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INSIDE LYONS Where do we go now? Well, for a start, we can factor out visits to the capital for football reasons.
Mayo still have lessons to learn
JIMMY LYONS
WHERE do we go now? Well, for a start, not unexpectedly, we can factor out visits to the capital for football reasons for the remainder of the summer. But of course I didn’t mean the opening query in that sense. For the third time in four years (and arguably the fourth) our campaign for the restoration of Sam to a former (very former, admittedly) favourite watering hole of his has come to an ignominious end. And these sorts of endings are never very satisfactory. What you want is an exit with a positive glow to it, one that leaves you looking forward to next year, when you’ll be setting off on the journey from a spot nearer to the destination. The ones we have experienced since ‘04 have not been of that ilk. Instead they have left us with an almost overwhelming sense of despair, or worse, apathy and sent us searching around once more for that goddamn drawing board. It’s quite clear that lessons have not been learned. That’s not an earth-shattering revelation, by any standard. In any field of human endeavour, if you keep getting the same outcomes, whilst striving for different ones, then you must be repeating the same old mistakes. It’s not that all those involved haven’t tried, of course – players, officials, and management. They’re all, or most of them anyway, focussed on a collective goal of reaching the very top. But obviously the questions that need to be answered haven’t been answered in an effective manner. So either the wrong questions are being asked or the wrong answers are being proffered. Everybody has an opinion on what is required – we have to be bigger and hit harder, we have to be small and move faster, we need more ice-baths, we need less ice-baths, we need a psychologist (psychiatrist?), we need a good kick up the … Truth is though there are no off-the-shelf solutions. In any organisational unit where people are the main resource, the solutions to problems are as unique and diverse as the personalities involved. Yes, you can pull ideas from here and there which may broadly fit your situation but they have to be tweaked, adapted, reshaped. John O’Mahony doesn’t need to prove his leadership credentials. His record speaks for itself and for him. 1983, 1989, 1994, 1998, 2001 – four and a half different teams, all being the best that they could be or very close to it. So whatever he achieves in his present managerial incarnation is not going to define his career, much as the parochial amongst would like to believe. Nevertheless, one would think that he wishes to leave as positive an imprint here as he on every previous road he has trod. For one reason or another, some more obvious than others perhaps, he has uncharacteristically not made optimum use of the past year. Things which were obvious last September are still, unfortunately, irritatingly, maddeningly, as obvious today. They should be images of the past, not of the present and surely now, definitely not of the future. There has never been a strong sense over the last six months or so that the team in green and red has been entirely of the manager’s wishing – not through any direct influence, rather for more intangible reasons. One would imagine that now there are no impediments to total focus, this will no longer be the case. From here on in, it has to be his team. Johnno’s teams have always been his teams in the past; he made tough decisions so that would be so. Now is the time to do that again. Some decisions will be made for him. There are tougher ones that won’t.
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