Reform the League, not the Championship

Whisht, a minute now, would ye whisht!

Conversations about remaking the Championship are as boring as ones about the gap between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in rugby, and about equally pointless. This hasn’t put an end to them, of course. John Fogarty reported in yesterday's Examiner that there are eighteen – 18! – proposals to remake the Championship on their way to Central Council this very winter.

Here are some facts on which all concerned should reflect. The Championship will always be unequal for as long as only Mayomen can play for Mayo, Galwaymen for Galway, and so on. If that rule ever changes, whatever comes after will not be the Championship, or the GAA, any more. It will be something else, and the one cogent and successful expression of nationalism and patriotism since the 1916 Rising will be lost with all the others.

The inequality of the Championship used to be compensated by the fact it was a knockout competition. A lesser county may have no hope of an All-Ireland but it could certainly deny an All-Ireland to its bigshot neighbour. There was a certain joy in that – the Germans do not have a freehold on schadenfreude, after all. There’s nothing about schadenfreude you can’t tell a nation of begrudgers.

Beating your neighbour will always count for more than beating someone drawn out of a hat, whose county-people you don’t know, with whom you didn’t go to school or college, don’t meet at work, and all the rest of it. There can only be one winner every year, but the Championship was comprised of so many smaller Championships, between Laois and Offaly, between Galway and Mayo, between Derry and Tyrone.

That small compensation of softening a few bigshots’ coughs is denied the lesser counties by the back-door system. The story that the back door was there to favour small counties was only ever a lie. Laws, as a friend of the blog likes to remark, were never made for the poor.

However. The problem of inequality among counties was addressed in what your correspondent can only describe as a flash of genius from Kieran Shannon in an Examiner column of a few weeks ago. Shannon's simple proposal should be the Number One item on the bill for central council deliberations instead of the Champions-League knit-one, purl-two around the house and mind the dresser alternatives being proposed.

There are many reasons for the gap between haves and have-nots, most of them down to tradition, but the problem has become worse in recent years. It’s become worse because best teams play each other every spring in the National League, each honing their skills against the others. Other counties don’t get a look in at that highest level of football and then, when they do run into it in the Championship, they get destroyed without ever knowing what hit them.

James Horan, who has proved excellent in his second life as a pundit, remarked on Newstalk during the summer about how much he and Mayo learned from every single Division 1 game that they played. It is unfair that Mayo and others should have access to so much tutoring and other counties should not. Which is where Kieran Shannon’s plan comes in.

Shannon’s simple suggestion is that the League return to the 1A and 1B format. The current Division 1 and 2 can populate Divisions 1A and 1B, with the teams that finished first, third, fifth and seventh in Divisions 1 and 2 going into 1A and those who finished second, fourth, sixth and eighth going to 1B, and the same procedure used for filling 2A and 2B from Divisions 3 and 4.

The point here is that while the Championship structure is set in stone, the League is always open to reconstitution. So, instead of trying to change what you can’t, people concerned with inequality in the Championship should concern themselves with what they can change – the League.

There would be some kinks to iron out over who was promoted or relegated, and about maintaining the balance between the A and B sections of the divisions, but these are small details. The former Division 1 teams now only get half the benefit they used to get from their League games, while the Division 2 teams get to test themselves against the big guns and learn a thing or two before it’s time to load the live ammunition in summer.

People have entrenched views on the Championship while the League, once a competition of prestige, is now a red-haired stepchild to be kicked around the place. A simple change would benefit everybody, and there would be no thumps or spilled pints during the debate. Please note, Central Council.

Mayo's Civil War

Civil wars can never be won. They can only be ended. The sooner they are ended, the less damage they do. All sides in the current Mayo GAA dispute should come to terms with this fact as quickly as they can.

The very fact a civil war has broken out is appalling; for positions to become entrenched and a long campaign to break out would catapult the county out of the lofty company it’s become so accustomed to keeping, and back to the days of being on the business end of a twenty-point whipping from Cork or a one-point massacre at the hands of Leitrim.

All minds must now concentrate on finding a solution. It is a bizarre thing to say, but the rights and wrongs of the thing don’t really matter now. The dispute must be ended as quickly as possible. And the quickest end to the dispute would be for the current management to resign and for James Horan to return for one more swing on the merry-go-round.

If Mayo win their fourth All-Ireland title in 2016, well and good. But while Horan and the team are trying to do that, the County Board should be spending its time properly planning the succession. If Mayo don’t win the All-Ireland, the team as we’ve known it over the past five years is shattered, and someone totally new is going to have start from Square One again.

But at least the County Board will have a year to make their plans for that contingency. What they can’t do, under any circumstances, is let the current situation fester, unresolved.

There is a meeting tonight. Some speculate it’ll be like the Donnybrook Fairs of the 18th Century, and that’s possible. God knows there’s enough resentment being built up, and no small amount of tub-thumbing instead of reasoned calm. But if ever there were a day to leave egos outside the room it’s today.

Mayo have been so close to Sam in recent years they can nearly smell the silver polish. Everybody knows that. Football people in Mayo all know the pall that hangs over the county of being the eternal bridesmaids on the third Sunday. Once that hoodoo is broken, football is liberated in Mayo and a tradition can be built to rival any county’s.

But what people are allowing themselves to forget is that a team is as delicate a creature as a thoroughbred racehorse, and just as easily spooked. John O’Mahony liked to quip that the opportunity of a lifetime only lasts as long as the lifetime of the opportunity. Cillian O’Connor and Aidan O’Shea are young men, but they have a lot of miles on the clock. Kevin McLoughlin has played in fifty of Mayo’s last fifty-one games, between League and Championship. That’s a rate of attrition that can’t last.

Nobody knows this more than the players. And so they seem to have decided that if die they must, they will die with their boots on. It’s not the done thing to wash dirty linen in public, but in a county whose bottle and appetite for battle has often being questioned down the year, the current team are standing up to be counted, and they have to be respected for that.

I wish the delegates well tonight. I know that theirs is no easy task, and I do not envy them it. And while tempers run high, the delegates should remember this: if Saipan happened tomorrow, Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane would be able to settle their differences inside half an hour. Thirteen years on, each understands the other’s position in a way that they didn’t during that time. The pity of it is that it’s thirteen years too late.

Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy have the rest of their lives to think of what might have been. I don’t wish that on the current Mayo senior panel, the current management, past management or anyone involved in the dispute.

Civil wars can’t be won. They can only be ended, and they have to be ended as quickly as possible. Mayo, God help us.

What's Another Year, Mayo?

For all the good-natured teasing other counties like to indulge in when it comes to the County Mayo, it is only fair to acknowledge that there’s a strong line of realistic fatalism that runs through Mayo people’s devotion to and enthusiastic promotion of the county team.

This was at its most noticeable at the first of the Mayo GAA Blog meetups in Bowe’s of Fleet Street, Dublin 2, the night before Mayo lost to Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final of 2011. Nobody in that bar thought that Mayo had a prayer the following day, and they were fine with that. After getting sliced up in Sligo and Longford the year before, Mayo people were content to be still alive in August.

Which is why, perhaps, the county isn’t tearing itself apart as the Championship looms (“looming,” of course, is a relative concept; the Championship proper started a fortnight ago when Galway played New York, while Mayo won’t make their debut until another month from now, by which time Galway will have played two Championship games. But there it is). The people of Mayo have drank deep and well during the Horan years. If 2015 is to be a down year, then so be it. Country people can relate to the notion of seasons.

Now that the pressure has come on Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly, the two men tasked with not only living up to Horan’s standards but taking the team that one step further, the prospect of a down year has not been as apocalyptic as we thought it might be.

The team has a puncher’s chance against anyone, of course. Any team with Aidan O’Shea and Cillian O’Connor among its ranks will always have a puncher’s chance against anybody. But the people of Mayo have seen enough of thoroughbred football in recent times to know that the team isn’t quite that this year.

It can’t be repeated too often that winning a fourth All-Ireland only requires Mayo to be one point or more better than anyone else that year, as opposed to having to measure themselves against some sort of eternal Platonic metric of football greatness. And if, as has been noted, the contenders aren’t quite battering down the door this year, that still doesn’t mean that Mayo 2015 will be good enough. Besides; the evidence of history is that whenever a “soft” Sam has been there to be won, it’s Kerry who weren’t too proud to stoop and pick it up for the collection.

People will remember a similar foreboding before the trip to Salthill two years ago next week, when Mayo battered Galway as that proud county have seldom been battered before. But this year feels different, somehow.

Cillian O’Connor was present in 2013, for starters. Evan Regan, the long-heralded Sorcerer’s Apprentice, continues to be blighted by injury and these two men’s absence leaves the Mayo attack looking like men taking bows and arrows to a gunfight.

Would a loss in Connacht, either in Salthill or later, be the end of the world? Not necessarily. There are those who believe a time in the shadows of the Qualifiers, bursting forth to glorious life in Croke Park at harvest time, could be the ideal route for Mayo. The Qualifier Odyssey would give the group a badly-needed opportunity to gel and pull themselves together.

But here’s the rub. It’s not like these men are strangers. It’s not like they’ve just met. Whatever is keeping Mayo from performing at the level of which they’re capable, it’s not because they’ve just met each other.

And so we have it. Short of a miracle, the 1951 team have one more year to wait, at least. As for Mayo, if they don’t win the All-Ireland this year, the powers-that-be have to decide if an All-Ireland is still in the current group – the majority of whom are in their prime, of course – or if the bus has left the station. If there is an All-Ireland in this group, it won’t keep. It’s up to the Board then to decide what went wrong this year and what can be done to put it right. Before it’s too late.

Mayo Championship Preview 2014

A hallmark of what we may call Horan football is a commitment to defense. It was a feature of his Ballintubber teams, and it’s a feature that continued at county level. If you scored on Mayo, you earned it.

How odd, then, that in Horan’s fourth year in charge, Mayo conceded an average of two goals over their eight League games. Those sixteen goals include three against fourteen-man Dublin and two against fourteen-man Derry. Why are Mayo leaking goals? What’s behind it?

The theories are many. Some said it was the absence of Keith Higgins from his usual station. Some said it was the absence of David Clarke, or Chris Barrett, or Tom Cunniffe. Some said the attacking half-backs leave the full-back line too exposed, and more said it was just an All-Ireland hangover and everything would be fine once the summer came.

But An Spailpín’s mind keeps going back to St Conleth’s Park, that tight little bandbox of a pitch tucked in off the main street in Newbridge, where Mayo played Kildare in the first round of the National League this year. Aidan O’Shea made a clumsy challenge about twenty minutes in, and was served a black card and his marching orders in consequence.

It was a bit harsh and it didn’t seem that big a deal at the time. But there is a thing called the butterfly effect, where something very small can amplify to suddenly become catastrophic. Is it possible that black card awarded to Aidan O’Shea is such a trigger?

With the greatest respect to the man, people automatically assumed that the black card was introduced for the Ryan McMenamins of this world, the hardy wee men who will happily chew broken glass before letting their man score.

But on that cold day in Kildare, it wasn’t a Ricey-esque bit of a boyo that got the line. It was one of the most recognisable and stylish players in the country. And when that happened, did the Mayo players subconsciously think: hold on. I have to watch myself here, or else I’m off and someone of lesser ability than me is on, meaning I’m letting the team down?

Could that explain the suddenly leaky defence? The subconscious is an unruly beast. It can betray you when you least expect it, and without you even knowing about the betrayal until afterwards, if ever.

These are the shifting sands that Mayo must navigate as, once more, they try to pull themselves together for another tilt at the windmill. How do they play defence? Can they return to the full-blooded commitment of last year, epitomised by Tom Cunniffe’s famous hit on Peter Harte?

Mayo are in big trouble if they can’t, because there are few signs that they will be able to win any shootouts. The perpetual knock on Mayo forwards is easy shorthand for lazy journalists. Forwards are a team within a team, and teams can amount to more or less than the sum of their parts. Right now, Mayo are less and the clock is ticking on James Horan to find out why that is.

Nobody wants to hear whining at the time, not least when you lose to Dublin’s greatest team since the days of Sean Doherty, Brian Mullins, Jimmy Keaveney and the rest, but it is a fact that Mayo were bitterly unlucky in the All-Ireland Final last year.

Andy Moran was a risk in one corner after such a long layoff from injury, while Cillian O’Connor, had he been anyone else at all, would have sat this one out too because of his injured shoulder. Add in Alan Freeman’s sickness during the week of the final and James Horan was looking at three empty shirts where a full-forward line ought to be. That Mayo came within a point of Dublin at all was a tremendous achievement.

Horan’s chief mission in the League was to fix that problem, and make the Mayo forwards into a unit that is more than the sum of their parts – this, before the backs started devolving, as outlined already.

But the longer the League went on, the less comfortable Keith Higgins seemed at centre-half forward. Adam Gallagher flared brightly on the wing, and then disappeared. Cathal Carolan got injured. People began to question Alan Freeman. The midfield, strong to begin with, has been improved by the return of Tom Parsons and the excellent form of Jason Gibbons, surely Mayo’s player of the League. But fore and aft of the midfield, there are causes for serious concern.

And yet, with all that said, Mayo are still in a better position than the majority of teams in the Championship. They have experience of winning on the great stage, and are only a small tweak away of suddenly finding the accelerator again. Even now, as I type, barmats are being stripped and the bare sides covered with complex diagrams of forward interplay, drawn by the football people of the heather county as they exchanged theories and formations.

The work is being done, but will it be enough? Who knows? Mayo play the winners of Roscommon and Leitrim in the Connacht semi-final, which will be by no means a gimme. And although Mayo’s record in and aptitude for the Qualifiers is awful, maybe a loss to the winners of Roscommon and Leitrim would be no bad thing. It would give Horan a bit more room for further experimentation than a Connacht Final, where there is no room for experimentation at all.

Sligo have never not risen at the prospect of a Connacht Final and, while Galway appear to be struggling currently, they are not to be trusted even if their fifteen men limped onto the Connacht Final field of glory wearing bandages, ringing bells and shouting “unclean! unclean!” Since 1998, no sensible Mayo person will ever knowingly under-estimate the heron-chokers. They simply can’t be trusted.

But who knows what will happen, really? Championship exists on a different plane to the League, and always has. Were one of the surfeit of current midfielders to go inside as Kieran Donaghy did for Kerry in 2006, could that work the oracle? Or how about two of them, as Donaghy teamed up with Tommy Walsh in the second half of the last decade?

All the possibilities are there, and Horan has the players. Whether he can find the right combination before running out of road is, as ever, the never-ending question. Up Mayo.

Hats

First published in the Western People on Monday.

James Horan’s chief goal in life is to return the County Mayo to All-Ireland glory. We all know that. But wouldn’t it be something if, as a happy accident of his mission, he were to return the hat to men’s fashion as well?

Horan is seldom seen without a hat. We presume he takes it off when he goes to Mass, or lifts it gallantly when passing a lady on the street, but otherwise the man is seldom seen without a lid of some kind.

In the good old summertime, Horan favours the baseball cap. In the winter, the sensible woolly hat. For his first few years, he wore a Mayo County Board team gear hat during League games, but the Sunday before last Horan debuted a new one, a bluey-grey sort of an effort not unlike the bluey-grey skies under which we have to labour in this wet first month of spring. And more luck to him.

The hat has been out of fashion for men for so long that the language no longer distinguishes between a hat and cap, as it once did. Now, anything you can wear on your head is called a hat, no matter if it’s a hand-made silk topper or a some sort of beanie with a little propeller on the top.

Even though they’ve been unfashionable for quite some time, some men have to wear hats for their own protection and well-being. This depends, like so much in Ireland, on the weather. A man needs his hat to keep the rain off at this time of year, but also to protect himself from the sun on those odd days when it deigns to shine.

The need for a hat on a sunny day may not always be obvious, and the penny may not drop until a man is sufficiently old to realise that he has changed with the years. Your correspondent can’t speak for everyone, but I was genuinely mystified for years when, the Monday after going to watch Mayo in Championship games, I would wake up with the crown of my head looking like that red spot in the centre of a non-stick frying pan.

Eventually, I took a proper look at myself in the mirror and realised that my hairline was not where I thought it was. It had retreated back across my pate like King James fleeing the Boyne, leaving the land undefended in the face of the big Orange man in the sky.

I’ve by jabbers worn a hat since, and over the years have amassed something of a selection. This is something to be recommended to the gentleman who needs to buy a hat but can’t make up his mind which hat he needs. There is a quick answer to him – buy several, and wear them as the occasion demands.

For instance, when those bitter winds howl in off the Atlantic, it is the foolish man who goes out of doors without his woolly hat pulled down tight over his ears. They call those hats toques (pronounced “tooks”) in Canada and if anyone should know about protecting themselves from the cold it’s the Canadians. The Great North is a beautiful country, but ludicrously cold for the majority of the year.

Gentlemen may be tempted to buy a chullo hat, having seen them in the shops or worn by angst-ridden musicians on the BBC. It’s best to resist the temptation.

Although it has a strange name, the chullo is becoming quite common winter headwear in Ireland. The chullo is a hat made from llama wool like that of the standard woolly hat, except that it’s pointier, almost like the business end of a bullet, and has two ear-flaps hanging down from the side, not like a bullet at all.

The chullo is originally worn by the people of Andes mountains in South America and more luck to them, but no man has ever worn one of those things at an elevation of fifteen thousand feet or lower without looking like the world’s most hopeless eejit.

Even Paddington Bear himself, a style icon for generations and native of Peru wherein the chullo is commonly worn, thought better of wearing such a thing when sent to London by his Aunt Lucy. Paddington styled himself in a practical sou’wester, a broad-brimmed floppy hat popular with sailors of the squally seas, paired with a practical blue duffel coat that always had a marmalade sandwich in the pocket, in case of emergencies. The diametric opposite of a fool, Paddington Bear.

Years ago, it was said that headgear was a sign of social class. The working man wore a flat tweet cap, the professional a natty trilby or homberg hat, while respectable upper classes wore bowler hats in the daytime and top hats by night. But social classes are seldom so simply identified.

Irish tough guys in the eastern US cities of the late nineteenth century favoured the bowler hat (called a derby in the USA) – if you look closely at Notre Dame’s famous fighting Irishman symbol, you’ll see it’s a bowler he’s wearing.

Also, the bowler hat was quite popular with the faction fighters at home in the earlier part of that century. This was less so for reasons of fashion, but for more practical considerations. The bowler is somewhat stiff to begin with but at the faction fights it was also often stuffed with straw to make a kind of helmet, the better to resist whacking shillelaghs with which the heavy work was done on the field of honour.

Stuck in the middle of a faction fight, a man might have been throttled by the flaps of his chullo, or have his trilby crushed before the blackthorn as the frog before the harrow, but the well-stuffed bowler could keep him alive until he got the price of the trip to America. One of James Horan’s most favoured summertime hats is that of the New York Yankees baseball team; it’s nice to think it a serendipitous tribute to those Fighting Irishmen who helped to build America.

Mayo Championship Preview 2013

One of those red digital display countdown clocks, like the ones you see in the movies, has been running in every Mayo head since about half-eight or nine o’clock on the third Sunday of September last year. The five stages of grief having been squeezed into three hours by virtue of long and bitter practice, thoughts then turned to Championship 2013, and Revenge. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Those clocks are down to single digits now, as Mayo’s early outing at the seaside against Galway approaches. Since the draw was made in October last year, Sunday has been a green-and-red letter day. Win in Salthill, and the Mayo bandwagon is back on the road. Lose, and James Horan needs to be smuggled out of the county until things calm down a bit.

Problem is, those countdown clocks are calibrated incorrectly. A countdown to Salthill made sense before Christmas but as the League rolled on, things changed. A measure of a team’s success is its ability to adapt; if Horan can adapt to changed surroundings in time to have Mayo punch their weight come August, it’s been another great year already. If not; well, it’s not like we haven’t cried into our beer before.

What’s changed since Christmas? Injuries are what have changed since Christmas.

James Horan spent the first year of his time as Mayo senior manager trying out players and combinations. By Year 2 he had found the men with whom he was prepared to fight or die, and that year was about bedding them in. And Year 3 would be about forging those men into burnished steel in the white heat of the greatest glory of the Irish summer, the Championship.

But that plan is pretty much dependent on the players being there in the first place. If they’re not, Horan has to wing it until they are.

Mayo football never wanted for rumours, but we are certain that Michael Conroy is gone until August at least. A big loss. If Alan Dillon and Andy Moran are back, they can’t be match fit, and no-one will really know how much Andy Moran’s lion heart will be able to rule his wounded body until he plays.

That’s three hostages to fortune on Sunday out of the six forwards the rules allow. Barry Moran’s continued absence sees further question marks over midfield, so Horan is going to the game in Salthill with three lines disrupted. Those who dream of the return of Richie Feeney or Tom Cunniffe could make the case for four.

And that’s a hell of a lot of uncertainty for a team to be away-from-home favourites against a traditional rival who always have it in them to turn Mayo over, and to sometimes go so far as to give Mayo a comprehensive hiding. The price of Mayo as 8/15 favourites at Salthill on Sunday is mean in the extreme.

In an ideal world, of course, Mayo turn up in Salthill, burn Galway down and cast their ashes to the wind that howls around that cold ground. Galway are a team that cannot be beaten too often or too badly by the County Mayo. We do it, not out of spite, but of love for our western neighbours that, like the triumphal Romans of old, they will always know that they are mortals, not gods.

Unfortunately, that’s not always possible and on occasion it’s been Galway that have done the beating. There is a strange quiet in the land of the heron chokers this week, a remarkable trait among a lippy tribe. What are they up to? Are they thinking of May 25, 1998, a day that will live in infamy in the county Mayo?

Perhaps they are. It’d be like them, God knows. But this is 2013 and, should the unthinkable happen, Mayo must remember that there is a back door this year, and they should be neither ashamed nor unmotivated to use it.

Mayo’s qualifier record is shocking, but it doesn’t have to be. If Mayo take the pipe in Salthill it’s six weeks until their next competitive game. That’s a lot of time to repair those who need repairing and to remind the younger members of the panel that if you want a place on the team you have to go out and grab it. It won’t come to you by right.

It would be lovely if Horan threw caution to the wind and told someone like Evan Regan that his hour is come, and if Regan were then to go out and do as Cillian O’Connor did before him. Chances are that Horan will pick Enda Varley or Alan Freeman instead. Both are fine men, but neither particularly daring as a selection. Who knows? The most important thing to remember is that the countdown clock doesn’t reach 00:00:00 on Sunday the third Sunday in May but on the fourth Sunday in September. All Mayo have to do until then is survive.

Survival on the high road of the Championship would be ideal, as Mayo have done in the past two years of the Horan era. But if the journey is to be through the mountainy land of the Qualifiers, so be it. So long as a full-strength Mayo are in Croke Park in August how they get there doesn’t matter. Because, gentle reader, take this as gospel: there isn’t one county in the country who’ll look forward to playing them then. Up Mayo.

Mayo Are Better Than People Think

Sources in the Eternal City indicate that among the first things the new pope will do is lift the Lenten obligation from the people of County Mayo, Ireland. It seems that agonizing over the League performances of the Mayo football team is a far greater penance than giving up the sweets, the smokes or the sauce combined.

Years of disappointment have warped Mayo football people’s ability to see the game steadily and to see the game whole. Mayo fans focus on all the opponents’ strengths, and all of Mayo’s weaknesses. There is never balance.

For instance, when Tyrone beat Mayo a few weeks ago in Castlebar there was general distress that Mayo were behind the times when it came to dealing with the blanket defence of the modern game. No reckoning was made of the fact that Tyrone’s own blanket, while all-enveloping in its pomp, has been somewhat threadbare in recent years.

Dublin are not easy to beat in Dublin. Fourteen men often beat fifteen in Gaelic football. Mayo were unlucky on Saturday night in Newry, but sometimes that happens. It doesn’t mean the sky is going to fall.

James Horan has sustained a certain amount of criticism for not making correct tactical switches to win games. This assumes that Horan’s chief priority is to win these games, which is not necessarily correct.

One thing we did learn after last summer was that Mayo may be one or two players short of an All-Ireland team. Horan’s job in the League is to find those one or two players and find out how they combine with the automatic selections, and he’s only got seven games to do that.

Seven games isn’t enough to run through all his permutations and, if Horan chooses to start someone and it’s not working out, Horan has to give the debutant time. If Horan starts a man and then calls him ashore after twenty minutes or a half, how does he then repair that man’s confidence and show him that Horan trusts him to do a job if he’s called on to do it later in the year?

These are what Horan has to think about. Ideally, the team wins as well. That’s ideal for two reasons. Firstly and most obviously, winning makes everybody feel better. There is no game worth playing that is not worth winning. Secondly, it’d be nice to stay in Division 1 of the National Football League.

However, Horan is surely thinking that winning is secondary to looking at players. Horan’s critics say that he isn’t looking at enough, and certainly he’s not ringing the changes that he rung during his first year in charge. But he doesn’t have to – he’s clearly happy in most positions, or as happy as the manager of the Mayo senior football team can ever be. It’s only those missing few that he’s hunting down, and how to combine them. Sufficient wins should add up to keep Mayo from the drop, and if they don’t, they don’t.

The short nature of the National Football League makes it something of a lottery. Mayo went into their last game last year looking at the drop and ended up in the playoffs instead. This means the League isn’t a true contest. It’s a lottery, a coin toss. It has no worthwhile meaning.

The people of Mayo, before rending their garments and setting their hair on fire in distress, should first conduct a thought experiment. Instead of looking at the team as the Mayo team, look at them at Meath, in the old Kepak golden-grid jerseys. Take away the agony of those lost All-Irelands, and replace it with the Team Who Were Never Bet. What do you see?

Well, you see a fullback in Ger Cafferkey who has grown into his craft to such an extent that extra-curricular impacts are necessary to put a stop to his gallop. You see a midfielder in Aidan O’Shea who may be the best in the country come the summer. Barry Moran beside him isn’t far off, and it was hard not to cheer when Moran made those barging runs into the Down defence on Saturday night.

In fact, those runs by Barry Moran may have excited the imagination to wonder what a Mayo full-forward line of Doherty, B Moran and Conroy – the very blueprint of a Mayo footballer – might do. A lot of the Mayo forward question depends on Andy Moran, of course, and what he can do when or if he returns, but in the meantime, the pieces are there. If the ball can stick inside, Doherty and Conroy can rattle up the scores and then where will we be?

Mayo stormed through the League in the first and last years of Johnno’s Second Coming and a lot of good it did them. This year, eleven weeks until hostilities commence in Salthill, Mayo are doing just fine, thank you.

Mayo Among the Contenders Again

The criticism of the football in the Connacht Final has set your regular correspondent wondering when the last good Connacht Final actually was. 1989 was the first date that flashed into my head, but there have been some pretty good ones over the years when you think back. The Broken Crossbar Final in 1992. The ending of the Tuam Hoodoo in 1997. Tuam 1999. 2001 in the Hyde. Salthill 2003. Castlebar 2010.

Those were all great days. Last Sunday in the Hyde didn’t measure up, for a variety of reasons. That said, Eugene McGee was let down by his subeditors a little in yesterday’s Irish Independent – the headline referred to “Dismal Efforts in the Connacht Final,” but Eugene’s own analysis was much more measured.

As has been remarked by some commenters on the excellent Mayo GAA Blog, while the Connacht Final was a poor game of football, it was a tremendous game to win from a Mayo perspective. Mayo’s heart has been questioned down the years, but that’s a little too superficial a generalization. There was any god’s amount of dog in John Maughan’s teams over his two reigns, whatever else might have been lacking. And Horan is very much Son of Maughan in that doggy sense.

It was ironic hearing Maughan speak on the discipline issue that occurred in the lead-up up the game – Maughan never had the name of a Conciliator himself, being very much of the My Way/Highway school. But it’s again a superficial analysis to say that a missing player had an effect on the Mayo performance, to suggest a player’s absence haunted the Hyde like Banquo's ghost in The Scottish Play.

The problems in the forwards have been clear since the start of the League, as Horan hunted for a combination that would click. He didn’t find it, and he’s still looking. This is normally the time for the Mayo support to rend garments and commence wailing, but Horan has time on his side. The Mayo forwards have to click sometime. If it takes until the third Sunday in September for Horan to unlock the combination, so be it.

If Mayo continue to struggle for scores they will not win the All-Ireland. Even in this hateful defensive era, the ability to score is still what separates the wheat and the chaff. But if Mayo can solve that conundrum, if they can find the balance between tactics, personnel and application they will be a force in the land.

Midfield is more a spaghetti junction in the modern game than the quiet country crossroads it was in the days gone by, but there isn’t a mouth in Mayo that doesn’t water at the prospect of Barry Moran and Aidan O’Shea i lár na páirce. When O’Shea came on as a sub against Galway, a friend of the blog turned to me and said “he’s like a prize bull in a paddock, isn’t he?” When O’Shea then went and caught the first ball near him, it was all An Spailpín could do to not bellow “Mooooo!” at the top of my lungs.

There are two rounds left in the qualifiers, and then the quarter-finals. Mayo will appear the weakest of the four provincial Champions, but they will be the team nobody wants to play. Win, and you beat nothing. Lose, and you're out.

Mayo, bizarrely, now find themselves in the ideal position in any race, just off the shoulder of the pace-setter. If Mayo can hit the gas as the bend rounds into the straight, they win. If the gas isn’t there, so be it. You can't ask for more.

As for which team Mayo will draw in the quarters, An Spailpín has already been in touch with a certain whiskered party. Please Santa, let it be Kildare. I’ll be good on account for the rest of the year. Let it be Kildare.

Mayo Aren't That Far Away

There is an air of grimly facing the inevitable about Cork’s trip to Castlebar on Sunday. Cork were sweetly obliging the last time Mayo played them in the League regular season, rolling over to have their tummies tickled by the banks of the Lee. They then turned around in a week to have a loud last laugh by carpet-bombing Mayo in the League Final and setting up the further Mayo humiliations to come.

Cork are now the best football team in the country. There is no disputing that fact. Having finally won that All-Ireland last year, their option now is to win a few more, and claim definitive greatness. If they leave it only at one, you can rest assured their witty neighbours to the north won’t be long reminding them that, yerra, 2010 was a soft one.

And for all that, An Spailpín isn’t despairing about summer prospects for Mayo. If anything, the summer looks rather good.

Of all the bizarre events of that hammering from Dublin last Sunday week at Croke Park, An Spailpín was struck by the fact that James Horan made no substitutions until the second half. How many times will teams go down 4-4 to 0-2 after fifteen minutes in any grade without at least one of the backs getting the curly finger?

So either Horan didn’t notice that Mayo were getting a complete scutching, or else he didn’t care. An Spailpín has no idea, but I’d guess that Horan knew it was happening alright, but whatever was on his mind was more important than two league points against Dublin.

If not, why wouldn’t he have hauled poor Chris Barrett out of there, and sent Ger Cafferkey back? If Mayo have as bad a start as that in the Championship, you can rest assured Horan will do something. But for the League; no. Results aren’t what interest him just yet.

Which doesn’t mean Mayo are playing to lose, of course, or that relegation doesn’t bother them. It’s just a question of relativity, just as we all now realise in the modern world that, while getting a pay cut stinks, it’s still better than losing your job.

Relegation wouldn’t be that bad if, for all his tweaking, Horan can hit on a winning formula in the summer. Connacht isn’t as weak as has been made out, and if Galway can do something against the rising Ross in the Under-21 Connacht Final in Salthill this weekend, that might do their senior team no harm either.

Nor are Mayo necessarily doomed to the trapdoor either. How bothered are Cork about a spin to Castlebar? The League is all about judgement. Cork know from Mayo last year that League wins aren’t worth a damn. It’s only about your last game in the League, and how that sets you up for the summer. Stronger or weaker? Better to suffer now than later.

Issues remain with Mayo, and there are issues with nearly every line of the team. But this Mayo. That will always be the way. It’s too early for weeping by the lovely sweet banks of the Mayo. Wait until the summer, and see what the good God brings.