O’Mahony gets up and keeps on going

THERE was no time for tears of anguish for Galway senior football manager John O’Mahony.

Less than 24 hours after the bitter disappointment of Sunday’s All-Ireland SFC quarter-final loss to Donegal, he was straight back into harness, leading a training session with the county U-21 team in preparation for tomorrow night’s Connacht final against Mayo (Tuam, 7pm).

It’s not the ideal situation for either manager or players, given that nine of the U-21s are also involved with the seniors. But such is life.

“We would have preferred more time, we looked for a postponement but didn’t get it, so we’re just getting on with it now,” the dual manager explained yesterday afternoon.

“In fact I’m heading off to U-21 training in 20 minutes, so I have no choice, I have to recover.”

The loss to Donegal was obviously a disappointment, but it was one that O’Mahony took on the chin, giving due credit to Donegal. Judging from his immediate post-match comments however, what seemed to upset him most was the criticism of many of his players in the lead-up to that game, following on the last-minute draw from the previous week.

Yesterday, he was still incensed by those comments.

“I am very upset. I know the real truth about these guys, their passion, their love of playing for Galway, and it really hurts when you read suggestions that some of our key players either don’t want or have lost the hunger to play for Galway. That is so unfair. They’ve been around a long time, have played a lot of magnificent football.

“When I see players like Sean Óg de Paor taking the week off work to try and get his leg muscle right, when I see all the lads who didn’t get to play in the drawn game with Donegal last week coming in for an extra day’s training session on Tuesday, when I see the likes of Michael Donnellan coming in an hour early to train with Johnny Glynn, to see all that and then to read the personal criticism of these fellas, it’s an insult to everybody involved.

“It’s not the main GAA writers either, it seems to be a tabloidy thing, raking up stuff that has absolutely no relevance to what’s going on.”

Galway had been expected to easily dispose of the Donegal challenge, but when that didn’t happen, when they were left hanging on for survival in that drawn game, rather than give credit to Donegal for the quality of their play, the general suggestion was that Galway had under-performed.

Not true, says O’Mahony.

“We’ve been learning to live with that for a while, there’s no game for the last two years that we weren’t expected to win. Ironically, if we’d gotten past Donegal, we would probably have been written off against Armagh, which would have been great. But that’s it, it’s a feature with Galway football for the last few years, and these are the things you learn to live with. I suppose it could be said we’re victims of our own success.”

As for his own future with Galway, it is all still too early to say.

“I don’t know, I literally haven’t had time to think about it yet. It’s on record that I committed myself to another three years last year, but we’ll wait until after the U-21 championship is over and see what the story is then.”

If he does stay, it will be in the dual role of senior and U-21 manager.

“There are times when it will be quite intense, when they overlap. Even as late as last Saturday, we had a meeting and training with the seniors in the morning, and training then with U-21s in the afternoon. But you’d have to combine the two, they are complementary to each other.”