The Ballad of Football Jesus

The Ballad of Football Jesus

I don’t care if it rains or freezes

‘Cos I got my Football Jesus

Waitin’ on the sideline in the Hyde

In the Hy-ide, in the Hy-ide

Waitin’ on the sideline in the Hyde

I ain’t scared of snow or hail

Tulsk Lord Edward or Western Gael

With Football Jesus sittin’ by my side

By my si-ide, by my si-ide

With Football Jesus sittin’ by my side

He’ll jump for kickouts if they’re there

He’ll let her in quick to the edge of the square

There’s nothing Football Jesus cannot do

Cannot do-ooo, cannot do-ooo

There’s nothing Football Jesus cannot do

He can’t be bought for a bag of silver

Just give him the ball and he’ll deliver

Football Jesus’s here for me and you

Me and you-oo, me and you-oo,

Football Jesus’s here for me and you

An A-Z of the Past Decade in Mayo Football

Your faithful correspondent was flattered and delighted to be asked to add his two cents to the Western People's recent magnificent tribute to the Mayo footballers of the past decade, published about two months ago now. Here now are those two cents, with nothing added or taken away. Or hardly anything. Ahem.

A is for Ardour
It’s reasonable to wonder why we do it. Mayo people think we’re great at football but three All-Irelands in 130 years isn’t quite Liverpool’s Glory Years in Europe. But you can’t choose whom, or what, you love. Mayo are ours and we theirs and the GAA senior football team is our morning and evening star, whether we like it not.

B is for Bowe's
John Gunnigan, the man behind the Mayo GAA Blog, decided to hold a sort of a Mayo pre-match party on the eve of the All-Ireland semi-final of 2011. We all knew Mayo were going to lose in the morning, but Gunnigan thought it important to mark how far the team had travelled from losing to Sligo and Longford the year before. And so, visits to Bowe’s of Fleet Street became a pre-match institution as this remarkable decade rolled on. The night before the 2013 Final it felt like Mayo’s Age of Aquarius had dawned in that area of Dublin bounded by College Green in the south and the river in the north. It didn’t last, of course, but it was magical while it was there.

C is for Cork
Younger readers may not remember what a bogey team for Mayo Cork were. Cork beat Mayo in the 1989 final, but the humiliation of Cork beating Mayo by 5-15 to 0-10 in the 1993 semi-final particularly stung. It looked like business as usual in the early minutes of the 2011 quarter-final, and the pundits’ pre-match mockery of Mayo was going to prove all too true. Then Aidan O’Shea cleaned Noel O’Leary, Kevin McLoughlin stuck a goal and history changed. Mayo met Cork again in the quarter-finals of 2014, and won a game by a one-point margin that felt like six or seven. As someone remarked at the time, “isn’t it nice to be the bullies for a change?”

D is for Donegal
Mayo played Donegal in the Championship four times this decade, and won three out of four games. But the one game of those four, the one Donegal won, is the only one that’s carved in stone. In the Championship, when you win is often more important than whom you beat, or how often, or by how much.

E is for Egg-Chasing
Every hardcore GAA club member treats rugby like a black-widow spider. They don’t want it about the place and if there’s any hint of an infestation, it’s all hands to the pumps until the crisis is dealt with. This is a little paranoid, not least because it’s not at all obvious that the IRFU wants its base to be widened as much as young people in non-rugby country want to play the game. However. There is one egg of which the GAA should be much more wary, and that is the Sherrin KB Size 5 ball used by the Australian Football League. It’s very hard to expect any young man to turn down the offer of Australia and our blessings and best wishes to all to take their chance when it comes but goodness gracious, it’s middling heartbreaking for those who are left behind.

F is for Forwards, Quality Scoring
Well, Bernard Flynn, or Dessie Dolan, or Tommy “Tom” Carr, or whoever, why do you think Mayo didn’t win the All-Ireland this year? I’m glad you asked me that Joanne – I think that it’s mainly due to a lack of quality scoring forwards. This summer, Cillian O’Connor surpassed Colm “Gooch” Cooper’s career scoring total. O’Connor is twenty-seven years old. Why not think about that one for a while Bernie, or Dessie, or Tommy?

G is for Galway
You could make a case that the best Mayo team of the first Maughan era was the 1998 team. But no-one would ever know because that team didn’t last past the month of May, beaten by Galway in Castlebar before the schools had closed for the summer. The hero of that Galway generation has just been appointed Galway manager. The prospect of history repeating is not a pleasing one.

H is for Heraclitus
Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted that a fire is always changing, and yet is always the same. It’s the same with the Mayo team. There’s been some talk in the media about the “end” of Mayo. Teams don’t end. Mayo will have a team in the Championship as long as there is a championship. Always changing, always the same.

I is for Insult
The first your correspondent ever heard of the so-called Mayo curse was outside the Big Tree after Mayo were hammered in the 2004 Final. There is no way between Hell and Bethlehem it’s been around since 1951, because if it was I’d have heard of it before then. I don’t know who started the curse story first, but if he, she, it or them ever has the lard beaten out of him, her, it or them by stout men with sally rods, that’ll be fine by me.

J is for Jackeen
In discussing Gaelic games with Dublin supporters, it’s essential to point out that the nickname “Jackeen” comes from the vast amount of Union Jack flags the city-that-took-on-an-empire hung all over the metropolis for the visit of King Edward VII in 1903. It drives them demented. Demented.

K is for Kerry
If you’re playing serious football, you’re measuring yourself against Kerry. Over this decade Mayo went from cannon-fodder in 2011 to equals in 2014 to victors in 2017. It was hard luck on Aidan O’Shea, but when Kieran Donaghy boxed O’Shea in the dying minutes of the All-Ireland semi-final replay, we knew the Kingdom was done when that was all they had left. Anything that happened in that oul’ Super-Eights stuff isn’t right Championship at all, you know. Ahem.

L is for Limerick
The city of the ancient walls and the broken treaty stone will always have unhappy memories for Mayo. The 2014 semi-final replay should never have been played in Limerick, and the County Board were chicken not to stand their ground. The match had spectacular levels of drama and was a classic for Kerrymen and for neutrals, but none of that is worth yesterday’s chewing gum when it’s your team that gets knocked out.

M is for Money
It got lost in the coverage of Ireland’s hammering at the hands of New Zealand in Tokyo, but that same day saw a special congress of the GAA introduce a two-tier system to the Championship. They say it’s to give smaller counties a chance. It’s not. No law was ever made for the poor. It’s another step on the road to professionalism, along which the GAA has already travelled a perilously long way. In trying to mimic other sports, the GAA is in grave danger of losing that thing that makes it unique and unparalleled. God forfend the unhappy day.

N is for Newbridge
Stephen Rochford’s tenure as Mayo manager ended in loss to Kildare in Newbridge. Newbridge hadn’t been awarded the fixture when the draw was made but Kildare kicked up, the country got behind them and they claimed their reward. This column looks forward to Kildare showing similar gumption the next time the current Leinster and All-Ireland Champions tell them there’s no room for Dublin’s massive travelling support in Newbridge.

O is for Overseas
People used to say that what goes on tour, stays on tour. That was pre-social media. Anybody involved in sports, on either the playing or administrative side of things, should have the fact that the world is now a village tattooed on the palms of their hands, for fear they’d forget it while dazzled by the bright lights and make jack-asses out of themselves and all belonging to them.

P is for Propaganda
History is written by victors. The narrative of the 2017 final is a case in point. That game is remembered for its ending – Lee Keegan chucking his GPS-tracker in the general direction of Dean Rock before Dean Rock kicked the winning free. Except that wasn’t the ending. The ending was when all three of the Dublin fullback line dragged down their men as David Clarke was taking the kickout, ensuring that there was no short kickout option. Did the referee issue three black cards? He didn’t even blow his whistle. Did anybody go bananas in the RTÉ studio or in the papers afterwards? Not at all. After all, Dublin winning All-Irelands is good for the game. Future Mayo teams should always remember what it’s like to be disrespected. It’ll help concentrate their minds.

Q is for Quest
A year or two ago, a friend was stuck in traffic on the way home from one of those indeterminable qualifier fixtures and was surprised to find himself not caring. He saw the cars stretch fore and aft of him, all bedecked in colours, all in common cause, and he was washed over with feelings of camaraderie and fellowship. Reader, when you can’t remember the years or the opposition or the players’ names, you’ll remember that feeling and many like it from these golden years.

R is for Reek, The
In the dying years of the Twentieth Century, between the All-Ireland final of 1996 and its replay, some Ballinamen climbed Croagh Patrick. One of them looked down from the summit, turned to his fellows and asked “how can anywhere this beautiful not win an All-Ireland?” Some mysteries pass all understanding.

S is for Sam
S is for Sam, S-A-M, Sam. Accept no substitutes.

T is for Tickets
It’s never been easy to get a ticket to an All-Ireland final. I know a man who knows a man who met a man who heard of a man on a lock-in in Kilkenny some years ago, when the hurlers were unbeatable. He and his fellow zombies regained consciousness sometime around midday and, while searching his pockets for any money he might have left, he found a ticket for the hurling final that was on that very day. He held it up, and got a laugh from the boys. If he had done that in Mayo, it wouldn’t have been a laugh he’d have gotten. It’d have been a spin in an ambulance.

U is for Ululation
Ululation is the sound of sorrow vocalised, from the Latin ululo – I shriek, I yell, I howl. We are more inclined to describe that sound as “keening” in Ireland, but Kerry have already taken K – just like they take anything else that isn’t nailed down if you don’t keep your two eyes on them.

V is for Victory
Mayo won three national titles in this decade. The minors won in 2013, the Under-21s in 2016, and the seniors won the League this year. Had those victories occurred in any other generation, there would be statues chiselled and songs sung. But they happened in the shadow of this extraordinary decade, and thus didn’t get what they might otherwise have gotten.

W is for Winter
Andy Moran retired this year, as did Ger Cafferkey. Alan Dillon hung up his boots a year or two before that, and there will be more to come. It’s sad that neither Andy nor Alan nor Ger won an All-Ireland, but is any sadder than the fact that Ciarán McDonald didn’t, or Liam McHale, or Willie Joe Padden, or any of the countless others? Winter is what it is, and we must accept it.

X is for X-Marks-The-Spot
Fifty-three degrees, forty-four minutes, thirty-one-point-seven seconds North, seven degrees, fifty-five minutes, three-point-five seconds West. Those are the exact co-ordinates where Sam will cross from Leinster into Connacht on his way to Castlebar if they’re travelling by bus. It’ll be 53 degrees, 25 minutes 43.8 seconds North, seven degrees, 57 minutes and 38 seconds West if they take the train. Some of us have been planning ahead.

Y is for Youth
The fire is always the same, and always changing. Youth must be given its fling. There are footballers coming into their prime now who know of no other Mayo than the one that plays in Croke Park as leaves turn on the trees and they take up the torch in their turn.

Z is for Zzzz’s
Of which there are only sixty-one thirteen left until Mayo's first game of the FBD League in dear old Caisleán a'Bharraigh. Can’t wait.

The Gospel According to Darragh

This column likes to consider itself second-to-none in its admiration of Darragh Ó Sé’s weekly column on Gaelic Football, published every Wednesday by the Irish Times during the Championship.

Yesterday, in his preview of Sunday’s All-Ireland Final, where only Kerry remain standing in the way of a historic five-in-a-row titles for Dublin, Darragh presented his masterpiece.

This may not have been obvious on first reading of the column. Some prophets are born to shoot from the hip. John the Baptist made it quite plain to Israel that the new covenant was at hand. Roy Keane, in those happy times when he annually righted the nation’s wrong as part of his charity work for the Irish Guide Dogs Association, and before the misery of his having to put his money where his mouth is began, was of the same school. Seán Báiste and The Boy Roy both gave it to us straight.

Darragh’s is of a different style. Darragh’s way is more subtle, more gnostic, more allegorical. Darragh’s is the way of parable and imagery. He is more in the tradition of Jeremiah or of that other John, servant of Jesus Christ, to whom was granted the Apocalypse.

To truly read Darragh we must engage in exegesis. We must carefully parse the text in order to lead out its true meaning.

As we consider Darragh’s column of yesterday, we note that it begins with a parable, The Parable of the Bomber. On the face of it, it’s a reminiscence of the two big men exchanging bantz before the 2009 final, and very middling bantz they are. But reader, shun the easy path. Look more closely. Ignore the instruments. Feel the Force.

Darragh decides to have a bit of fun, but the bit of fun he has – “as long as the three Sés are in it” – isn’t actually funny. So why tell the story? Because the prophet is telling his followers, lo, remember, I am Darragh the Trickster. I like to have a bit of fun. My words are not as they seem.

The next section is pure stodge, with a lot of old yak about the Killarney Races and the Rose of Tralee and how training is different from Darragh’s day. This is to scare of the unwary, who will lose the will to go on. The true followers continue, however, knowing the House of Wisdom is only reached after wading through the swamp.

And then, through the mist, we espy the first turret of that same house. “The one thing I’ve noticed this year with Dublin is that Jim Gavin seems to have settled on a team and more or less stuck with it.”

“The one thing I’ve noticed.” It’s straight out of Columbo. Just as the murderer thinks he’s got away with it, the LAPD ragamuffin says “there’s just one thing that’s been bothering me …”

Jim Gavin’s is a settled team, muses Darragh. In other years they chopped and changed. Not this year. The competition for places isn’t the same.

Dublin were training in Cooraclare, but Darragh is not at all sure they were going hammer and tongs at it. They’re well used to this, says Darragh.

Reader, does that sound at all like the Comfort Zone to you? Could Dublin be … complacent? Could Dublin be … stale? If Darragh were as his forebears, a voice clamouring in the desert, his acolytes’ ears would be pricking up big style at this stage.

Then Darragh remarks that, while caution may have got you to an All-Ireland final, an All-Ireland Final itself is a place in which to throw caution to the wind. “A final is a place to be borderline reckless in,” remarks Darragh, almost as an aside.

Reader, think back to the Parable of the Bomber. Of the nine (nine!) All-Ireland Finals in which he played, which one did Darragh discuss with the Bomber? It was 2009. Was anyone “borderline reckless” in 2009, borderline reckless in a way that would lead to the winning of the game? Reader, that sonorous booming noise in the distance is not the ringing of a marriage bell. It is the sound of the Prophet dropping a hint.

Having dropped that hint, the Prophet goes on to disrobe, oil up, and start whacking that great big gong that used to start some British movies in the 1950s, the better for his followers to pay attention.
Mayo caned Dublin in the first half of their semi-final, Darragh points out, but did not make it count on the scoreboard. The boy-king Clifford, Stephen O’Brien or that Geaney fella won’t be missing many from twenty-five yards, and Dublin have been slow starters this season.

His colours nailed to the mast, Darragh re-vests and ladles on the yerra, in case the Empire have sent their spies. He tells a Parable of Jacko, yea, and then he goeth even further unto the praising of the Dubs. He points out that Dublin are so strong that Eoghan O’Gara probably won’t make the 26-man cut. Golly. A team must be good if not even Eoghan O’Gara can make the grade.

Kerry's price had held steady at 9/2 since the semi-finals, but it went out to 5/1 with Paddy Power yesterday. The price went on the board just as Darragh was published, but before he had yet been digested. Reader, I fell it on like a thunderbolt. Adveniat regnum.

The Hateful Eights

Filleann Rí a'Chnoic

In his match report from the ballroom dancing in Omagh on Sunday, the Irish Times’s Malachy Clerkin enjoins us never to speak of this again. If only, Malachy. If only.

Sadly, it’s all too necessary to speak of it. The match in Omagh was the Super 8s equivalent of Old Shep being taken to the vet and the vet, on completing his examination, saying “I can’t do no more for him Jim.”

The GAA has no option now but to pick up its gun and send the Super 8s to half-witted-ideas heaven, where it may rest easy with the remixed Sunday Game theme tune, hurling gloves and the B-Championship.

How did this mess come about? Money, of course. For some reason, without any resolution being passed by Congress or any of that palaver, the GAA accepted a change to its fundamental identity in the past decade or so.

Instead of being an organisation that would offer an opportunity to play Gaelic Games to as many people as wanted to, the GAA decided it was in the sports entertainment business. Just like the Premier League, or European Championship Rugby, or even the MMA, the supreme sports entertainment product of our times.

There wasn’t a need to put motions before Congress. This sort of an idea is one of those you circulate at social functions, and let it go viral. There was an obvious gateway – the burning desire of the Gael to believe we’re just as good as the soccer/rugby/Brazilian Ju-Jitsu crowd.

Reader, do you know the absolute favourite story of any good Gael? It’s the one where Sir Alex Ferguson, or Bill Belichick, or Richie MacCaw is shown footage of some football or, ideally, hurling game and Sir Alex/Belichick/Richie are suitably impressed. But then, the kicker.

Whoever has provided the footage tells Sir Alex/Belichick/Richie that the players are all amateurs, every one. And Sir Alex faints, or has a heart attack. Belichick goes mad, and has to be taken to a home. Richie has to have a cavity block smashed over his head to calm him down, being driven demented by the news that amateurs could produce such sporting beauty.

Screw you, Team of Us.

Of course, once you get into the sports entertainment game, you find yourself always worrying that you’re a bit short on Product. Content is King. Give the people what they want. So we need to find a way to dig up more matches, somehow.

Lightning strikes in hurling. The provincial championships change from a dead weight to a Philosophers’ Stone, as a round robin format suddenly finds matches bursting out all over. A round robin doesn’t sit so well with the football formats, so what else to do but force it?

Hence, the Super 8s. For the Super 8s to work, there had to be eight teams of about the same level every year, or four in every five years, say; a combination of the provincial Championships and the open-draw qualifier system had to be the best means of identifying those teams, and each of the eight teams had to play one home game, one away game and one game at a neutral venue.

Advocates of the Super 8s may argue that the way things have fallen out are just unlucky. The happenstance of Dublin’s current dominance, how a little tweaking can make all the difference, and so on. It’s all blather.

The idea of the Super 8s is inherently flawed on two levels. On the most superficial level, it’s flawed because a competition can be a league or it can be knockout, but it can’t be both. The backdoor stretches the credibility of the knockout format to its elastic limit, but it doesn’t quite break it.

The Super 8s shatters the knockout idea into dust. Championship means do-or-die. It does not mean Dublin and Tyrone holding a seventy-minute teddy-bears’ picnic on the August Bank Holiday weekend.

The more fundamental problem is the nature of GAA itself, and this redefinition by stealth that it’s up to. The increased number of games was the expeditionary force. The special congress in the winter when they try to introduce a tiered Championship will be the tanks crashing through the walls.

The GAA is not, and should not be, in the product-selling business. Its purpose is to provide the opportunity to play Gaelic games to as many people as want them. Watching Fat Tony hauling his great tub of guts over and back some god-forsaken field on the side of a mountain might not be up there with watching Lionel Messi at the Bernabeu in terms of sports-entertainment-product, but dammit, running around that field means a lot to Fat Tony. And the GAA is made up of thousands and thousands of Fat Tonys.

There is an argument about the amount of training put in by senior inter-county players in the modern era. Firstly, nobody’s making them. It’s not like there’s a GAA-Stasi kicking players’ doors down in the middle of the night and checking their carb intake.

Secondly – and nobody finds this more bizarre than your correspondent – people in Ireland now routinely put in that sort of training because they like it. They like it. People run Ironman and Ironwomen competitions all the time, but there’s no idea that the nation somehow owes them something because of it. It’s quite easy to remain dry-eyed at the more heart-rending tales of woe from the GPA and their acolytes if you grant yourself a little perspective.

For all that, the genie is so long out of the bottle that the situation can’t return to what it was. The GAA was the sport of a poor country, and Ireland isn’t a poor country any more. Money is more important now that it’s plentiful than it was when it was scarce and the GAA can only exist in the real world.

Therefore, a modest proposal. Let the GAA meet its need for more product by expanding the League. Address the current inequality by having more teams in Division 1, broken into two conferences, as the Examiner’s Kieran Shannon has been preaching for so many years. And satisfy the need for more product by doubling or even trebling the number of League games.

Return the Championship to provincially-based single-knockout games, and run it off quickly the summer. The people will quickly choose whether they like the professional league or the amateur championship, and let the cards fall where they may.

It may be the end of the GAA as we know it. It may be that the GAA as we knew it has been gone for some years. But at least we’ll find out, one way or the other.

Mayo Post-Mortem #67: Exhaustion

One day you lower the bucket into the well and when you bring it back up the water just won’t be there anymore. That’s the day you know your goose is cooked, and that day arrived for Mayo on Saturday night in Newbridge, in the evening sunlight of this scorching summer.

It’s not the only thing that happened, of course. Kildare bet the house on the venue and won, and their players stood up to be counted. Aficionados of the game were teary-eyed at the foot passes of forty and fifty yards finding their men and, if they do nothing else this summer, Kildare will be worth a cheer for reminding the nation of the value of that skill.

All Kildare will have their ears pinned to the radio on Monday morning to see what’s next to get in the selection box. It’ll be of academic interest only in Mayo. After seven long summers, it’s going to be odd being locked out while the party goes on.

Will Sundays now see lost men and women going into the bookstores and browsing the adult coloring books, or the Danish home design books, or even 12 Simple Steps to Learn Business Cantonese books, as they desperately try to fill the Mayo-sized hole in time that’s opened in their lives? Thank God for porter and Smithwick’s ale – a fine refreshment and a sensible alternative in this hot and heavy weather – for their already-discovered powers of instituting oblivion.

There has been end-of-the-line talk about Mayo. It’s understandable, but it’s not fully thought out. Football teams can be understood in the same way the peculiar nature of fire is remembered down the centuries since the Greek philosopher Heraclitus first twigged it. A fire, said Heraclitus, is always changing, and always the same. How can something be changing and always the same? But look at the thing – how else can you describe it?

And so with Mayo, as it is with any football team. The pieces come and go, but the team, the movement, the idea, the spirit goes ever on.

What makes Saturday seem more of a watershed is that the fire hasn’t been flickering at quite the same rate as it should have been. A team will always change, and managing that dynamic is one of the keys to managing a team.

A reluctance to let reality intrude on romance has retarded that natural and necessary process of change, which will make it seem harsher than maybe it might have been when it comes, but there you go. You’re always best pulling off the band-aid in one tug. The ease-it-off approach is kidding yourself.

The good news for Mayo is that while Mayo are unusual in their extraordinary ability to not win All-Irelands, they are equally unusual in squandering a bizarre amount of riches in the process of competing for those All-Irelands.

Certain people hold that the issue with replacing players was that no players were coming true but that’s just not true. The FBD League was made by God in His workshop in Heaven for the express purpose of having a good look at young players. To use it to put even further miles on old men’s clocks is bizarre.

This is the team that started against Sligo in the FBD League in January, as recorded by the unrivalled Mayo GAA Blog: Clarke; Harrison, Cafferkey, O’Donoghue; Boyle, Hall, Paddy Durcan; Gibbons, Coen; McLoughlin, O’Shea, Diarmuid O’Connor; Doherty, Regan, Andy Moran. Reader: what on earth was the point?

But there it is. Rightly or wrongly, very few people think Stephen Rochford will ask for more once his three years run out in the autumn, and that will mean new management, new processes and, God help us all, new hope. One year after Mayo last lost in the Qualifiers, they beat the All-Ireland Champions to begin a seven-year All-Ireland quarter-final winning streak. The players are there. The players are always there. Mayo is always there. Up Mayo.

All-Ireland Championship Cancelled for Next Three Years, Possibly Forever

et in Arcadia ei

History matters in sports. One of the great joys in the completion of any sports season is the ranking of that season’s Champion among the pantheon of the greats.

We kid ourselves doing this, of course. All-Ireland Finals have been played over sixty, seventy and, for a short time in the 1970s, eighty minutes. The catch-and-kick game of the 1960s isn’t the almost-basketball game of the 1980s and the current game is the least like any of its predecessors.

What role would Brian Dooher, say, have played in the 1960s? Would the legendary Mick O’Connell of Valentia even get a jersey in this era where high-fielding really isn’t a thing anymore? If you were to play an imaginary game between a team of the 1980s and a current team, how do you even up the playing field?

Do you load up the men of the 80s with protein shakes, broccoli and weight programs? Or – your correspondent’s own preference – do you load the contemporary athletes up with warm Smithwick’s ale and a twenty-Carroll’s smoking habit, and see how much they fancy running up and down Croke Park then?

All good fun in the pub to while away the winter while the Championship sleeps, ready for another year.

Sadly, all that comes to an end this summer. The introduction of the so-called Super 8s means that this year’s Championship, and future Championships to come, are as different to the previous 130 years of competition as a brick is different to an ice cream cone.

The Qualifier system put great strain on the Championship by giving the Great Powers a get-out-of-jail free card while claiming to level the playing field for the smaller counties. But for all that, the fact that the eventual All-Ireland Champions still had to play three knockout games meant there was still a hint of what the Championship had been, and should be.

How many true knockout games did Kerry have to play in their ‘80s Golden Years? What about Galway coming into the hurling championship at the All-Ireland semi-final stage? Not that awful many.

This new age of the Super 8s, however, is a definite break with tradition. There’s no point codding ourselves anymore. Whatever puncher’s chance the underdog had prior to this is now legislated out of existence.

Powerful counties that have tradition and money on their side now have the rules of the competition itself in their corner as well. Dublin or Kerry can now lose twice, in their provinces and in the Super 8s, and still be in an All-Ireland semi-final, happy as Larry and licking their lips at the prospect of munching down whatever lambs are fed to their slaughter.

Darragh Ó Sé left the yerra behind in his column in the Irish Times during the week. The Provincial Championships doesn’t matter a tu’penny damn any more, according to Darragh. The Championship only begins in July in the Super 8s. Everything prior to that is shadow-boxing.

How has this come to pass? How has the Championship been turned on its head without Gaels seeing comets in the sky, or great cliffs falling into the sea, or any of those other portents of great change?
It’s all down to Money, of course, long-recognised as the root of all evil.

Eugene McGee once opined that the GAA lost its soul when it first agreed to shirt sponsorship. Whatever; whenever it happened the genie is out the bottle now, and there’s no getting him back in without some profound and uncomfortable sacrifice on many people’s part. And neither sacrifice nor restraint is a noted quality of Modern Ireland.

Quietly, unnoticed by many, an opinion grew within the Association, fostered by the GPA and their media enablers, that the GAA has a duty to offer the elite athletes of the nation a space or forum to display their gifts. This, aligned with Croke Park Teoranta’s insatiable desire for dollars, combined to bring about our woe.

The GAA that existed to provide the opportunity to play Gaelic games to as many people as wanted to play them has been pushed aside by a new organisation, eager to grab some of that sports/leisure industry revenue. The cuckoo has taken over the nest, and the end is nigh for the GAA as we knew it.

We are now on the slope that will tumble us, sooner than we think, towards a professional league of maybe eight football teams, six hurling. They’ll call themselves Leinster Lions or Breffni Badgers or the Earl of Desmond’s Rangers, and they’ll have woolly mascots that the kids love and it won’t be too bad, really, and we’ll get used to it sooner than we think, even whingers like your correspondent. But what it won’t be is what we once had, the pearl worth more than all our tribe that was the Championship.

Which makes it all the more important to speak truth to power now, before we are lost, and identify what it is that is before us. This new Super 8s Championship is a damnable thing. It is despicable, hateful, monstrous. It is an abomination, an affront in the sight of Almighty God.

And somehow it is here, all set to ruin the summer like one thousand showers or one million protests on the Garvaghy Road. It is a crime and a sin that the Super 8s now rig the Championship to ensure that only the rich can survive. We should shed a tear and keen a lament for that which is lost. We surely own it that much after all these years.

Why Mayo Don't Win All-Irelands

The Irish Examiner’s Kieran Shannon wrote a marvellous profile of Tommy Guilfoyle, the greatest Clare hurler of whom you’ve never heard, last summer. Tommy Guilfoyle was, and is, a prince. He is all that you could ask a man to be.

Guilfoyle's hurling career was dominated by injuries as freakish as they were frightening, and also he had to deal with the sort of personal tragedy that puts all those games we play in their true perspective. Tommy Guilfoyle spent the early ‘90s meeting with Triumph and Disaster, and treating both imposters the same.

And then, in 1994, it all came together. Injury free at last, Guilfoyle was back playing with the county and reminded the Banner of his talent by hammering two goals home against Tipperary, hated Tipperary, in a league semi-final in Limerick.

Ger Loughnane then took over as Clare manager at the end of the 1994 Championship. Loughnane is from Feakle, the same club as Tommy Guilfoyle, and Loughnane had trained Guilfoyle at Under-14. For Clare hurling, 1995 was going to be The Year.

And so 1995 was – just not for Tommy Guilfoyle. When Loughnane selected his panel for the 1995 Championship, Guilfoyle wasn’t on it. Guilfoyle wasn’t happy about this, and held it against Loughnane for sixteen years. And then news broke of Loughnane’s cancer battle and Guilfoyle, like the gentleman he is, put things in perspective and renewed his friendship with the man who denied him an All-Ireland medal.

Why didn’t Loughnane pick Guilfoyle? For this reason: Loughnane knew exactly the sort of team he wanted playing for Clare, and exactly what it would take to make them. The brutality of Clare’s training in 1995 is well documented.

Loughnane knew Guilfoyle couldn’t take that sort of punishment after all he had been through, and Loughnane also knew that there were no half-measures. No exceptions could be made. Everyone had to get equal treatment. And so, in the name winning, Loughnane cut Tommy Guilfoyle’s heart out and threw it in the bin.

If Tommy Guilfoyle had been a Mayoman, his would have been the first name down on every team sheet in 1995, and Clare would still be waiting for an All-Ireland. Clare people would love Tommy Guilfoyle and happily fight anyone who dared besmirch him or question his right to stand in the pantheon with Leahy and Whelehan and Pilkington.

But they wouldn’t know what it was like to hear the Clare shout ring out from Jones’ Road all the way west to the crashing waves of the broad Atlantic itself, as the team came home to the torchlights with the Liam McCarthy cup on the front of the bus. They’d still be waiting on that particular joy.

In Mayo we think they’re big-time because of all these finals we’ve been in. Mayo are everyone’s second county and we lap that plamás up like cats at a saucer of milk. We never stop to ask if all that milk is any good to us, or if it’d be any harm to have a shot of whiskey now and again instead, to put hair on the chest.

Anthony Daly was Ger Loughnane’s captain when the curse of Biddy Earley was broken in 1995. Nineteen years later, he resigned as Dublin hurling manager after Tipperary hammered Dublin into the ground in a quarter-final. He was doing colour commentary on RTÉ radio some weeks later when Limerick put up a heroic-but-doomed stand against Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final on a wet day in Croke Park.

Joanne Cantwell asked Daly what TJ Ryan, the Limerick manager, would be feeling on the sideline. Daly, as ever, didn’t hold back. TJ Ryan will be proud of his men, said Daly, and would not feel the scalding humiliation Daly himself felt when he watched Tipperary lay waste to Dublin from the Dublin sideline earlier in the summer.

Daly went on to talk about the welcome the Limerick players would get back home, and how everyone would congratulate them on how well they played and commiserate them on their bad luck. They don’t commiserate you on back luck in Kilkenny, mused Daly; if Kilkenny had let a chance to win slip as Limerick had done, they’d go off and pick a team that wouldn’t let that happen. No forgiveness.

That’s the difference, said Daly. If you want to be big-time you have to be ruthless. You have to be able to cut the beating heart right out of your best friend and throw it in the bin like it’s nothing more to you than a chewing-gum wrapper. Winning has a price and if you can’t pay it, you can’t have it.

Up Mayo.

Mayo's Deliverance

Boyler takes an O'Neill's

Size 5 into custody

Colm Boyle – your correspondent’s pick for the next Garda Commissioner, if Clarkie doesn’t want it – was interviewed after the defeat of Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final. Boyle was asked how Mayo were going to prepare for the All-Ireland Final. He seemed a little puzzled by the question – “just like we always do,” was Boyle's reply.

Some years ago, a great GAA man and friend of the blog remarked that Mayo’s best chance of winning their fourth All-Ireland was to go through a series of semi-final replays. So many replays, in fact, that they would have only one week to get ready for the final itself, and thus insulating themselves from the sort of anguish that seemed to descend on the county at these occasions.

There was a certain logic to that at the time, but events have moved on. When Mayo appeared in their first All-Ireland Final in 38 years in 1989 the county went bananas from the thrill of it all, and stayed bananas until that great team were felled once more by that terrible hoodoo that once lived at St Jarlath’s Park, Tuam some eight months later.

Those days are gone. There are children growing up in County Mayo currently for whom the road to Croker is as well travelled as the road to school. There is no novelty about Croker anymore. There is no novelty about winning in Croker anymore. For this iteration of the Mayo Senior Team, there really is only one last box to tick.

It was once the case that Mayo had two choices. Either consider the All-Ireland Final the Most Important Day Of Your Life, and seize up with nerves, or else consider it just another game, and then be stunned and run over by another team for whom it was, in fact, the most important day in their lives.

That doesn’t apply to Mayo 2017. Has there ever been a team as seasoned in the Big Time as Mayo who haven’t won an All-Ireland? Dublin are certainly a very great team, but Mayo aren’t quite chopped liver either. For this Mayo generation not to have won at least one All-Ireland already is astonishing. To think they will finish like Moses, within sight of the Promised Land but never crossing into it, is very difficult to believe.

It is right that Dublin are favourites on Sunday of course. But while Mayo haven’t beaten Dublin in quite some time, Mayo certainly have put it up to the navy-and-sky-blue machine over the years. What will it take to make the difference?

Dublin have two particular vulnerabilities. The first is, through no fault of their own, every game this summer has been a stroll in the park for them, with the exception of a gallant Carlow challenge. A team wiring it up to them will come as a shock, because you can’t think yourself up to a certain pitch of action. By the time you have to command your body to move up the gears to a challenge you weren't quite expecting, it may already be too late.

The other interesting thing is that Dublin’s greatest strength is their greatest weakness. All Dublin’s church is built on the rock of the Cluxton kickout. Every brick, every wall, every buttress. If that kickout can be disrupted, will the edifice stay together or will it all come crashing down?

Now these could all be thoughts in the air, of course. It may be that Tyrone were actually very good this year but that Dublin have evolved into a different football dimension. If so, it might get ugly for the green and red support as Dublin ascend further towards the summit of greatness and Mayo are yet again churned beneath their heels.

And then again, maybe Tyrone just didn’t have anything in the tank, and Dublin could be the ones shouting at each other around half-past four on Sunday, wondering what’s going on as a nightmare begins to take form into material reality before them. We’ll just have to wait and see. Up Mayo.

Aidan O'Shea, Fullback

Your correspondent is very confused by the response to Mayo playing Aidan O’Shea at fullback in the All-Ireland against Kerry on Sunday. This tweet from Matt Cooper is typical of the reaction:

Just home from Croke Park. Can only imagine what agony it must be to be a Mayo fan. But what a disaster the Aidan O'Shea experiment was.

— Matt Cooper (@cooper_m) August 20, 2017

“Disaster” is an interesting choice of words here. Any Mayo follower worth his or salt is able to list successive disasters and rate them out of ten going back to 1925 and the All-Ireland lost in a boardroom instead of on the pitch. Where does the playing Aidan O’Shea at fullback stand in this miserable pantheon?

Nowhere. Because it’s not like Mayo lost, is it? Mayo are still in the Championship. Mayo went into that game as 5/2 underdogs, and Matt Cooper is annoyed they didn’t beat Kerry out the gate? Extraordinary.

Malachy Clerkin of the Irish Times reckons 2-6 of Kerry’s 2-14 can be attributed to Donaghy. Maybe so, maybe not. It is, however, a fact that one single point is all Donaghy scored from play. Donaghy scored two goals in the All-Ireland Final of 2007 as Kerry whipped Cork 3-13 to 1-9, but the Cork fullback on that day went on to win an All-Star at fullback that same year.

So having Donaghy score two goals on you in the All-Ireland Final doesn’t cost you an All-Star but having him score one point on you is the reason Mayo didn’t beat Kerry on Sunday? Clear as mud, my Lord.

One of the reasons put forward for Mayo’s playing of Aidan O’Shea being a “disaster” is his incalculable loss out the field. And this doesn’t quite add up either.

Reader, how many previews of Sunday’s game hinged on Kerry’s terror at the havoc Aidan O’Shea was going to cause in among the Kerry backs? Contrast that not-very-high number with the number of times you’ve read about Mayo’s lack of forward quality.

It would seem that in the space of seventy minutes Mayo have gone from lacking a quality forward to having the damn things falling out of the trees – Andy Moran, Cillian O’Connor – the current top scorer in the Championship with 3-52 and counting, by the way – and now Aidan O’Shea, Destroyer of Worlds.

Remember all that stuff you read during the year about Aidan O’Shea being distracted by being on that Toughest Trade TV show, or playing basketball, or having selfies taken with children, or not looking up, or running with his head down and not letting it in? All in your imagination. Nobody ever thought, wrote or podcasted any such thing at all at all. In actual fact, the very sun itself rises from Aidan O’Shea’s not-at-all-fat-perfectly-athletic-in-fact bottom.

Are there questions that could be asked of the Mayo management? You betcha there are questions, but not one of them has anything to do with Aidan O’Shea playing fullback on Sunday. Not one. The very worst you could say about it is that the case is not proven, and if there are problems in the way Mayo set up it’ll take more than a straight swap between Aidan O’Shea and Donie Vaughan to solve them. Up Mayo.

The Ballad of Diarmuid Connolly

Jim Gavin Lambastes Pat Spillane and 'The Sunday Game.' Irish Times, June 25th, 2017.

The Ballad of Diarmuid Connolly

A great crowd had gathered, in Mercs and Land Rovers
The lawyers of Dublin would soon earn their fee
For inside in Central Council, a brave son of Dublin
Was tried for his summer before the C-C-C-C

Our gentle young Diarmuid, who plays hurling and football
Stood proud in the dock like a true Dublin man
While before him in judgement sat a big gang of culchies
Their minds already poisoned by Patrick Spillane

The legals and the eagles could do nothing for Dermo
Neither Clucko nor Fento nor the rest of our Champs
Now Dermot has nothing to do for the summer
But hang sponsored boots off the Five Lamps

God’s curse on you culchies, you cruel-hearted monsters,
Look what you’ve done to our football scene – oh!
But we’re not defeated, we’ll beat you in winter
Because our real hero is J Mourinho.

Mayo v Galway: The Lonesome Road to Salthill

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

The Mayo fan has no fear of frightful fiends. Why would he or she? What chills the Mayo soul in the lead-up to Mayo’s trip to face Galway in Salthill are entirely more rational and comprehensible than the slimy things in the slimy sea that so bothered the Ancient Mariner.

Billy Joe Padden, in a typically excellent preview of events in the Mayo News, outlined how Mayo can beat Galway. Billy would like to see a sweeper, ideally Kevin McLoughlin; he’d like Aidan O’Shea to start, ideally somewhere in the middle of the field; he’d like Andy Moran to finish the game, rather than start it, meaning Andy must come on as a sub, and above all Billy would like to see Mayo attack in numbers from the middle third.

Your correspondent sees the merit in every one of these arguments. My own personal contribution to Mayo’s Heroic Path to Immortality would be to play Aidan O’Shea at full-forward, rather than in midfield, but it’s not something I’d fall out with people over, least of all someone who knows so much more about these things than me, as Billy Joe does.

However. What does make me wonder just whether or not a frightful fiend doth close behind me tread is that we have seen no evidence at all of Mayo playing in the way Billy suggests all year, and there’s no reason to expect them to change their ways now.

There is a growing trend in GAA discussion that suggests anyone outside the team and its back-room team – henceforth referred to as “The Group” – has no business questioning any decisions made by The Group. Such questioning is, in fact, as near to treason as makes no difference.

Your correspondent takes an opposite view. Your correspondent thinks that the Mayo edifice – players, trainers, even the Board – have a duty to keep the fans reasonably informed of what’s going on with the county team. That does not seem unreasonable. It’s so reasonable, in fact, that Darragh Ó Sé made a case for it in yesterday’s Irish Times:

Supporters need to be led. They need to be given something to believe in. They need big players and big personalities showing them the way. Not giving them a reason to shrug their shoulders and decide that this is just how things are.

Where are the Mayo supporters being led right now? Your correspondent is more than eager to hear something, anything, from The Group in response to the following questions that have been rattling around my noggin:

• Why has Kevin McLoughlin spent the entire league at corner-forward if he’s going to play sweeper in the Championship?
• If McLoughin isn’t going to play sweeper, who is? Will Mayo play with a sweeper at all? And if not, why not?
• Why start Andy Moran when you need him most in the final twenty minutes?
• Why didn’t Robbie Hennelly start one home game in League? We all know David Clarke is the Number One choice but Robbie is still No 2 to a keeper who isn’t getting any younger and who has a history of knocks. Hennelly is going to catch Hell from the fans whenever he starts, so why not start him in the bleak midwinter and get it over with.

These aren’t the only questions that need asking, but they’ll do for now. If they’re not being asked aloud, people are certainly thinking them – by the time these things dawn on your correspondent they will have long ago dawned on better football people. And, like anything that’s supressed, the reaction will be greater the longer it has to stay underground.

If, God forbid, Galway should win in Salthill you can expect these questions to come bursting forth. You may say that’s unfair, but fair has nothing to do with it. The price of playing at the great height at which Mayo have played for the past six or seven years is that the fall is steeper.

And there is the awful truth that, for all the long and wonderful summers, Sam did not come home. Sam’s not coming home is more than a detail; Sam’s not coming home is why the depths of Mayo’s fear and trembling are so much greater than Galway because, even though Sam hasn’t been in Galway for sixteen years, that’s as the snapping of the fingers compared to sixty-six years, and counting.

Kildare never really came close to Galway in the Division 2 Final, but Kildare, with all due respect to them, weren’t really that great. Equally, Galway laid an egg the size of the Rock of Gibraltar in losing to Tipperary, something for which they did not get anywhere like the roasting a Mayo team would have got. Of if they did, they kept it quiet.

A seasoned Mayo team on the top of its game has nothing to fear from Galway. But a malfunctioning Mayo team, whose identity is slipping away for whatever reasons, will always walk in fear and dread. Let’s hope that walk to nowhere doesn’t start on Sunday. Up Mayo.

The Football Championship - A Pageant, Not a Product

The Championship: Philly seems to like it.

Positing the notion that a two-tier Championship is inevitable in Tuairisc earlier this month, the great Dara Ó Cinnéide wondered in passing how anyone could have the idea that the Championship could ever be a level playing field, with county demographics and traditions being what they are.

In light of this, it’s interesting to remember just why the back-door system was introduced in the first place. The original idea was that many teams were denied either the Championship itself or a good long summer run by the vagaries of chance, with the Cork footballers of the 1970s being the most frequently cited example. Had they not had the ill-luck to share Munster at the same time as the Kerry Golden Years team, who knows what could have happened?

And that’s why the back-door was introduced. Not to level the playing field for all, but in the hope that no more should a flower like that Cork team be born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as Mr Gray might have put it.

The back-door is with us sixteen years now, and the Law of Unintended Consequences has kicked in. The back-door Championship was introduced at a time that the economy was booming and the enforcement of the GAA’s amateur ethos grew increasingly token. So an initially-flawed idea – Cork were going to have face Kerry at some stage, after all – mutated into an even worse one and left us the mess we have today, where the GAA is having an existential crisis without properly realising it.

The whinging about the format of the Championship that (correctly) bothers Ó Cinnéide is based on the idea that the Championship is a sports entertainment product competing in a marketplace with other sports entertainment products like European Cup Rugby and the English Premier League. But it’s not. It’s something completely, uniquely different to that.

The things that make the Championship great cannot exist as part of a sports entertainment product. The Championship is written about as if the GAA exists to present a sports entertainment product. That is not why the GAA exists. The GAA exists to allow as many people as is practicable to play Gaelic Games as often as they wish. The inter-county Championship is a by-product of those thousands and thousands of games. The Championship is accident; the club games are essence.

This fundamental point is being lost in the hubbub as the GAA striates further between the haves and have-nots, and the separation will get even worse when the Super Eight series are introduced next year. The people running the GAA think the increased revenue will improve the Association. It will not. The increased money will destroy the Association by creating a professional division that will leave the ordinary club players behind. The ordinary club players and members who, after all, comprise the vast majority of the membership of the Association in the first place.

Under pressure of money, propaganda and carelessness the GAA is inching along a road where the needs of elite athletes will be prioritised over the needs of the thousands and thousands of fat bucks, slow bucks, clumsy bucks and hungover bucks who need and deserve the regular games that the GAA can provide them. The prioritisation should be the reverse.

Ewan McKenna, a man never afraid to speak truth to power, tweeted this after Tyrone walloped Derry yesterday:

Please, please, please GAA, bring in two-tier championship. After so much brilliant competitive sport yesterday, I can't watch this mismatch

— Ewan MacKenna (@EwanMacKenna) May 28, 2017

But McKenna misses the point. The GAA isn’t about providing yet another dish to the armchair fan’s sporting feast. The moment its raison d’etre becomes the production of a sports entertainment product it’s all over for the Association.

McKenna will have his two-tiered Championship then. There may be two or three Dublin teams, two or three Ulster, two Connacht, two Munster, two Leinster. They won’t be counties though – they’ll be Lions, or Kestrels, or Wolfhounds instead.

There will be transfers and big money signings. The media will get proper media access, where players will dutifully remark that today’s performance was no surprise as everybody in the unit knew that if they executed their process everything would come right on the day. Hurling will go the way of having grammatical Irish in programmes – a fond yet distant memory.

Is the situation doomed, then? Is there anything that can be done?

Happily, the cause is not yet lost and there is something that can be done. Three things, in fact.

Firstly, close the back door. The Championship is a knockout competition like Wimbledon or World Championship Snooker. If you lose, you lose. Get over it.

Secondly, the GAA needs to remember it’s an amateur organisation, and that means bread-and-water diets for those who’ve been spending like sailors on shore leave. Either a budget cap or, better again, revenue-sharing as in the NFL of the United States. No more lawyering up to escape bans and most of all, proper and painful sanctions for those who would flout these laws.

Finally, it’s perfectly possible to accommodate those who want a more equal inter-county playing field by reconfiguring the League. Three divisions, home and away, promotion and relegation of course, maybe playoffs for the crack. The better players in each county get to test themselves against teams of the same level. The great Kieran Shannon of the Examiner has made the point many times that reworking the League will do more to address the uneven playing inter-county playing field than a hundred tweaks to the Championship.

The League can be run off between January and June, and then July-August-September are free for the pageantry of the Championship. Sports scientists and protein-shake aficionados will know that the best team is the one that does best in the League, while the Championship retains its ancient glory and stays true to the notion that a commoner may challenge a king, and that one crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.

Mayo Championship Preview 2017

One of the perpetual debates that take place where two or more Mayo football folk gather is the one that looks back at the different teams that reached the All-Ireland Final in recent years, and wonders if that particular team let one slip away or if they were blessed to get there in the first place.

1996, above any, is seen as one that slipped away while 2004 vies with 2006 as years where Mayo were lucky to get as far as they got is the general feeling in the county.

Your correspondent, however, is nothing if not a difficult man and would argue that the 2004 and 2006 teams are under-rated, and it is the fact of their failing so badly on the big day that causes them to be judged more harshly than they deserved.

For instance, the 2004 campaign started in Castlebar with Galway going 1-3 to 0-0 up in the first ten minutes, and friends of your correspondent at the game contemplated turning to Buddhism, leaving all possessions behind and wandering the world with a begging bowl, anything but to have to watch any more of this.

But Mayo came back, helped in no small part by the arrival of David Brady from the subs’ bench, and later that summer put the All-Ireland Champions, Tyrone to the sword, again inspired by David Brady. You may cavil that Tyrone were still mourning their fallen hero, the great Cormac McAnallan, and of course that’s possible. But equally we’ve heard narratives going the other way too, that after a tragedy there was no way such-and-such a team were to be denied. Again, it’s one of these things that is only knowable in hindsight, and never at the time.

All of which is a long way of coming around to ask the critical contemporary question: did Mayo deserve their place in the All-Ireland Final last year, or where they lucky to get there?

Last year’s final was the reverse of the usual Mayo paradigm where Mayo play beautifully during the Championship and then blow up like the volcanic island of Krakatoa in the final. Mayo played like a drain all through last summer, only to rip off the disguise and give Dublin the fright of their lives in the Final. There was one Mayo supporter who could feel the hot tears of pride welling in his eyes looking Mayo’s defiance against Dublin. I know, because I was that Mayo supporter.

And then they lost, again, and then came this year’s League.

This year’s League wasn’t great. Armagh’s Oisin McConville was fairly withering in his assessment of Mayo on the Second Captains podcast after Dublin disembowelled Mayo on a Saturday night in March, and it was hard to argue cogently against any of the points he made. Where have Mayo got better? Why should we believe that Mayo are ready to that extra yard that has eluded them for so long?

The return of Galway to football’s top table casts a considerable shadow over the Mayo summer. Hopefully the team’s mind is focussed solely on Sligo, whom Mayo face this coming Sunday, but every supporter is thinking of that journey into the claustrophobic confines of Pearse Stadium, Salthill, three weeks later.

This isn’t the first time Mayo have gone to Salthill nervous after a poor League. James Horan’s second year in charge was such a time, when Mayo responded by buttering Galway up and down the seaside. But that was then and this is now. Mayo were young and hungry then; they’re not that anymore.

Mayo’s visit to the back-door last year was their best-ever campaign in the wilderness, but the difference between the front and back-door Championships for a team with Mayo’s miles on the clock can’t be underestimated.

In the front door, Mayo’s experience stands to them. Everyone they play knows who they are, has been watching them on TV for the past six years. There’s nothing the opposition can do that Mayo haven’t seen and aren’t ready for. If Mayo play a team with less experience, that’s what the young team will see.

But if Mayo play a team with less experience in the Qualifiers, what are the young lads thinking? It depends on who knocked the other team out. If they lost to a Division 4 team and half the panel are already in the States, they’re cooked.

However; if they’re Kildare, say, and they lost to Dublin, what have they got to lose? Dublin were always going to win but win just two more games are they’re back in Croker in high summer, exactly where they want to be! Isn’t that what we want boys? Isn’t that what all those long winter nights were about? Now come on and put these losers out of their misery!

Or whatever. Getting to Croker is a big deal for the up-and-coming team in a way it can’t be for a veteran team like Mayo. To be still playing football in August is an achievement for nearly every team in Ireland. It doesn’t mean diddly in Mayo. Sam or the Void for Mayo. There is no in between, and that’s a hard mark to make.

You may say that the Qualifiers did Mayo no harm last but there’s one more year’s mileage on the clock and fellas have to be wondering. Some of the selections and tactics have left supporters scratching their heads. If the team are scratching their heads too, Mayo are not long for the summer.

The Championship is about momentum. If Mayo beat Galway in Salthill, Mayo have some momentum.  They will still have to find an identity, but the League form will be on the summer breeze and another golden road opens up before them.

If Mayo lose or, worse, get hammered in Salthill, their momentum is zero and any young team with ambition will see them only as prey when Mayo are taken out of the pot. So; another light-hearted and carefree Championship in store for the sweet county Mayo, the finest county in Ireland.

2017 Football Championship Preview

To consider this year’s football Championship is to long for the open competition of the Big Four era four or five years ago. The truth of the 2017 Championship is that there is Dublin, and there is the rest.

The Champions reign far above anybody else in the firmament and no circumstance can be imagined in which any path to glory can bypass them.

Kerry’s recent win over Dublin in the National League Final suggests that Dublin’s great historical rival may be on the way back, but being on the way and having arrived are two different things.

Kerry are the aristocrats of football – how could they not be? – and that made the artisanal nature of their game against Dublin so strange. One does not expect to see royalty with the shirt off, down in a hole, digging, but that’s exactly what Kerry did to do something, anything, to keep up with Dublin.

And more luck to them. Kerry people love to talk about beautiful football but that’s just blather for the tourists on the jaunting cars around Killarney. Kerry know that the only beauty is in winning, and whether that winning is done with the rapier or the broadsword is very much a secondary detail.

If Kerry and Dublin win Munster and Leinster – and goodness, what a shock it would be if they didn’t – they are not due to meet until the final and such a final would be a game everybody in the country could look forward to. But the chances of Kerry putting another one over on Dublin are slim.

A rare sight in contemporary football was to be seen in the League Final as Dublin’s Cian O’Sullivan, emperor of the Dublin defence, was utterly unable to figure out just what was going on. Kerry had found a way to get past him and for once O’Sullivan had little impact on a game. But what will Kerry do the next time, now O’Sullivan and Dublin are forewarned?

Jim Gavin gets insufficient credit for his tactical nous – Dublin have so many players the idea exists that all a manager has to do is roll them a ball and let them get on with it. But Gavin proved his worth in the All-Ireland replay. Gavin made three tactical changes for the replay, all of which worked. His opposite number made only one, and that blew up in Stephen Rochford’s face. Game, set and match, Gavin.

While Kerry are not in Dublin’s league, is anyone else in Kerry’s? It’s a hard case to make. For a time, it looked like Mickey Harte was about to do what only Seán Boylan has done, and build All-Ireland teams from two different generations. Tyrone faced Kerry in the 2015 semi-final and it is a fact that the Kerrymen were scared of a Tyrone returned to their opening-years-of-the-century glory – you could sense the fear in the players before the game, and the sheer relief afterwards among the Kerry support.

But the new model Tyrone lack the score-taking ability of their forebears and you can’t win games of Gaelic football if you can’t take your scores.

Donegal are still a threat, but that threat is lessening. There are hints of trouble in the camp and, while Michael Murphy is the best pound-for-pound footballer in Ireland, we are reminded of the remarks of Doctor Henry “Indiana” Jones, Junior, to Marian Ravenwood in their desperate flight from Egypt aboard the good ship Batu Wind – it ain’t the years, honey, it’s the mileage.

Galway were impressive in their win over Kildare in the National League Division 2 Final. They have forwards with that little bit of cut about them, and the day when Galway were too posh to press in defence are long gone. It’s been a long, long time since anyone outside the top flight won the All-Ireland however, and it’s hard to see Galway doing it this year for that reason. Seasoning counts in modern football.

For those who enjoy a longshot bet, I would consider Monaghan at 40/1. Galway are a shorter price even though Monaghan are now veterans of Division 1 and Galway haven’t played in the top league in years – this is the benefit of being glamorous, which Monaghan never have been. But if Sam is to go further than Dublin – and it’d be a really big surprise if he does – Monaghan at 40/1 looks the value bet to me.

Mayo? Tomorrow, friends, tomorrow. What’s one more day in a sixty-six year wait?

Mayo Post-Mortem #65 - Misadventure

It has been said that one of the keys to winning is not to beat yourself. The Mayo management team went against that cardinal rule in the All-Ireland Final replay, and paid the inevitable price.

Would Mayo have won if David Clarke had started in goals ahead of Robbie Hennelly? We’ll never know. But it is clear that while Stephen Rochford won the sideline battle in the drawn game, Jim Gavin beat him all ends up in the replay.

The theory advanced by Rochford himself for the change of goalkeeper was that Dublin’s winning of turnovers off kickouts in the final quarter of the drawn game was significant. That’s debatable. What’s not debatable is that the cure was worse than the disease and now Mayo have yet another year to lick their wounds and dream of the top table.

Gavin’s analysis of and reaction to the drawn game was much better than Rochford’s. Gavin realised that the clock just doesn’t go backwards, and Bernard Brogan and Michael Dara MacAuley, corner-stones of this Dublin side, are now past their prime. So Gavin dropped both, knowing that they could contribute when they came on. And so it came to pass.

In his selection of Mick Fitzsimons, Gavin also found a man to do what many have tried and failed to do all summer – shut down Andy Moran. In the winter of his career, Moran has been the centerpiece of the Mayo attack. Moran was the only Mayo full-forward to score from play on Saturday but he was nothing like as influential as he had been in the middle of the summer and, without that influence, the Mayo attack withered on the vine.

So credit Gavin, in many ways. But it would not serve history to anoint Dublin a superteam like Kerry in the ‘seventies or Down or Galway in the ‘sixties, forces that could not be denied. Dublin were never able to put Mayo away, even after Mayo had gifted them two goals in the drawn game and 1-4 in the replay. A catastrophic error was made in Mayo’s selection, and there is no getting around that.

But it’s done and the clock doesn’t go back. The Mayo News tweeted that Cillian O’Connor told the Mayo post-match banquet last night that the future is bright and he’s not wrong. Cillian O’Connor himself is only 24 years old. Diarmuid O’Connor is 21. Aidan O’Shea is 26. The age profile of the team is very good.

This isn’t so much a golden as a platinum generation of Mayo footballers. That’s why the mutiny, ugly though it was, was worthwhile, and that’s why it’s legitimate to be as frank about where this All-Ireland Final was lost as we can be.

It’s important that the management be as honest as they can be as they assess this year and plan for next. Insofar as can be established, because very little news escapes the camp, the priority of the year has been defence. This is one of the reasons that Mayo looked so poor against Kildare, Westmeath and Tipperary – they were not set up to attack but to defend, and to take such scores as might accrue.

Part of this has to do with the nostrum that Mayo’s failure to win All-Irelands having appeared in so many finals was down to two fatal flaws – the absence of a “marquee forward,” and a chronic inability to defend goals.

Malachy Clerkin of the Irish Times was good enough to list all the goals that Mayo conceded in recent big games, going back to the 2012 All-Ireland final. And that’s all grand; goals have certainly been conceded. But reader, every other team concedes goals too.

The concession of goals happens in football. The fact you can score goals and points in football is one of the things that makes it great. What is important in the analysis is whether those goals Mayo conceded could have been defended.

It has become generally accepted that James Horan erred in his defensive setup to allow Michael Murphy to score his goal in the 2012 Final. But it’s not like Michael Murphy is an ordinary footballer. It must be accepted that an exceptional talent like Murphy can’t be stopped and can only be contained.

So Michel Murphy scored a goal; credit Murphy. That doesn’t mean the Mayo defence is Swiss cheese and needs seven men back there instead of six. The vim that Kevin McLoughlin added to the Mayo attack when he moved up the field suggests that Mayo were at a double-loss in playing McLoughlin as a sweeper.

These are the questions that the Mayo management have to ask themselves in the long winter ahead. What do we know, really? Is what we think true, really true? If the Mayo defence is so leaky, how did the team ge to six straight All-Ireland semi-finals, winning three and drawing two? If the Mayo attack is so threadbare, how did Mayo get to six straight All-Ireland semi-finals, winning three and drawing two?

These are sums that don’t add up. And here’s another: if Dublin are the team of the decade, what are Mayo? No team matches up against Dublin better than Mayo. No team seems to get under Dublin’s skin as much, to throw them out of their rhythm as much. That would suggest that Mayo are the second best team in Ireland.

But Dublin have won four All-Irelands in the past six years. Mayo have won no All-Irelands in sixty-five years. In our system, that means that Mayo are nowhere. To be in the conversation, you have to take Sam home. When Mayo win the All-Ireland, then we can have the conversation. Until then, there isn’t a conversation to be had.

That conversation will start at about five or half-past five on September 17th next year. Up Mayo.

The Proposed New Championship Structure is a GPA Trojan Horse

The GAA announced a new partnership deal with the GPA on July 25th of this year. Ten days later, the GAA announced an unexpected new proposal to reform the football Championship that will go before next year’s Congress and, if accepted, will start in 2018.

It may be that these events are simply a co-incidence. It may be that the money was simply resting in Father Crilly’s account. Either requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

The Irish ability to moan about the inevitable is a sad fault in the national psyche. It was this school of constant moaning about not being able to time Uncle Timmy’s return from beyond in America that lead to this A/B designation in the qualifiers, and inadvertently killed the best thing that fifteen years of the Qualifiers have given us – that extraordinary Gaelic football carnival that was the August Bank Holiday weekend.

All four quarter-finals being played over the August Bank Holiday weekend was like all the gunfighters arriving in Dodge City at the same time and you wouldn’t know who would be left standing until the smoke cleared.

That sense of occasion has been lessened by the quarter-finals now being spread over two days, even though neither Uncle Timmy nor the man in the moon knows if his team is in the A or B bracket, and Uncle Timmy as wise as ever he was in planning his return to the green isle of Erin.

Now the Association has come up with this proposal to insert a round-robin style playoff at what was the quarter-final stage, where the four provincial winners and the four survivors of the qualifiers will play each other, and the top four then go on to contest the semi-finals.

Ostensibly, this will create more games between the better teams, and free up time in the calendar to let counties properly organize their club Championships.

But wait – if the “better” teams are playing in this round-robin thing, what’s everybody else up to?

Since its inception, the mission of the GPA has been to exalt the county player as a special being within the Association. They have drawn in their horns in that regard in recent years, but leopards don’t generally change their spots. Professionalism has always been the GPA’s aim, and if they couldn’t swing it by hook they are now attempting to swing it by crook.

The Examiner’s excellent Kieran Shannon has repeatedly pointed out that one of the big causes of separation in the GAA between haves and have-nots is that there are only eight teams playing in Division 1 of the League. They get better by playing each other and, when a Division 1 team plays a team from a lower Division, the lower Division team doesn’t know what hit them until it’s all far too late. There are exceptions, but that’s generally how it works.

Now, consider that advantage coupled with the existence of a mini-Division 1 played in the best weather in which to play football, with 24 other counties looking on like Moses looking at the Promised Land, knowing that he can never go there.

Give it five years and the counties currently struggling to keep players at home long enough to play in the provincial Championships before high-tailing it to the States will be broken at last. In the meantime the elite will have become even more deeply embedded and the separation will be clear even to the dullest of minds.

It will be only logical, then, for some top players from the second-class counties to look to moving to a first-class county rather than go to the States – home birds, people who can't live without the Kerr Pinks, and so on - and that can be sorted out. It’s been done before, and after a while it will become a well-worn path.

Then the GAA will be in the same situation as rugby – eight professional teams where rugby has four, while the others continue on as before, but far, far away from the limelight and with no chance of a day in the sun again.

So far we haven’t heard how this Championship restructure idea came about, but your correspondent is willing to bet his best pair of shoes that it started with the GPA. Delegates at next year’s Congress will want to perform due diligence on this proposal, and beware of the GPA bearing gifts. Gift horses seldom work out for cities under siege.

Suggested Changes to the Rules of Gaelic Football

Gaelic football has become impossible to referee. The nature of the game as reflected in the rulebook is at odds with the game as it’s played in reality. The games are under more scrutiny than every before, with greater levels of TV coverage, better cameras, social media and the rest. Therefore, the rules must change to both keep up with the times and to secure the fundamental nature of the game, lest it turn into some sort of poor man’s rugby league.

I expect precisely none of these rules to ever be implemented, as the GAA’s bureaucracy is up there with the Vatican’s, but still. It’s easy to mouth off about what’s wrong. These are my suggestions on how to put things right. Some are amendments to the playing rules, some to the administration of the competitions. Here we go.

Bring in the Australian Rules Tackle
There are two tackles in Gaelic football – slapping the ball from the hands of the ball-carrier, and a shoulder-to-shoulder contact. Pulling a jersey, pushing in the back, striking or attempting to strike an opposing player are all fouls of increasing levels of severity.

However. Modern football, and I suspect historical football, would look like ballroom dancing if the rules against pushing, pulling and – sorry, Father – striking were enforced. Those laws are unenforceable and therefore should be repealed.

An obvious successor is the tackle as defined in Australian Rules. Contact anywhere between the knees the shoulders, the ball-carrier must lawfully release (that is to say, deliver a foot or a handpass) or else it’s a foul and possession is handed over.

Simple, easy to understand and enforceable. No slobbering about someone not being that sort of player or not really meaning it.

Replace the Black Card with a Sin Bin
Nobody knows what a black-card offense is. Admit the whole idea of the black card was a mistake, drop it and move on. Go back to the idea of the ten-minute sin bin a la rugby for persistent and cynical fouling. Besides; we’ll need the bin again later.

End Appeals to the CCCC
The consistent appeals to the CCCC of the most blatant fouls and, worse, the CCCC overturning the original decisions make a joke of the disciplinary process. Let counties take their medicine. Appoint a Discipline Czar or Star Chamber to review fouls to ensure justice but let his or their word be law and get on with it.

The Czar or Star Chamber should also be empowered to review game footage and hand out bans for events not seen by the referee but seen by everyone in Ireland through TV, social media and the rest. Head-in-the-sand attitudes won’t wash in the 21st Century.

Distribute Money Equally Among Counties
Some counties’ ability to fund-raise is stronger than others. This occurs for different reasons, but it’s chiefly to do with accidents of population. Wouldn’t it make sense for all such monies raised to be distributed equally, or at least to make some sort of effort at revenue sharing?

Building a super team is no good if there’s nobody left for the super team to play against. If the avaricious billionaire owners of American Football’s NFL can manage revenue sharing, then surely the amateur sportspeople of the Gaelic Athletic Association should be able to take a stab at it?

Allow Fighting in Limited Circumstances, à la the NHL

Professional ice hockey, as played in the National Hockey League of the USA and Canada, is the only non-combat sport I can think of in which fighting is tolerated. It’s not strictly legal – if a fight breaks out, the fighters end up in the sin-bin for their troubles – but it is indulged.

The reason is because hockey is a dangerous game, and NHL teams play each other a lot. Bad blood can fester, and things can get out of control. And the idea has evolved that having players drop their gloves and fight it out releases pressure that, if not otherwise released, would result in much more dangerous play that would see body checks to knees and heads that are career- and life-threatening. The NHL sees fighting as the lesser of potential evils.

The evil that faces Gaelic games isn’t to do with noxious rivalries. There are some counties that play dirty against each other, but it’s tolerable.

What isn’t tolerable is the evolution of a particularly dirty type of sledging. It’s surely part of any game to tease your opponent to see if you can put him off his game, but social codes of the past meant that there was a line drawn.

Modern social codes have shattered all societal boundaries, and players have to listen to up to seventy minutes of the most vile abuse, always knowing that the abuser will receive no punishment for it.

It would be nice if sure abuse were reported to the Discipline Czar are mentioned earlier and he could take care of it, but how could that be enforced? All evidence would be hearsay.

Therefore, take a lesson from hockey. If your man says something nasty about your mother, a slap to the chops may cause him to think again. It’s possible the man will slap back, but that’s ok. The GPA always tell us what elite athletes play inter-county now. An exchange of slaps shouldn’t do too much damage until the referee turns up.

Up until now, striking or attempting to strike has been a theoretical sending-off offence in the GAA. In this case, five or ten minutes in the bin for both parties and the game continues on as usual. If nothing else, it should motivate the funny boys to work harder on their material.