Was it the right decision?
Conor Mortimer puts that question to himself in his new book. He has put it to himself numerous times since, whether or not he should’ve left the Mayo panel on the week of the Connacht final back in 2012.
Was it the right decision?
“Sometimes I wonder.”
He still wonders now.
It was never a personal issue with James Horan. More just a case of a certain manager not fancying a certain player. It happens. But, whilst Mayo’s all-time leading scorer found himself out of the loop with a senior panel he had given a full decade’s service to, inevitable questions about a return were always bound to rear their heads again when Horan stepped down after this summer’s semi-final defeat to Kerry.
“Obviously I would love to play,” Mortimer spoke to SportsJOE.ie about the prospect of donning the green and red under new managers Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly.
“But I don’t think anyone really could blame them for looking at younger players. You’re going back to players who have been there for quite a while – but it’s not to say that I wouldn’t offer anything, I’m sure I could offer something but it’s a management thing. I don’t know what they’re thinking.
I haven’t heard anything from any of them anyway or anybody down there for that matter and, if I’m honest, I don’t really expect to either. You never know, but Santa might come sooner.”
The Shrule/Glencorrib native released his book, “One Sunday: A day in the life of the Mayo football team”, last week and, with it, he had hoped that the question marks surrounding his inter-county departure would disintegrate.
“It gives me clarity,” he explained. “That’s what the last couple of chapters in the book are about. It’s the ins and outs of what happened and why it happened and it just gives people more of a broad-set on why. You know, it wasn’t just a case of, ‘Oh, I’m not playing, f**k this, goodbye.’ It wasn’t like that. It’s clear in the last two chapters of the book.
“It’s clarity for me. Like, I don’t think I’ll be listening to the questions of why and why not too much after because it’s written in black and white. I’ve said it numerous times before, it was a player-manager thing, it wasn’t personal. It happens in loads of clubs and counties, a manager doesn’t fancy a player but a lot of players – depending on the age – I suppose the younger you are the more likely you are to stick around and pursue. But you get a little bit older and you have more commitments here and there with work and life in general. You just have to weigh up the pros and cons and it wasn’t as advantageous for me to stay around at that time anyway.”
Unique in its kind, the Parnells club man uses his publication to depict an insight into the day of an All-Ireland final. The build-up, the psyche, the team mates and everything surrounding 24 momentous hours any footballer in the land would kill to experience.
Originally, Mortimer had reservations about the idea. It hadn’t been done before. But, in the end, both he and Jackie Cahill compiled a truly distinctive insider’s account of the biggest day on the GAA calendar.
“2006 was more recent, that’s why we did that,” he stated. “If you were looking at ’04, you’d have to mention ’06 and go into it anyway. It was just fresher in my mind as well. I suppose, after beating Dublin in the semi-final, there was a lot more expected of us than there was in ’04. But sure when it came to the game itself, it was just a bit of a squib, really, to keep it brief.
“We could talk about the characters/players from 2006, they would’ve been more fresh on people’s minds, both Kerry and Mayo players. For me personally, I would’ve played with, played against and watched a lot of those ’06 players for the last 10 years whereas a good few of ’04 would’ve left after 2004.”
Another revelation shed light on the fact that the former DCU and Jordanstown college player had been carrying a cruciate ligament injury for the best part of a decade. He had heard about the Kieran McGeeney stories, building up the muscle around it and all that, just getting the hell on with it – how hard could it be?
Eventually, it got tougher.
“That was going on a long time; that goes back a long, long way,” Mortimer admitted. “I know there are a few players who played without the operation and probably continue to do so but, when you get to 29 or 30, you start thinking about the quality of life and that was the reason I had it done really, it wasn’t to get back playing. Because I had been playing without it.
“Although normally when I had a twinge in my knee, it would take about a week or so for the swelling to go down but, when I hurt it in Jordanstown – it was more or less the same, I thought, as what I had done before, just a bad twist and it swelled up and bla, bla, bla – but I had torn my medial ligament and that was the problem.
“We were looking at 12 to 14 weeks for the medial to recover so you just double that to get the cruciate done as well so it just made more sense to get it done at the same time as opposed to not.
“The quality of football and the standard of teams was quite good. But I suppose when you’re playing any kind of football with an injury like that – I mean, most of the time you don’t really think about it, you just get on with it; it wasn’t something I was thinking about regularly at all – but, in saying that, in certain games and on certain surfaces, you’d be more wary in relation to turning and things which didn’t help because you couldn’t just go 100 per cent and turn 100 per cent because you’re conscious of your knee going for most of it.
“It was a huge part of my game, twisting and turning and the elusiveness that goes with it. I wouldn’t have been one of those more powerful players who was bustling through people, I was relying more on skill and instinct than physicality.”
Perhaps ironic then that a man of such slickness and trickery has gone down that route of physicality, looking after the strength and conditioning of League of Ireland side Shelbourne in the past year.
With a degree in sport science, as gym manager at the fitness centre at Parnells, it was just a natural progression for the corner forward to apply his theory to practice.
He does, however, see a future for himself in management.
“Ideally, at some stage, I’d like to get into the Gaelic side of it when I’m finished playing, as a selector or as a coach or something like that. Not so much the strength and conditioning side of it in the gym but more on the field than off it. Obviously start off with a club team, maybe my own or whatever and see how it progresses. Because, when you’re part of something for pretty much all your life, it’s something that you know and an environment you’re comfortable in so I’d love to get involved in that in the future going forward.”
The Mayo panel is also something he’s been part of for a long. It’s something he knows, something he’s comfortable with.
Conor Mortimer’s future might well lie in coaching, in managing. But perhaps the nearer future holds a return to that playing environment he has been so comfortable in?
He hasn’t just closed the book on that just yet.
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