Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly have their detractors and they have their defenders.
Colm Parkinson definitely is not in the latter’s camp.
On a heated GAA Hour, the former Laois player let rip at the old Mayo managers for their “petty” retort to being ousted from the job as county bosses last year.
The pair listed a series of gripes and issues that arose from their time in charge of the team and singled out Aidan O’Shea too.
“What’s wrong with Aidan O’Shea wanting to do #TheToughest Trade?” Colm Parkinson blasts on SportsJOE’s GAA Hour.
“Number 1, he’s going to get paid for it, it’s nice exposure, we’re amateurs and it might help his career. There’s a life outside football.
“Holmes was saying that nothing else should be in your mind other than winning an All-Ireland. Go away, will ya? That’s such an old school, nonsense thing to say.
“Brendan Maher, the Tipperary captain, did #TheToughest Trade earlier this year. Michael Ryan gave him permission, a manager that has enough confidence to say, ‘Brendan, you’re my captain. Nice opportunity for you, go and enjoy it.’
“Brendan Maher captained Tipperary to go on and win the All-Ireland so stop this bullshit.
“Not even asking Aidan. Just rang the producers and cut in. That’s treating players like a bloody child. You can see so many examples of how they could really get under players’ skins. Their man management was awful.”
We're just going to leave this here @AIDOXI… #TheToughest pic.twitter.com/PljEdEywhO
— AIB_GAA (@AIB_GAA) March 15, 2016
The decision to wait 14 months was also strange.
“It was a dignified silence but now, since that interview has come out, you have to look at that dignified silence and consider it as something else, as in: they were waiting for an opportunity,” Mikey Stafford pondered.
“They were probably hoping that Aidan O’Shea didn’t get that penalty against Fermanagh, Mayo went out of the qualifiers and that interview probably would’ve been two weeks after that.”
Colm Parkinson started to get more and more animated.
“Can somebody here make an argument to try and convince me that this was in the best interests of Mayo football? Those revelations – petty, mundane, silly stuff – any of the stuff that they said, if it wasn’t in the two months after the got sacked, how could it possibly help Mayo football?”
There wasn’t much balance offered elsewhere.
“This is what pissed me off most about the interview, they offered no solution, it was just ‘they need to be tougher, they need to be ruthless, they need to get that in check’,” Conán Doherty said.
“Well, they had a year there and they didn’t check any of these ‘egos’. What did they do to solve these problems? They listed a pile of different issues that they apparently didn’t try to fix themselves. What did they do?”
Wooly wasn’t finished.
“Did these problems just become big problems when they got the sack?” he asked.
“Because, from me reading the piece, and I wrote this on SportsJOE, I didn’t see anything – ANYTHING – barring one or two things that might’ve crossed the line. But this is a panel of 30 individuals over the course of a year – there are issues, you could write a book over the small, petty, little nonsense things that players get annoyed about.
“I guarantee you that Jim Gavin would have all these issues – meal times and whatever else – but Jim Gavin would discuss these issues with the players. Don’t think Jim Gavin rules with an iron fist, he’s a good manager and he deserves a lot more credit than saying he runs an army camp.”
Dion Fanning put it into perspective. When players are in a bubble and questioning a manager, the smallest things can seem huge.
“The universal thing about management is that you’re either plausible to your players or not. So if you’re Jim Gavin and your players believe in you, you can alter things and discuss things and players buy into it. But if you don’t, the smallest things – which can seem petty – are the things that players take issue with when, actually, what they’re really taking issue with is something else.
“David Moyes at Manchester United and the chips – the stuff that came out about van Gaal at United. From one side, you could look at it and think, ‘God these players are prima donnas or egotistical’ but from the other point of view, it is players thinking, ‘we’re not really sure if we buy into this guy and we’re questioning everything.’
“It happened years ago with Ireland and Brian Kerr and there were some players in the squad who didn’t really buy into what Kerr was trying to get them to do. You’d hear what he was trying to get them to do and you’d think, ‘Why don’t they buy into this?'”
Listen to the full interview below.
