With Dublin heavy favourites as they take on Kildare in the Leinster championship this weekend, we were curious about how teams expected to win handsomely deal with less celebrated opposition.
So when James Horan joined us on Off The Ball to preview and analyse the upcoming fixtures, Ger started off by asking him about the experience he had in his first championship in charge of Mayo against London in 2011, when they only scraped victory in extra-time. Horan jokes that he could have had the shortest inter-county reign in recorded history...
My first game as an inter-county manager in a championship game was against London.
I nearly had the shortest intercounty managerial career of all-time. I'm very aware of that fact as some of my buddies keep reminding me.
We were going over to London and London is a very unusual one in that pretty much playing anywhere in Ireland you've got a pretty good routine and you're fairly in control of a lot of things as regards travel, logistics and time.
When you're in a different country, at a different time, you don't really know about the opposition because there's guys in and there's guys out.
So it can be hard to prepare as you'd like so there were a lot of challenges around that one.
But it certainly did forge an awareness in a team that went on a run for the four years [that I was in charge].
It was a huge experience for us.
Horan was speaking on Thursday night's Off The Ball as we previewed this weekend's games. Listen back via the podcast:
Download the brand new OffTheBall App in the Play Store & App Store right now! We've got you covered!
Subscribe to OffTheBall's YouTube channel for more videos, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for the latest sporting news and content.
