Padraic Joyce says that bringing Jim McGuinness on board with Galway was a “no-brainer”.
However, the Tribe boss was coy on whether the All-Ireland winning Donegal manager will be involved with his side again this year after taking part of a training session in Tuam yesterday.
The pair go back a long way having studied at Tralee RTC (now IT Tralee), where they won a Sigerson Cup together in 1998.
Joyce said: “I’m always looking to do what I can for the players.
“My job as Galway manager is to make sure that my players are the best prepared that I possibly can give them and I just felt at this time that we needed a bit of a surge of something and the mental aspect of the game is huge nowadays so I just felt that around the country, in my eyes he’s the best performance coach in the country.
“He’s been there, he’s done it and he’s very relevant to GAA because he’s won it as a manager himself so I just thought it was a perfect fit. It was a no-brainer for me to be honest. It didn’t just fall out of the sky.”
When asked whether McGuinness will be involved again, Joyce replied: “We’ll see. Lookit, it’s like when you sample a new brand of something, you’ll taste it and see what it’s like and if you don’t like it you might go somewhere else and get something different but we’ll see how it goes down.”
He did add, however, that the players “loved” the experience with the 2012 All-Ireland winning boss.
Reflecting on his relationship with McGuinness, Joyce said: “He’s an old friend of mine. We were in college together for years.
“We had plenty of nights out and plenty of craic and we had plenty of matches together and I’d know him really, really well and that’s my relationship with him, we’ve always stayed in touch and we’ve just been good friends and close friends.”
Joyce expressed disappointment at how McGuinness’s involvement was leaked after a video of him taking a training drill surfaced on Twitter yesterday.
“Lookit, these things happen. We can’t legislate for a man that’s living in a house behind a pitch recording stuff. It’s unfair on the players that it got out.
“You’re invading people’s privacy at times doing that but unfortunately that’s the social media platform, the social media world we live in.”
