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.