KEITH DUGGANtalks to the bookmaker about taking over as Galway football manager and what he sees as the way forward for the county

WHEN ALAN MULHOLLAND became Galway manager, he found himself back in schoolrooms across the county talking to children about the game. Sometimes he would casually ask the kids to name their favourite Galway player and was taken aback by how many of them struggled to come up with an answer.

“Not always but enough to really make me open my eyes and think: we really need to wake up and get ourselves out there,” Mulholland says on a sleepy midweek morning in a coffee shop on Dominick Street.

Mulholland was brimming with energy, at once excited by, and nervous about, his team’s championship game against Roscommon and, as ever, busy with the family bookmaking firm he runs with his brother. He admits that Eddie sets the odds for Galway matches. “He gauges the mood early in the week,” he laughs but, falling serious, admits that even though he knew in his heart taking the Galway senior job would be all-consuming, he was clueless as to how much time it takes up.

Even though he had managed the Galway minors and under-21s to All-Ireland success, this was different. “You can let this job control you. It is addictive. And if you aren’t disciplined it can seep into everything – your family life, work life. It will take all the time you can give it. There is always something that needs attention. But it is enjoyable and that is the danger: you have to force yourself to cop on.”

Following Galway’s dismal exit from the All-Ireland last year, the smart money was on Mulholland to take over. The demands of his job and a young family were considered to be the two main obstacles. But for him, there was the additional concern of taking control of an enterprise which had seen Peter Forde, Liam Sammon, Joe Kernan and Tomás Ó Flatharta leave in varying degrees of frustration. “These were all excellent guys who had implemented professional set-ups,” he stresses. “So what was I going to bring to the show?”

Local knowledge and tradition was the immediate answer. His grandfather Ned moved from Glenamaddy into the city at the age of 18 and played in five All-Ireland finals in maroon, including the 1938 game when John Tull Dunne was the winning captain. In addition, Ned found time to set up the bookmakers and later the family ran the Hilltop Hotel in Salthill, which became a natural calling point for the Galway football cognoscenti.

So when Mulholland was a boy, Galway football was all about him. Tull Dunne was still a regal presence around the dressingroom of the Galway minor team of 1986, which John Tobin coached to an All-Ireland out of the blue.

Word filtered back to Mulholland that Tull considered him a decent centre back and he was on cloud nine. By then, the allure of ’66 had begun to fade and the thirst for an All-Ireland was stark. Along with promising teenagers like Kevin Walsh, Mulholland graduated to the senior ranks with undue haste and he lined out on Galway teams through a full decade, 1987 to 1997.

Given the shining year that 1998 became, there is something cruel about giving all that time to the cause and missing out on the glory so narrowly. But Mulholland is practical about his conspicuous absence from that All-Ireland-winning panel.

When John O’Mahony took over, he was to be the fifth manager that he played under. He had spent three years working as an engineer in Los Angeles, spending winters availing of his season tickets to Lakers games with his friend Niall Johnson rather than running around the field. He returned in time for the Connacht championship win of 1995. But by the winter of 1997 he was feeling the wear and tear of a full 10 years and told John that he would prefer to stay off the panel and maybe return in the New Year. But by then, O’Mahony had assembled his panel and had gone his own way.

“I had had 10 years of it. Maybe going away to Los Angeles, you see what is out there in the world and it is harder to go back into the cocoon. But I got a taste of what life is like and found it harder to keep it up. But I still wanted to play. That year, I think I said to John that I wanted to wait until the New Year. So it was an expensive break I took.”

And now, he is in O’Mahony’s shoes. When the Galway post became available, he realised there would never be a perfect time to take it. “You can never time these things. From the general public point of view, it was the right time to go in after the minors and 21. So it was a take it or leave it. When John O’Mahony took over in 1998, I am sure he didn’t look at the squad and think, yeah, there’s an All-Ireland here.”

But Mulholland inherited a Galway football movement that had stalled. Support had drifted, expectations were muted. Stories of player discontent were annual. It wasn’t unlike the fallow years of the early 1990s when Galway teams lined out on summer days to an utterly indifferent public. What he wanted to do was to wipe the slate clean. Invitations were issued far and wide and players who had problems under previous regimes returned. Some stayed, some didn’t.

Mulholland soon absorbed the influence of his predecessors. The benefits of the physical conditioning Kernan had emphasised were evident. The younger players like Mark Hehir and Johnny Duane that Ó Flatharta had introduced to the panel were ready to step up.

From the outside, those managers were deemed failures in Galway but Mulholland could see the work that had gone in. It just illustrated that the verdict on managers is based on the same combination of mathematics and luck as the bookmaking game. You either won or you lost.

So when he went in, he was apprehensive about dealing with an adult team which had fallen into the doldrums. No Connacht title since 2008 and no All-Ireland win against any side other than New York for two summers. It was a stark fall from grace.

“I have to say that since day one the mood has been good and there was no comparisons made. Everyone has come on board. And if the senior guys have had opinions, they suppressed them.

“ And maybe they are thinking that because Galway hadn’t performed too well, they aren’t really in a position to say anything anyhow. We haven’t forensically interrogated why it hasn’t happened in recent years. We just tried to go from here. But they do feel they have the ability and that it was a combination of bad luck and injury. I’m not going to dissuade them from that.”

The league went swimmingly: Galway played football that harked back to Liam Sammon’s belief in crisp, expansive football. Pádraic Joyce agreed to don the cape for another year. In a smashing game of football on Easter Sunday, they came within an injury-time penalty of beating Kildare and gaining promotion to Division One.

Little by little, the shouts from Pearse Stadium have grown louder. And Mulholland thinks that is important. Galway is a city of kaleidoscopic faces: a student town, an arts town, a party town and, of late, a rugby town. It is easy for the football team to fall out of sight. Walk the Salthill promenade and it is the flags of Connacht rugby that flutter from the lamp posts.

Mulholland has spoken to Eric Elwood, his old minor team-mate and the current Connacht coach about how the rugby team has infiltrated the imagination of sports fans in the west. He thinks it’s a marvel and one to which the GAA needs to wise up to. “Just like rugby, you have got to build your support in the GAA. I think in Connacht they recognise that it is about entertainment too. They are getting 5,000 people up there and Eric himself would be the first to admit that their win/loss ratio is not what they want.

“In the GAA, you get support when you win. And when teams lose, they revert into a shell and won’t talk to the media. But in rugby, there is this professional attitude where they promote themselves whether they win or lose. I don’t believe that the press is the reason that any team ever loses a game. There is this complacency in Galway that: hey, we are the home of the three-in-a-row team. But it doesn’t keep happening automatically.

“I have spoken with Eric about this and know him well. I am fascinated by the way Connacht actively promotes itself and the team. The GAA is different. Tell them nothing! Circle the wagons! And there is this attitude that the media is something to be fought a lot of the time. Maybe I am naïve! I am only five months in the job. But I want young players chomping at the bit to get into the Galway senior football panel.”

He knows that the cute thing to do this week would have been to switch off the phone and go silent. Even when he was a teenager, he saw how managers would try to use newspaper headlines to get their team going. He just never felt it worked that well.

“If someone says something stupid or is obviously disrespectful, then I could see how that would work. But to be afraid to promote the game is a different thing. But I just don’t believe that a team wins or loses a game because of the media.”

And then he laughs as he recalls the brouhaha in September 1986 when the Galway hurlers faced Cork in the All-Ireland final: his father John was mayor of Galway and Thelma Mansfield came to Galway to film the atmosphere before the big game and as mayor, John Mulholland said something flippant and humorous about Galway winning easily. And lo and behold when John Fenton lifted the Liam MacCarthy he singled out the mayor of Galway in his speech. And it went around that the mayor had lost Galway the All-Ireland.

It was, of course, daftness. But it illustrated the superstitions that course through GAA.

The thing is, when Galway run out in Douglas Hyde Park against Roscommon tomorrow, it won’t be about superstition. They have won and lost in a border rivalry that is always tetchy. Mulholland was just 22 when, in 1990, he was part of a promising young Galway team that had put Mayo, All-Ireland finalists the previous September, to the sword. “This was meant to be the new dawn.”

They soon learned Roscommon traded in early dusks. “Look, Galway drew with Ros’ in 1998. They lost to Ros in 2001. So even when we had our best teams, we found it tough to beat Ros.”

When he runs through Roscommon’s team for Sunday, he shakes his head as he acknowledges it is another stiff test. “We are going to have to be at our best to beat Roscommon. No question.”

But whatever happens in the 70 minutes, he wants the public to be excited about the game. It has been a while since the Galway football team has still been training after race week in Ballybrit. Keeping them part of the summer conversation would be nice. Keeping them in the minds’ eye would be a beginning. And what is true for Galway is, he feels true for the GAA in general. Promoting the game is important if it is going to thrive.

Years ago, the punters managed to pull a fast one on the family bookmaking firms: they cut the telephone lines and then bet on a race after the result had been confirmed. The world has changed since then.

Mulholland keeps tabs on all sports and likes to think the firm has a good reputation when it comes to offering solid odds on local sports. “If we are out, we know. And it hurts financially. And it is amazingly how quickly you will be shown because the money will come flooding in.”

Odds don’t fluctuate much between betting firms these days and Mulholland’s offer of Galway at 28 to 1 for the All-Ireland title. That seems about fair.

But of all the prices quoted those are odds he would love to shorten.