Pip: Mayo end a seventy-five-year wait, Eddie Howe exits on his own terms, and Glen Hansard leaves a silence that no one quite knows how to fill — Brendan has been busy.
Mara: This episode moves through two stretches of territory: sporting legacy and what happens when a good manager gets caught in someone else’s chaos, and then a tribute to Glen Hansard that is really about Irish identity and what we lose when we lose our artists.
Pip: Let’s start with the GAA, Newcastle, and the question of whether good people ever get to leave on their own terms.
Good People, Bad Exits
Mara: The frame here is timing — specifically, what it means when a long-suffering fanbase finally wins, and what it means when a manager who delivered trophies still can’t survive the boardroom.
Pip: The post opens with a striking comparison: Mayo’s seventy-five-year wait for an All Ireland title lands right next to the observation that “the storied old club would have descended into such turmoil around the time their greatest ever representative, Kevin Keegan, was called ashore to the big dugout up above.”
Mara: That’s the real sting — Newcastle win the League Cup, reach Europe, and then watch Stavely leave, Tonali, Gordon, and Bruno Guimaraes follow, and the whole structure quietly collapse under a manager who did nothing wrong.
Pip: There’s something almost geometrically unfair about it. The reward for overachieving is apparently a faster route to the exit.
Mara: The post is clear that Howe stepping away himself, before being pushed, is the best available outcome — and that his next job, wherever it lands, won’t be hard to find. The Stavely-West Ham thread is left open, which would of course require Nuno Espirito Santo’s departure first.
Pip: From hurling droughts in Dunboyne to Premier League politics — which is, somehow, a perfectly natural segue into grief.
Glen Hansard And What Dublin Sounds Like
Mara: The tribute to Glen Hansard is about more than one musician — it’s about what he represented: a living connection to a Dublin that expresses itself through a particular kind of roguish decency.
Pip: The post finds its spine early, and it’s a line that earns its place: “Hansard, though, was so close to a double of the man whose gravestone simply reads ‘Dubliner’ it was as if someone had gone to the Mount Rushmore of musicians and chiselled him from a template of the greatest.”
Mara: That comparison to Luke Kelly — in looks, in voice, in the ability to spellbind — runs through everything that follows. The post traces a personal discovery: a YouTube concert at the Royal Albert Hall on St Patrick’s Day 2014, Glen Hansard and friends performing The Auld Triangle, with John Sheahan on stage singing a verse of Brendan Behan’s classic.
Pip: The Royal Albert Hall, St Patrick’s Day, Behan’s words, Sheahan’s voice — that’s a lot of Dublin in one room for a concert in London.
Mara: And the post builds outward from there — noting that Hansard starred in The Commitments, that Falling Slowly reached people who didn’t even know his name, and that his annual Christmas Eve busking session on Grafton Street raised funds for charitable causes he championed throughout his career.
Pip: A man who could sell out concert halls choosing to stand on a street corner with a hat out for charity — that detail does a lot of work quietly.
Mara: The post closes on a verdict that doubles as an epitaph: “To somebody of my vintage, Glen Hansard’s death is the Luke Kelly passing our lifetime.” The word Dubliner, it argues, would serve equally well on both headstones.
Pip: Two very different kinds of loss this episode — one managerial, one irreplaceable — and both hinge on the same question of whether good people get the endings they deserve.
Mara: The music stays. The legacy stays. We’ll see what the next set of posts brings.
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