Staying put, and staying positive

Interview with John O'Mahony: Life after Galway: sometimes, John O'Mahony thinks about that. It has been seven years now and that can give a guy an itch.

Don't get him wrong; some day he will sit down and paste a hoard of maroon-dipped photographs into a leather-bound album because when times were good, they were beautiful.

See, O'Mahony grew up in Ballaghaderreen, a market town cultivated by a 19th-century trade that stopped booming long ago, a provincial town locked hard on the borders of Roscommon and Mayo, a private, friendly, assured and self-possessed kind of town. A town, in fact, that in character is reflective of its most famous resident.

Ballaghaderreen shaped O'Mahony, it is where he lives and it is where he socialises and where on January nights he runs laps around a cold, damp field with a group of old friends. Theirs was one of those pacts born of New Year intentions to meet once a week. As they run in the dark, blanking out creaking joints and aching knees, they become too wheezed, too exhausted to do much talking. And so, despite the pain, it becomes a blissful time to think.

Among good friends, you can be comfortably solitary. And so inevitably, despite his best efforts, O'Mahony's thinking drifts to those seven years.

Funny thing, a Ballaghaderreen lad growing up and igniting a revolution in Galway, always the biggest, the most glamorous, the most knowing of the Western counties. He envied Galway teams when he was a young kid playing for his club and with Mayo underage sides, wondered at the inherent swagger that comes with wearing maroon. Now, he feels absorbed by the county. He loves it. But still . . .

You have to be smart enough to feel the way wind hits against your cheeks. Best to move on before it turns icy. They had glory days aplenty and all that, a virtual dynasty reborn in a city and county where football was threatening to lapse into a backwater embarrassment. And yet there comes a time.

Maybe for the past couple of years the writing has been on the wall, as well as splashed all over the centre pages of news sheets. A man can get tired reading about himself. For many summers, it seems like there has been one row or another brewing at the training sessions over which he presided, rows that were news to him. Flashy words designed to give headaches. Meltdown! Feud! Walk-out!

Just this winter, an article appeared by the Kerry legend Pat Spillane assuring O'Mahony he had "lost" his dressing-room.

And now, last week, a column appeared in the Connacht Tribune, the Bible on local football, headed, "O'Mahony has gone too far". It contends the Galway manager is a compulsive autocrat. Because it was written by John McIntyre, the respected hurling coach and commentator who also manages Clarinbridge, the column had a jagged edge.

Although the piece ostensibly attacked what was seen as the Galway manager's stubborn insistence that Kevin Brady, a young Castlegar dual player, show up for a senior challenge game against Cork instead of playing in an under-21 championship hurling quarter-final, the history runs deeper.

Two seasons ago, senior dual player Alan Kerins was caught in a tug-of-love between hurling for Clarinbridge in a group championship game and preparing for a Connacht championship match. In both incidents, argues McIntyre, O'Mahony demonstrated a "lack of respect for clubs" and behaved in a way that was "outrageous".

"So which is it?" queries O'Mahony with a hesitant smile. This is new ground for him. Although always accessible and talkative, he is monastically self-contained when it comes to matters of confrontation. Public spats are alien to his psyche; you imagine he considers them in bad taste.

So he speaks slowly and deliberately, eyeing the tape recorder that sits on his sofa as warily as one would a reptile that a guest unexpectedly brought around for afternoon tea. He isn't fully happy about speaking but just feels it is time he should.

"It is inevitable there will be criticism but to be accused in one corner of having lost my dressing-room and the other of being totally inflexible - they can't both be true. But that was a personal attack, as has been the case with several others. In that article there was a misrepresentation of the facts and I would have had no problem dealing with each of the facts but, as with last summer, I have a problem with personal attacks.

"I don't want to get into individual confrontations but I would demand that facts get checked, particularly because I am always available on the phone. I never have a difficulty responding to an issue when people check with me. It is when allegations appear which aren't true that it is hard to take - in Galway above anywhere."

It was significant the accusations surfaced the same week civil war broke out in Limerick over dual players. O'Mahony's feeling on players who want to pledge themselves to both games at the highest level is ambiguous and true to his nature.

"I think it is possible, yes, but probably less than used to be the case because of the way fixtures are now. But with goodwill on both sides, it can be achieved. I have no problem with Kevin playing hurling matches for his club if it fits in with our training regime. We didn't play in the FBD (Connacht winter league) this year because of the overlap so we basically had three challenge matches - Kerry, Cork and Clare.

"We felt that it was important that we got as many players for those games as we could so it was in that context that there was a clash for the under-21 hurling final. And we had no request or contact from Castlegar to myself so I was taken aback by all this.

"The situation with Kevin was he won an under-21 football medal a couple of years ago, was promoted to the senior panel and decided he wanted to concentrate on football to see how he got on."

The comparison with the Alan Kerins situation was particularly stinging because O'Mahony believes before the public row that broke out over the player he had shown good faith in trying to accommodate Kerins's wish to pursue his excellence at both games. It is true O'Mahony had instructed Kerins not to play the particular game with Clarinbridge.

However, the issue was more complicated. Early in the league that year, it was agreed with the county board that each club team would play two football league games without its county players. But by July, several teams, including Spiddal, were facing relegation and were anxious to use their county stars for the remaining games. O'Mahony was not going to permit that and so he couldn't justify freeing Kerins to play in the hurling championship. He explained that to Kerins, who was caught in an impossible position. As it transpired, Kerins played the hurling match.

"I think the article contends that Alan was driven to distraction by me at that time. I would contend that he was actually driven to distraction by the pressure exerted on him by Clarinbridge during the period when he effectively had no choice but to play," argues O'Mahony.

Kerins did not line out in the Connacht final but remained with the football panel, played in several games and won an All-Ireland medal. The incident, in so far as it was one, blew over. Late last year, Kerins met O'Mahony and told him he felt like he was falling between two stools and was going to limit himself to playing hurling.

"We shook hands and I got a Christmas card from the Kerins family this year. I always thought, and continue to think, of him as a fine lad and there was never any personal animosity between us. He was caught between a rock and a hard place then."

The Kerins situation was just one of the incidents that have led to small rumblings and rumours of discontent regarding the past three years of the O'Mahony era. There was the Donnellan brothers' walk-out and the subsequent truce, the open criticism by Padhraic Joyce, who suggested that everybody, including management, would need to take a hard look at themselves.

Last summer, the Killererin forward's play was subject to intense public and media scrutiny, leading to several conclusions that the relationship between player and manager had gone beyond the point of reconciliation.

Of course, the same thing was said about O'Mahony and Michael Donnellan. Much ado was made about the sight of the Dunmore man kicking a water bottle in disgust as he walked off Croke Park after being substituted late in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Donegal.

"What I would say about all those stories is that the picture up close is very different than it might appear far away. Those lads are two of the key reasons Galway football has enjoyed All-Ireland success in the last seven years. It frustrates me because I saw close up the effort Padhraic put into his football. And I believe he was just unlucky, he didn't get the breaks last year even though he also played some very good football. And I saw the very real pain Michael went through to recover from a very serious groin injury.

"Do tensions exist? Of course. To be successful, we all have to bare our souls to each other behind the dressing-room door. But there would be huge respect there. Padhraic said what he said that time and there was a bit of a splash about that. But he was captain and we do have a policy in the dressing-room of allowing players to speak.

"And there would have been times the management has been criticised, of course. Because we made mistakes, of course we did. But I don't think those comments were meant in the way people probably interpreted them at the time."

Last summer was a low. On the sultry night that Donegal achieved a famous coup in Castlebar, O'Mahony had to round up his under-21 players and try to rouse them for the Connacht under-21 final against Mayo three days later. The Connacht board had refused Galway's request for a postponement.

"I rounded them up in the shower room and they were literally crying at the thought of another game, their third in 10 days. We met on the Monday but we could just send them to the pool they were so drained. And Mattie Clancy pulled up with a hamstring after 10 minutes and we lost the game by a point but it was disappointing.

"We saw the Munster under-21 championship postponed in similar circumstances and we had actually helped Roscommon a few weeks earlier by bringing forward a game. All we wanted was 48 hours to recover. And we were All-Ireland under-21 champions, so we felt it wasn't too much to ask."

The combined misery of that week - it began with a highly personal and unflattering portrayal of Michael Donnellan in a tabloid newspaper and concluded with the casually floated assumption that O'Mahony's Galway had entered a period of decline - left him feeling as empty as he has ever done. Again came the questions in his head: why stay? Maybe you are tired? Maybe the players are tired? Maybe it is same-voice syndrome?

"You often consider all those things. And any other team I managed I left after four years. But there are a number of things. That is one reason. And I feel it is important to have a positive philosophy and that is what has kept the players giving the commitment they have. After six years there will be peaks and valleys."

And he has felt a loyalty emanating from the county during the troubled periods. On the Monday after they lost to Roscommon in the 2001 championship, Pat Egan, the county chairman, was on the phone, imploring him to stick at it. That mattered and by the end of September they were All-Ireland champions.

Months later, at the end of a team holiday in Thailand, this foreign couple came up to O'Mahony and told him they didn't know who his boys were other than they were athletes on tour together but they thought the bunch had a lot of class and decency.

"I wouldn't be claiming any credit for that. But it always stayed with me since and it is one of the reasons I am still here."

Letters of support come in even in these relatively lean times. People communicate the sense that they still believe.

Also, there is the matter of the record. In his time, Galway have won 25 championship matches, drawn three and lost five.

"It is a record I am proud of. And I am just the figurehead of this team, we have a good back-room staff and great players that made this happen. And I mean some teams when they win or lose in All-Irelands they list out reasons for that success and write books about them. And that's fine, like I enjoyed reading Mickey Harte's book this year. I could have done the same but decided against that. It wasn't my way.

"And I supposed I had to smile over the last few years when I saw and heard about things that were perceived as revolutionary, as if they were not done before. But I certainly feel, and would like to send out the message, we run as professional a set-up here in Galway as any other county. But some years you will win championships, others not so and the set-up will be the same. And maybe people lose sight of that."

Two years have passed since Galway were last All-Ireland champions but in that time a theory has arisen that the game has undergone a fundamental shift. Call it "Northern Soul". The granite solemnity and the suffusion of colour and passion that engineered the wins of Armagh and Tyrone have led to a belief that Gaelic football has, in a short space of time, been revolutionised.

It is true there is always a tendency to mimic the team whose method hauls in the big catch - the short, hand-passing game or the long, direct game. But last year bore evidence not so much of a style as a mindset.

"Maybe that is true," says O'Mahony. "And I think we can already see the impact of that in club games this winter the way teams are getting behind the ball. But if teams are beaten by that style next year, there can be no excuses because it has been well advertised. None of us can say we weren't expecting it. Teams will react to it, certainly and it will make for a very interesting and unexpected year of football, I think."

This year when Galway resumed training, O'Mahony was struck not so much by the new faces as the absence of the old. It seems like yesterday that Martin Mac was bringing up the rear at training. Now, with Ja (Fallon) saying good luck, most of the 1998 team is gone. Big Kevin Walsh is the abiding link to the beginning, the large frame held together with pins and optimism, towering and unmistakable despite the rainy nights.

Paul Clancy is gone to Australia, Kerins is gone to hurl and other lads are just gone. That is the way of it - you know they are guys that you will see again in one place or another and you will exchange polite, even awkward hellos. But unspoken will be the remembered cause that bound you to a sodden pitch three times a week. That is the reason he is back there this year. He hopes and believes there is a deeper gold to be divined from this Galway team.

John O'Mahony is no guru; he doesn't believe in charms or fate or even talk all that much. Ask him why Galway stopped dead in July for the last two years and he will confess he does not have a clue. No, he is no shaman but he is one of the most successful managers of modern times. And all he knows is that he keeps trying to do all the small things right and that his players are happy to exhaust themselves when he asks.

Two years ago, Galway defeated Sligo in the Connacht final in Castlebar. It was a day of torrential rain that coincided with the World Cup final. The view was forwarded the next day by a celebrated football pundit that Galway were on the threshold of becoming a force not seen in football for 30 years. Weeks later, they were sent into a tailspin against Kerry and it is as if order has not been restored since.

So the same question keeps surfacing: are Galway finished? "Well," says John O'Mahony carefully, pausing for what could be minutes before responding with that familiar smile - wise, inscrutable, unreadable, a smile to strike fear around a poker table. "Well. Wait and see."

Wait and see. The journey starts anew in the hothouse of Navan tomorrow. Seven years on and he is itching for more.