Will Michael Maher's London reign finally get started in 2022?

A general view of the throw in during the Connacht SFC clash between London and Leitrim in 2017. Picture: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

A few weeks after Michael Maher was installed as London football manager in late 2019, Dessie Farrell was thrown the Dublin reins.

David Power got the Tipperary job around the same time while Seamus McEnaney was installed as Monaghan manager, Rory Gallagher took over Derry and Padraic Joyce got the Galway job.

Farrell has since presided over 20 National League and championship games as Dublin manager, Power has guided Tipperary on 16 occasions while ‘Banty’ is on 15 outings, with Gallagher and Joyce on 14 each.

Maher, meanwhile, just weeks out from starting his third season in charge of his native London, has overseen just five competitive games, the last of which was all of 22 months ago in the spring of 2020.

He wasn’t quite as unfortunate as Gerry Fox, who recently stepped down as manager of New York without having played a single game in his two-year reign, but sitting out almost two seasons of league and championship action still wasn’t anywhere on Maher’s job spec.

All going to plan, football will finally return for London on January 29 when they travel to play Carlow in Division 4 of the National League.

“London only tend to peak in any given year after five or six league games because we have no pre-season competitions and we’re always playing catchup a little on the teams in Ireland, so if you go back to 2020, we felt we were in a really good position after those five games that season,” said Maher.

“We were pretty excited about what was coming next and how we’d approach the championship. We were due to play Carlow and Waterford in our last two league games but never actually played again because of the pandemic. Ironically enough, we’ll get going again shortly with league matches against Carlow and Waterford so in a funny way it’s kind of like picking up from where we were two years ago.”

The problem, of course, is that so much has changed in the meantime. Maher has lost some players and gained others. The ones that are there since before the pandemic didn’t see each other for large chunks of 2020 and 2021. He is essentially starting from scratch again and trying to reestablish a culture and a positive environment after so long apart.

Michael Maher: Hasn’t coached a game since spring of 2020. Picture: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

As if life wasn’t difficult enough, the majority of his players who aren’t London natives returned to their families in Ireland for Christmas. They are all on individual training programmes and won’t cut corners but it’s another headache the teams in Ireland don’t have to plan for. For all of those counties, it’s been full steam ahead since collective training was allowed to resume on December 8.

“Look, we’ve just got a really, really positive outlook — when you’re out of action for nearly two years and you’re only a few weeks away from games coming back, you can only be positive,” insisted Maher.

“We’ve got the best possible training pitch available to us, a great backroom, a big panel that we’re looking to trim down by the middle of January so we’re all genuinely buzzing. We just can’t wait to get going.

“We’ve got a good few of the lads from the 2020 panel still involved. A few lads have moved away but in London you generally lose a few players year on year.

“What happened with the pandemic was that a few would have gone home and found that the working from home situation suited them so they stayed but look, it’s a really positive group and there’s a lot of optimism there.”

Back in early October, London played a Rest of Britain selection as part of the extensive London GAA 125 anniversary celebrations that were organised. It was their first game since facing Wicklow on February 29, 2020. Maher praised the London GAA board for the organisation of that occasion as well as the support they have given to him and his players throughout the down period. It has been a difficult couple of years but Maher’s mantra is that better times lie ahead.

He certainly never considered packing in the gig at any stage.

“God, no,” responded Maher, the first London native to take charge of the Exiles. “Please God things don’t get any worse with the current Covid situation because it’s all systems go again. We have the 29th of January pencilled in as one of the biggest dates in London GAA’s calendar for two years.

“I think all of us would feel a sense of unfinished business because we never really got started as a group in 2020. It’s just one of those things, we followed all the guidelines and did everything we possibly could so there’s no point looking back with any anger or regret now.”