Nallen has unfinished business

Connacht SFC First Round:James Nallen insists Mayo have no need of headshrinking, hypnosis or witchcraft. Keith Dugganreports

There would have been no shame had James Nallen taken his leave from service to Mayo football under the heavy veil of last winter. Enough was enough - he deserved the veteran's option of forsaking the big-gun salute and just bowing out on his own terms.

Through 11 championship years, the Crossmolina defender had enjoyed plenty of distinguished days, but that time-span could be broadly characterised by four All-Ireland senior football final defeats. And last September was the most harrowing of those, when Nallen was withdrawn from the field with unaccustomed haste as a full house in Croke Park witnessed the latest Mayo dream eviscerated in the length of time it took to drink a cup of tea.

The public watched Nallen as he left that sun-dappled field, a lean, muscular figure with hair from the Romantic age, and the consensus was we were seeing the departing act of a good football man. It was sad, but understandable. How much could a man take?

Kerry were rampant in the autumn sunshine, and afterwards there was much speculation about how those Mayo players would recover from being crushed so thoroughly yet again. It was said and written in the following days the Mayo boys would be traumatised after this one, they would be rushing for the psychotherapy couch.

It was said they would be scarred.

"Scarred," smiled Jimmy Nallen as he sat down over a plate of salmon in a restaurant on the campus of his workplace at Galway University. He bore yellow bruising above his left eye, and in jeans and a casual polo shirt, he looked as he has done for the entirety of his Mayo career - abundantly athletic and calm.

"Scarred. Nope. Doesn't fit in with my thinking," he says in mock apology. "If that were the case, you wouldn't be able for the next game, the next battle.

"In fact, why would you bother coming back? It's easy for people to write and say that, and if you are into statistics you can point to those finals. But that doesn't marry to what the players who have been involved in those games think or feel. The thing is, we lost each of those finals for different reasons.

"And history doesn't come into it. If you are interested in history, then fine. But when you are out there training and playing, history is not going to get you through the next set of sprints. Players don't think about that. It's like the weather. It is very easy talk about. Mayo will win an All-Ireland title again - it is just a case of when. Now, that can be said about a number of counties, but I think it can be said of Mayo with some confidence."

His work on the Galway campus as a physics laboratory technician has given Nallen an escape from football. It is not as though the Mayo players wear warning bells in civic life, but the hubbub and size of the university accommodates the profile of an All-Ireland finalist fairly easily. He doesn't get asked about the sport all that much and that suits fine.

Nonetheless, Nallen talks about last September comfortably. Retirement might have come into the equation under different circumstances: "Yeah, it could have been the end - if we had won. Obviously, I am going to stop one of these years."

But stopping on a bum note like that would have rankled. Getting called off so devastatingly early was an experience that completely threw him. It is not something you prepare for on the training ground. He became aware of a break in play and then noticed his number lit in red on the electronic board. Ten years of starting, 10 years of not entertaining the possibility of substitution, left him hardwired into assuming a mistake had been made.

Even as he trotted off, he half expected Mickey Moran or John Morrison to direct him back on to the field, to where he belonged. But no, it was over.

"It is abrupt," he marvels. "It's not like you have a choice or have an opportunity to rationalise it. Decisions get made and you have to make way for the decision. So there is a certain amount of shock that goes with it.

"At that instant, I just couldn't believe it was my number they were showing. I was looking around. And it was an experience I wasn't really used to, that sense of substitution.

"Maybe I have a greater appreciation now for panel and the broader sense of team. And when you are sitting there, you start to reflect and it takes a few minutes to deal with it. Maybe the way it was or wasn't handled afterwards was deeply disappointing. But then, having said that, I don't know if you can necessarily reconcile the bluntness of the thing anyway."

He admits the immediate days after that final were not exactly fun-filled. But staring at a wall and brooding is not James Nallen's style. He would happily mope if it helped, but he knows it does not.

Of more practical help was the fact Crossmolina had a league game a Sunday later. The local world had not spun off its axis. The village looked the same. Home was familiar and welcoming. Dinner tasted good. Life went on.

And the rationalist in him had already begun to work out what had - or hadn't - happened. He rejects the quack theories of lucks and curses and won't entertain the notion Mayo teams have a fear of All-Ireland finals: "If we had, we wouldn't appear in so many. We would get beaten earlier."

If those two September hammerings by Kerry were proof of anything, it is, Nallen believes, that Mayo football teams are not as utilitarian as most opponents. He agrees that whatever about actually winning against Kerry in 2004 and 2006, those Mayo teams should not have been vulnerable to such debilitating hammerings. He agrees most other elite counties would have been able to switch into a default setting, however grim, and set about damage limitation. Not Mayo.

"That is probably true. It goes to our style of play and the training ground. I guess that if we have learned anything, there is a greater need for us to focus on core issues or on team issues. A greater team philosophy is required. Mayo football is attractive when things go well and when things go horrible it can look nasty. Finals get over-analysed.

"Look back at those campaigns - we were never necessarily consistent in our performances. Some days we were flying, other days we scraped through. Some teams win because they play by a set of basics every time out. Mayo try to win nice or win attractively all the time."

Mayo champion the right of the individual to express himself on the field. In the days before the All-Ireland final, Nallen said something that was placed under the microscope during the heavy analysis of the latest Mayo implosion. Asked about his virtually unblemished disciplinary record - just one yellow card in his career - he stated if Mayo wanted to find a centre back motivated by knocking another man's teeth out, they were welcome to find him.

Nallen is teak tough, but he plays the game clean. His philosophy was and remains admirable, even if it adds substance to the argument that if Mayo are to become All-Ireland winners, they will need to add more muscle - and cynicism - to the style.

"That may not be what is required," he says of his own rigidly sporting approach. "That is a decision for management. I guess it has often been said that Mayo need a harder edge. I am sure we have those kind of players too. Maybe we are just more subtle than other teams. You do what comes naturally to you. That is the way I played the game. It is hard to change habits. Mayo sometimes struggle because we play the way we want to play."

Mayo had every reason to take the field against Kerry nursing a sense of grievance about the defeat of two years previously. Yet, it was the Kerry players who tore into the match as though they had some personal vendetta against Mayo - something that would have been plainly impossible.

Yet, three weeks after that, Crossmolina played Ballina in an October championship match that quickly achieved infamy because of the appetite for hard hitting displayed by both teams. The field was sprinkled with players from the All-Ireland final. The obvious parallel was that the frustration and anger created by that Kerry defeat found its release in the local theatre.

Nallen raises his brow in surprise.

"Well. That was an intense match and there was a lot at stake - not to say there wasn't three weeks earlier. But I don't think you can draw the comparisons or be as sweeping as to say we can be aggressive in the club scenario, but not outside that.

"Every day you go out, you give what you can. Club football is parochial and that was a dreary, wet day so there were mistakes and loose ball and a lot more contact than on a fine September day in Croke Park.

"Against Kerry we struggled to manage ourselves and we were not at the pace of the game during that early period. It was unfortunate that we allowed ourselves into that situation and that we could not dampen their impact, but I don't think what happened had any bearing on that club game.

"And if you could transport the pace of that All-Ireland final to the club game a few weeks later, then the intensity wouldn't be there. They are almost like two different codes because the pace of the game is so different. And it is only when you play both club and county that you realise how big the gap is between those codes."

The appointment of John O'Mahony banished any fleeting thoughts Nallen might have had about retiring. He participated in the hard, purging sessions of January and found the manager planned to use him sparingly through the league. Other men might have thrown a sulk or delivered ultimatums. Nallen knuckled down, accepted the reduced playing time and set about proving himself as a first-team alternative.

In the league final against Donegal, O'Mahony threw a typically well-disguised curve ball, starting Nallen at midfield. The selection served as a powerful statement that Nallen was not simply drifting into a slow fade - he responded with an eye-catching and authoritative performance that suggested he will have a major bearing on Mayo's championship campaign - starting with tomorrow at Pearse Stadium with Nallen at the heart of the defence.

Like David Brady, Ciarán McDonald and David Heaney, Nallen is one of the key senior men in the Mayo squad. The years have slid by since he finished that electrically charged goal move against Kerry in the 1996 All-Ireland semi-final. Now, when he takes the field, the television men use the phrases reserved for the elder statesman - the veteran, the servant, the grand old man.

"Yeah. Where's my stick?" he says, feigning the shakes with his hands.

"Fortunately, I don't hear those comments because I am out playing."

Maybe it does change, though. Maybe it all feels different now from the way it did when he started out. "Does it? It's a good question. Unless you keep some kind of diary, you won't remember how things were. The anxieties and tensions you have before the games stay the same. It has to. If you don't have that buzz, you are not in the right place.

"There are times when you feel like you should say something or offer something to the group. And that was not the case at the start. Now, you would be more inclined to take ownership of the whole thing.

"There is no doubt that because it was new and fresh in 1996, it all felt like new territory for Mayo. But, you know, it can all look very glorious on a Sunday in the middle of summer in whatever ground. It isn't though. The days to get there, whether down in Castlebar or on the east side of Dublin, is a slog."

But he is still fascinated and held by those seasons of attrition and tough training and the occasional days of dazzling euphoria. James Nallen is under no illusions as to why he is still involved. He wants an All-Ireland medal. Tomorrow, in Salthill, Mayo begin a new chapter against their oldest and closest rivals. It will be a long, dangerous road.

Second best will be worse than nowhere for Mayo. They need to think and play like champions and they need to play as angrily as Kerry did last September.

"And we have every reason to have that mindset," says James Nallen. "But the mind is hard to control," he adds with a contrary grin as he departs, all but whistling as he walks lightly down the gleaming, tiled corridor where an afternoon of science - and maybe the odd daydream about football - awaits.

Scarred? It just doesn't fit.