Moran and Mortimer wantO’Mahony to remain on
Daniel Carey
Mike Finnerty
JOHN O’Mahony has said he will make a decision on his future as Mayo senior football manager ‘in the next couple of weeks’.
The Ballaghaderreen clubman said he would be meeting with his selectors and with County Board officials and holding ‘a debriefing’ on the events of 2008, which ended with Mayo’s defeat to Tyrone on the first weekend in August.
“I’ll be making a decision in the next couple of weeks, I’d say, and meeting different people,” O’Mahony told The Mayo News last night (Monday).”
“In the next week or fortnight, what we’ll be [getting] into is a debriefing on the year, with my selectors [and] with the County Board. So [things] will move on from there one way or the other.”
O’Mahony said he had spoken to his selectors, Tommy Lyons and Kieran Gallagher, but had not had a formal ‘meeting’ with his management team about the year gone by.
Meanwhile, Mayo footballers Andy Moran and Conor Mortimer have both said that O’Mahony should remain at the helm. Moran said he had ‘no doubt at all’ that the manager should stay on.
The issue was discussed by a number of panel members on the train west the day after Mayo lost to Tyrone.
“Coming down on the train – there was about 12 or 13 of us – and I think there was a general consensus,” said Moran. “There’s no doubt about it, they all wanted him to stay.”
Mortimer echoed those sentiments, and added that the bulk of responsibility for Mayo’s championship exit lies with the players.
“There’s no point talking about managers anymore,” he said. “We’re the only county that have [had] four managers within five years. There’s something going wrong somewhere. There has to be something wrong …
“Once you go out over that line, it’s 15 guys – or 20 guys, because there’s five guys coming in. They’re the guys who are going to win the game or lose the game. It’s nothing to do with the manager or the selectors or whoever else is there.”
Comments by Mayo GAA Board officials last week suggested that O’Mahony would be returning for the final year of his three-year term.
County Board Secretary Seán Feeney said that if O’Mahony ‘wants the job, it’s his’, while Chairman James Waldron said the Kilmovee native ‘has the full backing of the entire County Board’.
