. But he had this thing, ‘I’m going to finish this’, and we had this thing, ‘He is going to finish it’, so myself and Joe Joe [Rouine] grabbed him by the hand and pulled him along. We developed this savage friendship. The feeling in the dressing room afterwards having done a session like that was absolutely fantastic.’