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.

For all that is good in Mayo football, there are so many things holding the county back. Chief among them is the loss of so many young people to emigration. Structures at club and county level become staid. There’s little turnover and where faces rarely change there’s usually resistance to new ideas. It leads to stagnation and makes winning ambitions all but impossible. It’s not anyone’s fault. The jobs are tough enough, the volunteers are not there and the tasks so bountiful that burnout is high.

But when James interviewed for the job in the October of 2010 there were other issues too. Longford and Sligo had beaten the county in the championship the previous year and expectations were low. Had they been higher he may not have even got an interview.

Back then no-one had heard of Lee Keegan. Cillian O’Connor was a minor. General consensus had written off the next generation: Colm Boyle was too small, Aidan O’Shea had the wrong attitude, his brother Seamus never going to make it, Kevin McLoughlin was too light and negativity pervaded the county.

Management teams followed the traditional model of two selectors and a coach. Typically they were selected internally. Strength and conditioning was ad hoc. Sports science a fad. The players worked on their own skills. Tackling was what northern teams talked about.

Horan revolutionised that way of thinking. He wanted a team to be able to physically compete with the best sides in the country based on a high intensity and skillset for every situation on the field. He appointed the best people to make sure they could deliver.

The board was caught a bit unaware. Increasing expenditure at a time when they were fighting for their financial lives was never going to go down well. There were regular issues. Both sides had to play politics publicly and privately but they found a middle ground and, once they saw the results, bought into his way of thinking. A New Zealander by birth he saw similarities in Mayo’s quest for Sam with his native country’s World Cup hoodoo. Instead of avoiding pressure, he encouraged the players to change their mindset from playing to avoid losing to playing to win.

“The All-Blacks created a situation where they had to win,” he said back in 2011. “They put immense pressure on themselves and the nation was gone absolutely nuts. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. They were down to their fourth choice out-half, their scrum-half went nuts, Richie McCaw was playing on one foot and some of the guys in the pack were running out of juice, but they kept at it, got the luck they deserved and sometimes that’s what you need to break the duck. So, in a certain sense, there are some similarities between the All-Blacks and Mayo.”

The weakness of the process was that the players in the camp were exposed to a much higher level of expertise than the normal club men. For four years he’s worked off a limited player base as, more often than not, they were so far ahead of the rest in terms of the game and style he wanted to play that he had no other option.

It all came to an end at the weekend. It was always coming to an end this year. Giving it another go was a surprise given the commitments he had. He had to though. A one-point loss in an All-Ireland final will do that to you. But he’s got five kids, his first son born just before the Connacht final this year, and a job with Coca Cola that demands commitment above and beyond the norm. It can’t have been an easy decision and he told me once his wife Siobhan was a saint to put up with it all.

On Saturday, facing the media from behind a kitchen counter in the bowels of the Gaelic Grounds, he said it wasn’t the day to talk about retirements. The referee, Kerry’s tactics, the venue... he didn’t bite on any of them. He had made the decision in his own head and wanted to go out quietly.

Later that evening, a few hundred metres up the Ennis Road in the Greenhills Hotel, he called his team into one final meeting. The tears flowed. They were convinced they would win an All-Ireland under James. His goals were their goals. That loss meant it would never happen and it finally sunk in.

The flattering tweets followed yesterday morning: “Four massive years with James Horan he has raised the standards and expectations of Mayo football,” wrote Aidan O’Shea, “Tough to see him leave without achieving the ultimate with him. He has been both brilliant for me personally and @MayoGAA so thank you.”

Alan Dillon added: “We awake this morning heartbroken and lost in tears, one this for certain this county should never doubt our courage for the fight. It’s unthinkable what James Horan & his backroom have done the past 4 years, he’s a absolute legend and sincere thanks. End of a Era.”

Lee Keegan’s message was a little more succinct: “To the great man all I can say is thank you” accompanied by a picture of him kissing Horan.

His loss to Mayo football is hard to convey.

The suspicion is that everything could easily fall back to ways of old within Mayo. The county could slip back from contenders to also-rans.

Given he’s only 42 you would wonder if he could still contribute, if he could somehow step into the breach again. It’s unfair to ask but a review of the structures within the county that feed into the senior side by someone with such a qualified background could be where he conducts his greatest work. Somehow I can’t see that happening.

So a return to the management role again some day? From what he’s learned these last few years he would be the better man for it.

But the thing you learn about James Horan is that once he makes up his mind he’s not for turning. Unfortunately for Mayo and the GAA landscape in general, from what we’ve seen these last few days, he may just slip off quietly. And if that happens we’ll have lost one of the great managers of our time.