Horan’s loss to Mayo football hard to convey

An admission first.

I fell out with James Horan last year. The matter was trivial but the effects were lasting. Both of us believed we were right and in the end all we could agree on was that it was best to avoid each other.

As a Mayo man working in Cork it made the day job a lot tougher and could easily have turned me against the man on a personal level. My main source within one of the top teams in the country was gone and the responsibilities of the job were still the same. But a lifetime spent watching Mayo club and county games meant I couldn’t dislike him because he was, without a doubt, the best manager the county ever had.