Gentle manager who sorts things out quietly and without hysterics

THEY were the dying moments of Dermot Early's career as a Roscommon footballer, in the Connacht final of 1985. Mayo were home and dry but Early was looking for a goal to put honour on the scoreboard and a gloss on his retirement. John Maughan was in his way."

"I dummied right and went left, but he stayed with me. Then he put his arms around and gently pulled me down 20 metres out. We were on the ground together and he turned to me and said: Sorry I had to do that to you, but we don't want to let you in. I got up and tapped the free over the bar and that was the last kick of my inter county career."

The word "gently" is difficult to reconcile with an incident in which two large Gaelic footballers collide, even if they were good friends. But it isn't out of place in the career of the man who has brought first Clare and now Mayo the chance of Croke Park glory. John Maughan the manager has established a reputation for getting his own way with players, gently.

"The one thing he brought to Clare was discipline," says Noel Roche, Army corporal and member of the Maughan managed team that broke the mould of Munster football by beating Kerry in the provincial final of 1992.

"There's no way he'd tolerate you being late for training, for instance. But he was not the type of man who'd ever ridicule a player in front of the others. He'd take you aside quietly and say what had to be said. And whatever was said would stay between you and him."

Maughan's career as an Army officer, begun in the cadet class of 1979, has refined a natural talent for speaking softly without the need of a big stick. "He's very bright and he applies a very logical approach to problems," says Dermot Early, an officer himself. "He'll sort things out quietly and efficiently, with no hysterics.

"He's the sort of man you can't but pay attention to," adds Roche. "He's 6 it 3 ins and about 14 stone and he'll stand upright and look out under his eyebrows without blinking, and you can't but listen to what he says. Then it'll lodge inside your skull and you won't forget it."

Clare players remember that a repeated theme in Maughan's talks was that every game goes so quickly, "so make your impression early and don't let it pass you by".

Maughan's own footballing career ended prematurely, with a knee injury forcing his retirement at 26. He had All Ireland schools, minor and under 21 winners medals behind him but the unfulfilled ambitions of the senior footballer are part of the fuel that drives the manager.

As well as wrestling with him as an opponent, Early played alongside him on Army teams and remembers a player who was "very strong, very clean, skilful but with a great sense of being a team player as well as an individual". One game in particular stands out, when a Garda side starring Offalys great Matt Connor beat the Army 5-8 to 0-22 at Croke Park. A one point win, Early translates: "A thriller, and nobody at it."

The premature end of Maughan's playing career left him not just his hunger for success, but a high level of physical fitness, too.

It has been said of him that he leads by example, that he won't ask his players for anything he won't do himself. But since he came to management in both Clare and Mayo as a still super fit athlete, his belief in setting a personal example - could only guarantee suffering lord players with waists thicker than his.

The success of both teams has been predicated by his extending super fitness levels from the nine or 10 most dedicated players of an under achieving team; to the 25 or 26 needed for a long summer in the sun.

Once the physical condition is in place, however, Maughan places huge emphasis on the psychological. He encourages his teams to visualise situations virtually real scenarios in which opposition defenders flail in their wake as they close in on goal, or forwards bite the dust under crushing tackles - and in 1992 went to extreme lengths to get his Clare team on to the Croke Park turf a week ahead of their historic semi final against Dublin.

The usually calm manager was reportedly frantic as he sought permission from the officials to get his team on to the pitch after the Donegal Mayo semi final. He eventually succeeded and Clare had a 40 minute training session, a big help in the creditable if losing performance a week later.

He quit Clare after the side - lost narrowly to Tipperary in the 1994 Munster championship. It was not a snap decision but Roche thinks he wasn't getting quite the commitment he wanted any more and he was never one to settle for less.

His Army career, took him to Cyprus for a year before he returned to his current posting as training officer with the 18th Infantry Battalion of the FCA in Castlebar. He had once previously served abroad, with the 64th Battalion in Lebanon, in 1988.

He took over Mayo on his return from Cyprus last winter and his achievements with the team - league promotion as winners of Division 3, a Connacht championship and an impressive defeat of Kerry in the semi final - have added to the managerial legend of a man who is still only 34.

Somehow, in between the Army and football commitments, Maughan manages a family life with his wife Audrey and three daughters. Above all, what impresses in the accounts of those who know him is that Maughan is a nice man like his opposite number in Meath, Sean Boylan.

Whether this quality extends to their teams next Sunday is another story.