Mayo's quiet man

THE year he first played with Mayo was the same year he won his first All Star and probably when he should have won his first All-Ireland too but when it comes to explaining why he and Mayo didn’t seal the deal, his take on it is different from nearly everyone else’s.

He has no interest in talking about the three points from play he kicked in the drawn game or the five points from play he thumped over in the replay. He has no notion of assuming the seductive role of the unlucky victim either. You won’t hear him harp on about how freakish and fortuitous Colm Coyle’s equalising point was, or how random and unfair it was that Liam McHale was signalled out in the replay’s big brawl.

Instead he brings you back to the sequence of events before Coyle’s speculative punt ever hopped over John Madden’s crossbar. Midway through that second-half, he reminds you, Mayo were six points ahead. And if you were to forensically break down how those six scores came about, as Horan himself has a thousand times in his mind, you’ll find Mayo had no one to blame but themselves.

He won’t get into names here but what he will do as we sit across the table of a hotel lobby is motion handpasses that should have been given and that weren’t.

“Our basic skill set is what let us down when it came down to it. I firmly believe that. A couple of passes were intercepted, I can still see them, simple handpasses that weren’t on and Meath just picked off and went down the field to score. Or a fella soloing on the inside foot. Or a fella shooting a bad wide because he had to turn onto his good foot and shoot under pressure.

“Not all of us could use both feet, not all of us could pass off our left or right hand. One of the passes that were intercepted, if he could have just popped off with this hand [he motions], instead of taking the extra second to go like this [motions again], those are the inches they talk about. If our basic skill set had been very, very good, we wouldn’t have given away as much ball. We would have won the game. It was just faulty decision making at critical moments, because of faulty technique. Little things like that let us down, not sending offs or balls bouncing over the bar.”

After such a clinical analysis you won’t be surprised to learn Horan is by profession a quality assurance manager at a manufacturing plant outside Ballina, with a degree in the scientific field of chemistry.

Likewise you’ll hardly find it startling that Horan conducted a rigorous skills gap analysis of his panel during the past off-season. Every player was given an individual prehab exercise programme drawn up by sports scientist Ed Coughlan which also incorporated a range of skills exercises.

Then when they all reported back to the group in January, they were put through a series of physical tests that were bookended with a series of skills. A sprint test might begin with a player jab lifting the ball with his perceived weaker foot, then finish with him passing off his left hand or left foot. For all the emphasis on hard work and honesty, the basics have been the central tenet of Horan’s coaching.

In a way it’s easy to trace where Horan’s independent thinking comes from. His father was barely in his 20s when he left the fields of Ballintubber for the adventure and isolation of New Zealand.

“He was a farmer’s son,” explains that farmer’s son, “and there was nothing going, so he decided to take off and get some experience of working on big farms. He caught a train right down to Invercargill at the bottom of the South Island. It was as far as the train could go.

“When he got off, there was no one else on the train and no one at the train station either, only him, this buck from Ballintubber. So he got off and stayed there for a few years before moving his way up through the South Island and then up to the North Island where he met my mother.”

When James was five, it was time to return home and man the family farm. That boat trip is Horan’s earliest childhood memory, with its horrible food and wooden-floored kids’ playroom where, he smiles with a grimace, “bloody ABBA” were inflicted upon them every day. Eventually, after five weeks which saw them pass Acapulco and up through Panama, Horan and his parents and three siblings arrived in Ballintubber.

There he’d play for the local football club, just like his father before him, and while he’d never play minor for the county — “I was small and chubby before I grew all of a sudden and didn’t have much power in my legs, plus, I wasn’t that awful interested either” — he would play a couple of years for the U21s before drifting into obscurity again. For a few years he played full back for Ballina rugby in Division Two of the AlL until at 24 his championship form with Ballintubber attracted the attention of new county manager John Maughan.

As well as having the ability to swing points over from distance, Horan had the ideal big-match temperament. He remembers being particularly nervous running out on to Croke Park for the 1996 All Ireland semi-final against Kerry but within moments finding his “bearings and fire exits” and feeling distinctly comfortable there.

That day he would score the game’s decisive score, intercepting a misdirected Declan O’Keeffe kickout and from over 40 metres out coolly drilling it over the goalkeeper.

By 1999 Horan was an All Star again, scoring three early points off Seán Óg Ó hAilpín in the All Ireland semi-final, causing the dual player to confess “I wish I had a hurley in my hand” before he was relieved of Horan duty and switched spots with Ronan McCarthy. After Cork defeated Mayo again in 2002, however, Horan as a married man with a young family was finished with county football.

He’s only been coaching for five years or so. He was working in Westport at the time where the Ballintubber U16s had a county quarter-final and after taking in the game he was asked if he’d help out at a couple of their sessions. That’s how he caught the coaching bug but in truth he had long had a curiosity about how teams prepare.

“I suppose when I was playing I would have been very judgemental about training. I always had a clear idea in my head how you could maximise a training session, how you could make sure the basic skill set was addressed and how game ideas and games sense could be improved, rather than just drills and running.

“When I worked in Dublin I lived near Tolka Park so I’d go along there to see some of the League of Ireland teams train, or pop along to Lansdowne to see how the rugby internationals and how they warmed up and prepared. I was always interested in that side of things.”

In 2007 he took over the Ballintubber team and in their first year they landed the intermediate title. Then, after reaching a couple of county quarter-finals, they won the senior championship last October for the first time in the club’s history.

It was a gradual progression, a gradual process. At the end of the 2008 season the team were in the second tier of the domestic league and generally perceived as a talented but flaky young side. Horan identifies the following year’s campaign in Division 1B as the decisive phase in the team’s development, a campaign in which they won 10 games on the trot, six of them by just a kick of a ball. Since grinding out all those wins in the muck of early spring Ballintubber have lost just four games in all competitions in the past three years.

This writer, in his other capacity as a sports psych consultant, would have worked with Horan over those years. But while his forensic attention to detail and brilliant ability to communicate and relate with players meant I could tell he was always going to manage Mayo. I’d envisaged him as the successor to John O’Mahony’s successor, rather than O’Mahony’s successor outright.

After the Longford fallout, though, Horan felt the time was right. He’d be finishing up with Ballintubber anyway; after four years, the lads in the club needed to hear a new voice while he’d be looking for a new challenge. Why not the county seniors? He began as a distant outsider as a number of high-profile names were linked with the job but the kingmakers were swayed by Ballintubber’s run to the county final and especially his power-point presentation in which he detailed his knowledge of and vision for Mayo football. There was no wild talk about winning All-Irelands within 12 months. Instead he talked about the kind of team Mayo needed to become and the structures and processes that needed to be put in place to facilitate that. Before aspiring to beat the likes of Kerry, first they’d have to become a durable, honest team like Kildare.

“I think I had a very good understanding of where Mayo football was and some of the gaps that were in Mayo football. The starting point was our fundamental skill levels, then having a strong defence, defending as a unit and being hard to play against. Those things needed to be addressed before anything else.”

Yet for as much as he recognised Mayo’s shortcomings, he was struck by how exaggerated they had become in the public consciousness when he finally got to work with the players.

“Their confidence had absolutely been shot to pieces. There was this perception that players weren’t putting it in for the jersey. From knowing the lads, it was totally unfair but when players constantly hear and read things like that, it does have an effect.”

He’s well aware things very nearly got even worse; that London, not Longford, nearly represented the nadir; that his managerial championship career could have been over before it had really begun.

There had, of course, been the odd scary moment in the league. Just 22 minutes into the team’s game against Dublin in Croke Park, they trailed by 4-4 to 0-2. Horan can smile now about how surreal that was but he wasn’t smiling then.

“I remember turning around to talk to Jimmy Nallen but there was no one there. So I was looking around the place and for a split-second my eye caught the big screen only to find I was looking at myself on the big screen! There was no one else there! Jesus Christ, man, that was a serious moment.”

Mayo would storm back into that game before ultimately losing it but against London there would have been no honour, only shame, in defeat.

Looking back, that weekend in Ruislip was a classic in slapstick comedy. For reasons too long to explain here, they were unable to fly out of Knock, so instead the day before the game they took a bus to Galway where they then took a flight which stopped over in Waterford before landing in Southend on the outskirts of London. Then there was a further two-hour bus journey to the team hotel which wasn’t the most sedate it could have been, it being the night of the Champions League final in the very same city.

Yet for all that, Mayo actually started quite well. In the first 12 minutes they had four clear goal chances — only to miss them all.

“That sort of knocked us for six and rallied London and in fairness to them, they played awfully well. So before we knew it we were just looking into the abyss.

“A few minutes into the second half our handpassing and freetaking and everything just shut down on us. And you can talk all you like about how it stemmed back to all the s**t from last year or the weekend’s logistics and all that kind of stuff but the reality is there were a few minutes there where the players had to look long and hard at themselves, as did management.”

Horan could see his entire managerial career flash in front of him. Before the game there had been a carnival atmosphere about the place, with tents and marquees swilling with beer and goodwill for the sizeable Mayo expats contingency that had taken the trouble to get out to Ruislip. But as the game progressed, Horan could feel their mood darken behind his dugout.

Bit by bit though, Mayo got better and with 15 minutes to go had clawed their way back to level terms. London then kicked a couple of outrageous points to go two ahead again, only for Trevor Mortimer to come on and kick a monster before Kevin McLoughlin popped up with a nice left-foot slicer.

Mayo would prevail in extra time, yet even afterwards an air of panic was prevalent. There was a danger the group could miss their flight home while a considerable number of players were dashing off to various different airports, meaning even the post-game debriefing and meal was almost as frantic as the game itself.

A few days later though when everything and everyone had settled down, the management team sat down and watched the DVD. The genre was unmistakably a horror.

“The way we defended in that game was absolutely unbelievable. Terrible.

It was the turning point of our season. Their first goal came from a breaking ball. Basically our half-back line had all gone ahead of the ball, anticipating a break forward, when it broke behind. But little things like that increased our focus on how we defend as a unit after that.

“It also has to be said that rightly or wrongly, Ruislip is a banana skin. It’s completely different to every other game; it’s not your normal build-up, it’s not your usual setting, and at the back of the players’ minds and I suppose in the back of mine too there was always the idea of playing Galway on our own patch. After London it wasn’t difficult at all to get the players right for Galway.”

They haven’t stopped learning and improving since. But he doesn’t want to stop here, even though it’s further than anyone outside the group had pictured.

“I think after the Cork game people are very supportive of the team. The local expectations aren’t out of control like they were in the past. People have been bitten a couple of times so they’re more reserved now.

“One of the goals we set back in the spring was to be consistently competitive at the latter stages of the season. That’s the kind of side we want to be. We’re looking to go out and play as hard and as well as we can against Kerry and see where that takes us.”

Bit by bit they’re becoming the team that he wanted, led by the very man that they needed.