There’s still over a week to go before the seven nominees for the Mayo bainisteoir job have to get their completed questionnaires back to the County Board’s Gang of Four and no doubt they’re using some spare time this weekend to work on their answers to the list of incisive questions that have been hurled at them.  How many of them will fill in the required paperwork and send it off ahead of Tuesday week’s deadline?

Hard to know, I suppose, but it’s difficult in particular to visualise Mick O’Dwyer hunched over those A4 pages, sucking on his biro as he tries to conjur up the kind of killer phrases that he thinks will go down well with James Waldron and his colleagues.  Sticking with the Goat Suckers – even if he is taking the piss a little at this stage with how long he’s kept them waiting – must seem like an easier option for the Waterville maestro, not least because of the more limited ambitions of those watching from the sidelines in that part of the country.  After the car crash Johnno II era, most Mayo supporters will want to see serious improvement under the new man and if Micko were to be slow in providing this, he’d soon know all about it regardless of how much sweet-talking folksy bullshit he’d come out with.  I’m not sure he’d be able for that kind of ear ache at his age.

You’ll no doubt have seen by now the comments made by some of the candidates.  This report in the Western contains quotes from Tony McGarry and James Horan and what’s noteworthy is that both of them say quite similar things about what what they’d bring to the job.  Could this mean that they’d work well in tandem, I wonder, or does the similarity in what they have to say mean that there’d be little point in having the two of them on board?  In other words, are they – as economists would say – complements or substitutes?  For the moment, though, they’re obviously head-to-head rivals.

John Maughan, predictably, decided to keep his powder dry in his latest Mayo Advertiser column and chose instead to muddy the waters a bit further with some ould guff that Banty McEnaney might be interested in the job.  Well, the McEnaney family does owe Mayo one I suppose but I suspect I’m not the only one expressing relief that that particular candidacy hasn’t made it out of the starting blocks. JM is, of course, too cute to say anything about his own nomination for the gig and the only nod towards it is this bit where he talks about the kind of planning a manager needs to do:

A manager of a team will try to visualise every potential move of the opposition… the ‘what if’ scenario. If such moves have been discussed and planned for, it can make it so much easier to execute the winning of a match.

Sounds like our John has been reading his von Clausewitz again.

Elsewhere, Tommy Lyons says he’d be “delighted” to talk to the County Board about the job but we don’t know if his delight will stretch to filling in the dreaded questionnaire.  Given that news of his candidacy hasn’t exactly been greeted by rounds of whooping and cheering within the county, I’d say there has to be some doubt as to whether he’ll bother doing so.  In contrast, I’d expect that Tommy Carr – the Lord loving a trier and all that – will go to post, regardless of how hopeless his case may be.

Denis Kearney, meanwhile, remains the dark horse in this particular race.  He said the other week that he hadn’t heard a peep back from anyone since he’d let his name go forward, though one assumes that he is now in possession of the same paperwork that the other six will have been given.  Kearney has to be viewed as a serious candidate, though you get the impression that he could be part of the answer to our problems rather than being the main man to sort out our present travails.

And so to the poll here on the site, which has produced some, shall we say, irregular voting.  Normally, the way things work with polls is that the general trend gets established over the first thirty or forty votes and that after that the percentages only shift a small bit.  On this occasion, though, James Horan raced into an enormous lead early on – he was close on 50% at one stage – but then, out of nowhere, Tony McGarry’s vote took off like an ass on steroids and, inside the last 24 hours, he went ahead of the Ballintubber man.  I dunno about the rest of you, but – a bit like all that odd Eurovision voting or the way that the poll on the 100 Greatest Britons turned out – I smell a rat on this one.  While the voting unquestionably shows that Tony has a fair bit of support, it’s not clear (and I have no way of determining) if this is spontaneous or if it’s organised in some fashion.  I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories but, on this occasion, I’m opting for the latter.