O'Mahony happy to commit to Connacht

Next Friday at 8pm under lights in Ballyforan, Co Roscommon, one of the best-known names in management may be walking the sideline for the last time. John O'Mahony, who has been in charge of Mayo, Leitrim and Galway with great success, will direct Connacht in their meeting with Munster.

O'Mahony was recently nominated as a candidate for Fine Gael in the next general election, an event no farther than seven months away, and if he succeeds in bringing in the third seat for the party in Mayo his football days will be behind him for a while.

"I've retired from teaching," he says. "I'm on another path and we'll see where that takes me. This is a football job I was delighted to keep on because it's a smaller commitment, and because I managed three of the Connacht counties I'd have contacts there.

"Every day you get up there's a new challenge. This is the one on the carpet at the minute. The interprovincial series comes first and we'll see how it goes."

Taking on Connacht is a particular challenge, as the province hasn't won the football title since 1969, and, with the increasingly chaotic GAA calendar squeezing the competition, all provincial managers have found it difficult to prepare in the middle of so many uncompleted county championships as well as the evolving training panel for the International Rules series.

O'Mahony says, however, that the enthusiasm of the players has been impressive.

"I don't think I got any refusal from any of the guys I contacted," he says. "I was looking around the dressing-room just after we had played Roscommon and saw players from various counties who had been beating the heads off each other during the year, and there they were asking each other about their club championships. And you had Mayo players rising to come up to Ballyforan under lights on a wet Tuesday evening nine days after - it says a lot about the commitment."

Connacht provincial secretary John Prenty has in recent years been critical of the amount of money being spent on the interprovincial championships now that finals are staged overseas - this year's football decider will be played in Boston in three weeks.

"That's par for the course with a lot of provinces," says O'Mahony, "in that they have to foot the bill for teams going abroad, but I don't get involved in the internal politics of that. But it is an issue and a test for the provincial councils' willingness to keep it going."

Does Prenty have a point? O'Mahony believes the series does constitute value for money.

"I do, but you'd expect me to say that, and I can see why people would think it's a big expenditure. There is a lot invested in coaching and it's a matter of budgeting.

"Look, all these people need to sit down and decide either to back it or leave it, and if that's the decision, that's the decision. But once it's there it should be fully backed and should be budgeted from within their resources."

It was also announced Mayo's David Heaney will captain Connacht, although the panel won't be finalised until later in the week.