Something Aido has up his sleeve too, wouldn’t you say 
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Nope.
I think what you will find is certain oddballs on the internet (and GAA media fraternity) get very triggered when legitimate criticism is fired AOS’s way.
Oooofffffft.
That’s a clamping.
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HERO DEPARTS Philly McMahon on the highs and lows of a stellar Dublin career
Retired Dublin defender Philly McMahon says his uncompromising style caused him problems with his team-mates and cost him the 2015 Footballer of the Year award, but the eight-time All-Ireland winner is glad he never changed his ways
Conor McKeon
December 25 2021 10:00 AM
Philly McMahon gives an example of how he became football’s most feared and reviled player.
He’s withholding names, teams, dates etc. But the gist is this.
On the day in question, McMahon was geared to mark a particular player. The opposition’s star man.
An unexpected late change to their attack meant he was switched on to someone else. Already hyped for his initial brief, McMahon decided he’d rattle the big dog’s cage anyway.
“This player had been marked by the fastest, the tightest, the most technically good corner-backs,” he recalls. “But had he been tested psychologically?”
So McMahon stood in where he was supposed to and then, across half the length of the pitch, began berating the other guy.
By the end, he had them both beaten; the star man, wondering why he’d incurred the snarl of someone he wasn’t even marking, and the direct opponent McMahon barely bothered with.
“That’s my game,” McMahon confesses. “I can say that now because I’m finished. People can call me what they want. A scumbag, whatever.
“Is it wrong for me to go after that psychological aspect of my game? Am I a scumbag because I went after that?”
Good question.
Rather than let that very pertinent question hang in the air, McMahon answers it himself: “I’d rather do it than regret not having done it.”
So there you go. No regrets.
And look, he knows what you think.
He’s on Twitter. He’s on Instagram. He has ears.
If it’s designed to offend, you may as well be throwing confetti trying to hurt him with paper cuts.
“The abuse, it didn’t bother me,” he insists. “I knew the way I played, there was going to be all this noise. If it affected me, I would have changed the way I played a long time ago.”
This is Philly McMahon. Footballer. Pantomime Villain. Entrepreneur. Author. Activist. Hard man. Paradox.
There isn’t a footballer of the past 20 years so notorious for his expertise in what are euphemistically called the ‘dark arts’.
And yet there might not be another Irish athlete who has had such an active and positive societal impact on his own downtrodden community.
But then, we know about that already, thanks to his award-winning autobiography, his media profile, his occasional Late Late Show appearance.
The freedom of retirement allows him now to shed some light on Philly McMahon, The Enforcer.
For the record, he’d like to point out he was only sent off twice for Dublin.
And whatever the perception of his methods, McMahon’s ability to get inside a fella’s mind was much more powerful than anything he could physically do to prevent someone from playing.
Once he carved a little perch for himself inside their head, he knew his football could do the rest.
“I wanted players to fear me,” McMahon confesses. “I wanted them to be thinking, ‘I can’t get this fella out of my head. He’s going to do anything in his power to put me off my game’.
“If there was a forward on another team who was shooting the lights out and tipped for Player of the Year and all that noise, I’d just think, ‘He’s mine’.
In his autobiography, Colm Cooper – who McMahon marked and outscored in the 2015 All-Ireland final – wrote about being “serenaded” by McMahon. Sledging isn’t among Gaelic football’s nobler arts – McMahon didn’t invent it either – but he’s open now about how and why he became such a noted practitioner.
“I have so much respect for inter-county players,” he says, a little surprisingly.
“I don’t give a s**t what county you’re from. I know what it takes to get to that level. I know what you have to do.
“But when you walk across that line, I have too much respect for the jersey not to try and do everything in my power to help the team to win.”
‘Unashamed’ seems like a good word to use here.
McMahon, as he admits without reservation, did everything he could to win. It’s what made him. He was, very simply, willing to go further than most.
In the early throes of retirement, he’s still very much OK that he often went over the line of rule and more frequently again, against public taste.
He might give the impression of revelling in his infamy, his reputation, his aura even. But it didn’t come without consequence.
After 14 years and eight All-Irelands, there are bonds that can’t be broken. But McMahon won’t pretend now to have been universally popular with his own team-mates.
“It’s a difficult style to play,” he explains. “When you play sport, there is an element of connection with your team-mates. And at times, it can be very lonely playing the way I played.
“You’re going in saying, ‘I don’t give a s**t about friendship. I’m going to try to get the best out of you. I’m going to do everything I can to do that. You either like it or you don’t.’”
He and Diarmuid Connolly went at it like Tasmanian devils.
Bernard Brogan, another who McMahon was only too delighted to take chunks out of whenever the chance arose, paid him the ultimate back-handed compliment last week when he said he was “glad he (McMahon) was on our side”.
“That impacts friendships,” admits the Ballymun Kickhams clubman.
“It impacts relationships. When I first went into the squad in 2008, I’m sure they were all saying, ‘Who’s this little s**t throwing his weight around?’
“You definitely don’t go in there to make friends. As a player, it’s the ultimate sacrifice.”
McMahon reckons his reputation cost him the 2015 Footballer of the Year. Not without reason.
That was the season he overwhelmed and outscored both Kerry’s Cooper and Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea. From Dublin’s last league game against Monaghan in Clones to the All-Ireland final, McMahon scored 1-11, ostensibly from corner-back. He scored in eight of his last 10 games.
Had a Seamus Moynihan or a Kieran McGeeney submitted such a portfolio of performance from defence, no debate would have been necessary.
But the same year, McMahon also faced accusations of head-butting O’Shea and of eye-gouging Kieran Donaghy, while Cooper initially refused to shake hands with him after the final.
“How is a player of my style going to win that?” he asks. “Everybody hates me!
“Some of them might respect me to an extent,” McMahon adds. “But they’re not going to vote for me for Player of the Year. I came up against Jack (McCaffrey) and Bernard (Brogan)! Who were they gonna vote for in a popularity contest?”
His family copped some of the backlash too, though not to the point where he felt it was worth changing how he played.
To say that McMahon is headstrong would be to understate it in the extreme. At a time when the Dublin football team were like a group of high-performing mutes, erecting blackout blinds to keep any chink of unwanted glare off their business, McMahon wrote an award-winning autobiography.
Even last year, he was frequently on to Dublin manager Dessie Farrell requesting a bigger role, feeling he had been typecast as simply a player who could wrestle with a target man for a few minutes when the opposition resorted to desperation.
He saw something in how Colm Cavanagh played in his last few years for Tyrone that he felt might have suited his own skill-set and compensated for his advancing age.
Now, though, McMahon’s war is over and he has a confession. Something he’d never have admitted at any stage over the past 14 years.
“The lads I went to war with are the ones I had the most respect for,” he says.
“They were the ones that were going to bring the best out of me; tactically, physically, psychologically,” adds McMahon.
“So all those boys, at inter-county or at club level that I went after, they can take that as a compliment. Because I needed to do that to have any chance against them.
“If you were a player and I didn’t ‘give it to you’, it’s because you weren’t good enough.”
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Philly is a fascinating character.
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There was a lot of praise for him for making bohs a lot tougher mentally this year.
Yet they shat themselves in the penalties and went from 2nd to 5th in the league.
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If by ‘fascinating character’ you mean a complete bollocks I concur
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A very impressive individual.
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Philly is the greatest player of the last 20 years.
A lot of praise? You’re making the League of Ireland sound popular and mainstream.
I must admit, I had no idea Philly was playing for Bohemians.
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“That we ultimately didn’t succeed in winning an All-Ireland during my time - our definitive goal - is a criticism that could be easily thrown at us. In the context of the ‘win or die’ prism of elite sport, this criticism is entirely justified. We did not succeed. We failed. In my 17 seasons as an inter-county footballer, I failed. That is top-level sport in its purest, most straightforward form. When you’re the one in the arena, that narrative drives you on season after season. It’s healthy if only in the sense that, when in pursuit of victory, you continually strive to get better. You play to win. The closer you get to the summit, the more realistic your chances, the more you want it. But, when it’s over and you reflect on the journey, the narrative changes. Put simply, now that I have stopped playing, I can’t affect the result anymore. In accepting that fact, I have reflected and asked myself if I regret not winning an All-Ireland with Mayo? I realise the question is nonsense - the word ‘regret’ implies a choice. The only choice was to empty everything into trying. I feel we did that. We never chose not to win. But if the question is nonsense, the answer is not: I regret nothing. My time as a Mayo footballer was the greatest experience of my life to date. Had I won an All-Ireland in 2004 or 2006, in my early 20s, would I have been better off? I strongly believe that no, I would not. That is not to say I didn’t want it. Would the long-suffering people of Mayo have been happier? Probably. For a winter at least. I’d be a fool to think otherwise. There are elderly Mayo folk all over the world who have spent their entire lives waiting to see us win just once. Perhaps I didn’t appreciate that great longing enough when I was a younger player, but it was something of which I became increasingly aware as I travelled with Mayo teams, especially to London and New York. Whenever I played, winning was always the goal. Now that I’m done, I realise that everything good I took from it came from the struggle. I would never swap that now, not for any medal.”
-Andy Moran
✪ (Lessons Learned in Pursuit of Glory/December 2021) ✪
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Anyone read Andy’s book?
I’d say he has a few stories to tell.
The last time Kilkenny didn’t win the All-Ireland hurling championship in a year ending in 2, Kerry cruised to the football All-Ireland.
And so it will be again this year.
eh, the article is about nut roasts mate
Kerry could finish Dublin football for about 10 years when they beat them in this year’s All Ireland Semi Final.
Sure Kerry are nuts and roasters.
About 8 years.
I’d say it’s shite TBH…he won’t want to have ruffled any feathers given he has constructed a media profile and inter county management career