‘New’ man in Mayo
Shane McGrath speaks exclusively to James Horan
‘THEY JUST WEREN’T PLAYING AT THE LEVEL THEY CAN’
ON the night he resigned as manager of the Mayo football team, James Horan walked away from a sport that was still free of Dublin rule. It was August 30, 2014, and darkness was falling in Limerick when Horan told his players in a dressing room in the Gaelic Grounds that his time in charge was done.
The exchange was, by accounts, emotional. Only moments earlier, Mayo had lost an All-Ireland semifinal replay to Kerry.
In the view of many, the match was the best of the modern era, one of the finest from any age. Kerry eventually out-lasted Horan’s team and pulled free in extra time to win the game by three points.
Less than 24 hours later, Donegal stunned the country when beating defending champions Dublin in the second semi-final.
Kerry would win a cagey final and Dublin’s gallop under Jim Gavin had been abruptly checked.
They were the dimensions of the football world James Horan stepped out of over four years ago. Things have changed. Dublin are dominant, to an extent that could prove unprecedented. Everything else is detail.
Kerry have been transitioning for three years. Tyrone remain wedded to tactics that do not work against the very best sides.
Donegal are trying to summon old strength.
And Horan returns to the intercounty game with significant doubts over Mayo’s ability to return to the grand Croke Park days.
In September 2017 they pushed Dublin in a barn-burning final, but they were gone from this year’s Championship before the end of June.
Horan’s new team will be cast around the supports he built for his old one: David Clarke, Chris Barrett, Keith Higgins, Lee Keegan, Aidan O’Shea and Cillian O’Connor will be central to his plans.
Many of the support players he fits around them will be familiar, too.
And yet supporters in the county are energised by his return.
They trust in him like they trust in no one else, including the men that succeeded him. That faith was hardearned; he took the Mayo job on the first occasion in the autumn of 2010, only months after Mayo’s Championship spanned two matches, defeats to Sligo and Longford.
By 2012, they were contesting AllIreland finals. By the time he left, they were celebrated as the greatest Mayo team in at least 60 years.
It is a Thursday night in Castlebar and he is already planning for the team’s first training session of preseason next month.
Outside, it is pitch dark and Storm Callum is mustering somewhere off the western seaboard.
The breathless days of high summer we associate with Horan’s Mayo seem an impossibility on a blustery night like this one. But with the spring will come the League and the stirrings of optimism will strengthen.
Football has changed over the past four years but Horan has, too.
‘In 2010 when I took over it was a very young team, and a very young management team as well,’ says the 47-year-old.
‘We didn’t know a lot of what lay in store, and we had to suck it and see along the way. We were operating blind for a lot of it, until you figure it out and experience it.
‘It’s different this time for myself.
‘And if you look at the experience in the playing group, they are eight or ten years at the highest level. That’s a huge amount of knowledge to have.
‘Hopefully I’ve learned something over the four years I was involved and the four years off. We can work together on that.’
And there is a good deal to be done. Mayo made final appearances under Stephen Rochford in 2016 and 2017, and tested Dublin in a way no other team has done.
Those late-season peaks came after arduous, sometimes torrid starts to the year.
It is clear Horan wants to introduce more consistency recognising, perhaps, that an ageing squad cannot gather the physical and mental powers needed to try and win an All-Ireland over the course of a few weeks in July and August.
There has been no provincial title since 2015; Galway have not been beaten in Castlebar since 2014.
They have played 14 home League matches over the past four years, winning only four of them. The dedication of Mayo’s support may be renowned, but the new manager recognises the value in giving them something to cheer in winter as well as summer.
‘I don’t think they were unlucky; I think their performances weren’t good enough, certainly in Castlebar,’ he says plainly of recent seasons.
‘They just weren’t at the level that I think that team can play at, for whatever reason.
‘You don’t know when you’re not involved; there could have been injuries to key players.
‘In big moments the discipline probably cost us games. There are a few things like that you can look at.
‘Galway are a strong team as well, there’s no question about that. But it’s disappointing not to be competing for Connacht finals every year.
‘Your identity is important and where you’re from,’ he says of the need to improve their dreadful record in McHale Park.
‘There will be huge crowds in Castlebar. It’s up to us as a team to make sure we’re right for those games. If your head isn’t right going into it, you’ll see it (the expectation of home supporters) as a weight.’
His candour in addressing the
inadequacies of recent seasons will hardly find favour with his predecessors, but he is correct, particularly in observing the effects Mayo’s poor League form had on Championship performance.
‘The League campaigns for me told an awful lot. Mayo have been on the ropes in an awful lot of the Leagues games.
‘Games where you think they should do well or they should get a victory, they haven’t got them. Then when backs were to the wall they got some of those victories.
‘It was very up and down like that, and that’s always difficult going into Championship games if you haven’t a level of performance or a baseline that’s steady.
‘It’s hard to develop some of the younger players through that when your backs are to the wall in leagues all the time, because the pressure is on. I think some of that spilled over into the Championship.’ He managed a fancied Westport side in the Mayo senior Championship this season, where their interest was ended in the quarter-finals. Immersion in the local game prompts him to suggest there are 12 players outside recent squads he can think of that have talent and ability that impress him. A series of trial matches will be held over the Halloween Bank Holiday weekend to extend the opportunity to impress as widely as possible. Roscommon come to McHale Park on January 26 for the first round of the league, and he will know the shape of his 2019 squad by then. A distinction of his first time in charge was the willingness to bring in expertise, most obviously in coaches Cian O’Neill and Donie Buckley. This time, he will lead the coaching himself. In four years, the challenge has changed as Dublin have swelled to greatness. But in another way it hasn’t changed at all. The challenge remains what it has been for decades. Soon, the pursuit will resume again.