Mark Durkan was rather gravelly at the launch of the SDLP manifesto in Belfast yesterday. "More croak mark than Croke Park," he said, explaining that his presence at the Ireland versus England game on Saturday accounted for his hoarse voice.
Taking a few hours out from the stomp, especially after that uplifting result, was probably good for the SDLP leader's spirit and sanity.
With eight days to go to polling we are now in the final stages of the election which, curiously, while hugely important, is as flat as the pancakes the Rev Ian Paisley was tossing on Shrove Tuesday. Why that is is hard to explain.
The main protagonists are a volatile bunch - William McCrea, Gerry Adams, Robert McCartney, Yes and No DUP-pers, anti-deal republicans, and so on - and the main issue - whether this is an election to something or nothing - is crucial. But this election has yet to erupt. In fact it has yet to even spark.
Therefore this is a doorstep election and every minute out on the campaign trail must be used to maximum advantage. After the launch of the 50-page manifesto Durkan was back in the SDLP campaign bus seeking votes.
For the past week party strategists have concentrated him in two constituencies, Strangford, and Newry and Armagh, where they believe respectively they can snaffle seats from Alliance and Sinn Féin.
Joe Boyle is targeting Kieran McCarthy's seat in Strangford and has a reasonable chance of success. The SDLP only has one seat in Séamus Mallon's old fiefdom of Newry and Armagh, that of Dominic Bradley, despite holding close to two quotas in the constituency. Bradley's young running mate this time is Sharon Haughey.
They hope that internal Sinn Féin ructions around the deselection of candidate and former mayor of Newry David Hyland - now standing as an independent - together with better vote management could gain them a seat each. It could happen.
Nonetheless, unless both the SDLP and the pundits are totally confounded by the voters, the party at the very least should be more or less where it was after the 2003 Assembly elections, when it won 18 seats.
So, the old nationalist middleground has not gone away, you know, even if much of it is now occupied by Sinn Féin. There is still a place for the SDLP. But there is one factor that could upset the fairly positive political prognostications about the SDLP - good old voter apathy. Durkan majored on this at the manifesto launch yesterday. "Don't stay at home. If you do, politics will only stay stuck. And we'll all be stuck with direct rule," he said.
Durkan also put his finger on why this campaign is so lacklustre. People are just fed up with the "endless process", he said. And he's right.
