A great novelist once wrote that “all peasants know the crop
must fail.” There’s a world of understanding in that short sentence.
If you’re an aristocrat, you don’t rely on the crop to the
same extent. If it fails, you can always rack up the rent. But if you’re a
peasant, the crop is all you’ve got and, at the back of your mind, you know
that one morning you could go out there and your entire future could be
destroyed. Too much sun, or too little, or too much rain, or too little, or one
of a hundred other things can wipe you out. There are too many disasters out
there for you to be able to avoid them all.
Mayo is a peasant county, with that peasant psyche. More so
than most, in fact. At the back of the Mayo psyche there is a solemn drone
behind the tune of life, that the crop will eventually fail and we will starve.
That drone is loudly drowning out the melody now, as reality of Andy Moran’s
absence from the senior football team hits home.
That the crop has failed once more, as we expected. Doom
could only ever be postponed, rather than avoided, and now Doom is here,
reaping his terrible harvest.
But this is just football. We’re getting carried away.
A friend of the blog likes to refer to Andy Moran as
“Ever-Present-Andy.” In James Horan’s first league campaign as Mayo manager
Horan changed at least six players a week. The one man he didn’t change was
Andy. Andy was vital to Horan. Andy was going nowhere if Horan had anything to
do with it.
But Horan can’t always have something to do with it. There
are some things you can’t fight, and sheer bad luck is one of them. A man is
handed the black spot, and that’s all there is to it. He’s not the first, and
he won’t be the last.
But in their mourning for Andy, Mayo are in danger of losing
a season that is still very much ripe with possibility. A consensus is quickly
building up that, while Mayo had a chance against Dublin, now Andy Moran is
gone there is no chance at all.
Once his knee went, Andy Moran became Mayo’s Eoghan Roe
O’Neill, our Patrick Sarsfield, our Gile Mear. The great lost leader. But
that’s not who he was going into the game.
Andy Moran is a vital part of the Mayo team, sure. But did
anyone think of the team as Andy Moran and fourteen other bucks before he hurt
his knee? Was Andy Moran Mayo’s Declan Browne, or Mickey Kearins, or Paddy
Bradley, or a host of other fellas who were asked to carry their teams on their
own?
No, he wasn’t. Andy Moran’s loss is huge. But to say it’s an
extinction-level event is not true. Andy Moran isn’t irreplaceable, and the
sooner that penny drops and the sooner the players concentrate on whatever it
is they’re going to do to get past Dublin the better. New Zealand lost Dan
Carter in the Rugby World Cup. They still struggled through somehow.
Andy Moran will still have a role to play, and if Mayo do
get past Dublin then his role will be even bigger. It’s a bitter pill for the
man himself, who is a gentleman by all accounts, but he can still do his bit
for Mayo.
Even though it will break his heart to do it from the
sideline or the dressing room rather than amidst the shot and shell, there is
still a role for him in the context of the squad and the dream. Andy Moran has
manned up for Mayo in the past. Now it’s time for Mayo to man up for Andy.
FOCAL SCOIR: The novelist? Lee Child, of course.
