James Horan is the best man for the job as Mayo manager but even he can’t hold back the tide of time
Mayo’s players have been boosted by the return of the manager they want but he can’t hold back time
ICAN recall Páidí telling me once that you know you’re playing against time when you are doing as much canvassing as you are training.
He was involved in a great team, but he knew they were at death’s door for a couple of years because, suddenly, instead of chasing medals for motivation, they had started to chase causes.
When he was made captain in 1985, the mantra within the group was ‘let’s do it for Páidí’ because he was the chosen leader on the field and his team-mates knew what it would mean to him.
And no sooner had he got his hands on the canister, the new mantra dictated they do it for Tommy Doyle, who had just succeeded Páidí as captain.
It was successful, but that can only work for so long. When you start pinning your ambitions on the shoulders of someone else, then you know that your own tank is all but drained.
James Horan’s return to Mayo this week triggered the memory of that conversation I had many moons ago with my uncle and it might seem strange because the situations are polar opposite.
That Kerry team had fattened themselves with so much success that, in the end, they had to embellish their ambition with a cause, while Mayo are a football team whose craving for success has left them famished.
That may be true, but it is not just successful teams who eventually bow to the time, so do those who have spent a lifetime chasing their holy grail but, in the end, are left exhausted by the chase.
That is why the return of Horan this week will provide the mental boost this Mayo team is craving for right now.
Perhaps it also explains why they were silent as a group despite the shoddy way that Stephen Rochford was treated by his county board, and why they were also quietly relieved when Mick Solan withdrew his name for the position.
Horan is where he wants to be and the players have the return of a manager they never wanted to leave in the first place.
And they know, no matter what Horan says publicly about longterm plans, that his return represents one last shot at it. Let’s do it for him.
That is why any draft retirement press releases have been filed away for 12 months because the Mayo players now have a familiar and much loved pair of shoulders on which to pin their ambitions.
They have a new cause, headed up on top of the bigger cause which has left them weary, and now they will privately vow to win it next year both with and for James Horan.
They will take something from that, but the reality is: when the rush of emotion subsides, not that much will have changed.
The times I have spent with James in the television studios over the past couple of years have made quite the impression. He has an impressively astute football brain which demands to be put to use on the front-line, but what also struck me was the affection and the loyalty he has for this group of players. That is a good thing, too, provided he is not blinded by it. That is perhaps the biggest challenge facing him now, but I believe he will be fully aware that the players he is returning to are not the same ones he left behind in 2014.
They are all five years older and wiser, but it is asking too much to think that somehow they will be also be stronger and better.
I am not being ageist about this. Last year Colm Boyle was deemed to be a 50-minute player and yet he ended up as an All-Star so the danger of being hoodwinked into thinking that a player has too many miles on the clock is one which should be ignored.
The group he is going back to is a special one – in the likes of Keith Higgins, Lee Keegan, Boyle, Aidan O’Shea, Kevin McLoughlin, Andy Moran and the O’Connors, you are talking about some of the greatest that has ever worn the green and red – but it is a group also in dire need of renewal.
That may mean new roles for some players, perhaps even Andy Moran and Boyle having to make do with impact roles from the bench – because the one thing Horan knows is that if the team of five years ago were not good enough to win the AllIreland in their prime, they are not going to be good enough now.
That means he is facing the exact same challenge which confronted
Pat Holmes/Noel Connelly and Rochford, which is to make a shallow squad deep enough to absorb the demands of a Championship which has become a lot more challenging following the advent of the Super 8s.
Mayo’s greatest shortcoming has been their failure to develop talent. It is hard to believe that four years after he had left, only two players – Patrick and James Durcan – who did not belong to the Horan era, started in the summer’s qualifier defeat to Kildare
That points to a group which has stalled rather than evolved and while Horan’s return is easily sold on the basis that he will get the most out of the older players, that will count for absolutely nothing if he fails to introduce fresh talent.
And in doing that he is going to have to park his loyalty to some of those players who right now will be applauding him on his return but need to see this as a new beginning rather than some kind of sequel where they will just resume where they had left off.
In many ways, though, the headaches which presented themselves in his first term, still remain. He is still in dire need of a full-back and he hardly needs reminding that his loyalty to Ger Cafferkey in 2014 came at a huge price as Kieran Donaghy wreaked havoc.
The doubt over the future of Tom Parsons, who is still recovering from a serious knee injury, will only be filled in part by the excellent Diarmuid O’Connor, while the usual question marks hover over an attack that is still not as sharp as it needs to be against the main contenders.
He is the best man to answer those questions, but will that be sufficient to take Mayo over the All-Ireland line?
No, because in the end there is no cause that can beat back the tide of time.