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.

All-Ireland Football Championship 2019 Preview

Dublin are odds-on favourites to win their fifth title in a row, an achievement that would make them the greatest GAA team of all time, football or hurling. They would be the only team to achieve that feat, and that therefore makes them the best. Of course it does.

Of course, they would not be a sensible investment. An odd-on price is never a sensible bet in multi-horse field, even if there are fewer horses running in the race than you might prefer.

Your correspondent is inclined to take League form with a pinch of salt, but what was interesting about Dublin in the League wasn’t so much the results as the sudden loss of appetite. Dublin in their pomp revelled in burying teams. This new, steady-as-she-goes approach ill-suits them. Seeing them like this is like calling into the local and seeing the local Champion Pintman not only drinking tay, but drinking it out of a cup and saucer. Has the world changed, or is he only doing the dog?

There is an opinion abroad that Dublin could get broadsided in Leinster. Delicious though this prospect would be, it’s impossible to make a case for any other Leinster team doing anything other than falling valiantly. In recent years, it’s only Westmeath that have really put it up to the Dubs, but they’ve never had the sort of playing resources that Meath or Kildare or even Offaly once enjoyed. The pick of the three wouldn’t keep it kicked out to Dublin now.

A shrewd eye should be kept on Kerry. There was much made of how immature Kerry looked against Mayo in the League final, but you can grow faster in football years than you can in actual years. Seán O’Shea will only be a few months older come the summer than he was in that League final, but he’ll be carrying scar tissue that will stand to him in bigger battles to come.

How long it takes him and others to toughen up will determine how quickly it takes Kerry to win their next All-Ireland. It is not impossible it may happen sooner than we would have thought when the final whistle blew in that League Final.

The hardest challenge to the Dublin imperium will come from the North, as usual. The Ulster Championship is easily the most competitive, and perhaps it’s because of this that a dumping into the qualifiers seems to knock Ulster teams less out of their stride than others.

The leading hounds of Ulster are Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal. Monaghan had a stinker of a league, and did well not to get relegated in the end. This, after beating Dublin in the first game and being hailed by some critics as the second best team in Ireland.

The reason why Monaghan had such a poor League isn’t obvious. But it’s difficult to believe that so valiant a team as we’ve known Monaghan to be in recent years have just suddenly thrown in the towel. The suspicion here is that it would be unwise to dismiss the Farney challenge without further intelligence.

Donegal and Tyrone have been praised for their league performances, and praise has been grudgingly given to those counties in recent years. It’s interesting that the praise heaped on the counties is at odds with the rumours drifting from the camps, about players not happy about playing for their particular managers and other stories of internal strife and woe.

Try though I might, I can’t force myself to believe that Tyrone have found a Philosopher’s Stone to take them one further than last year’s All-Ireland Final loss where, in truth, they never really competed. You have the players or you don’t, and Tyrone, for all Mickey Harte’s in-game tactical ability, seem one or two players short.

Donegal are blessed with the best player in the country, Michael Murphy, and will always be a threat while that man can pull on a jersey and answer Tír Chonnail’s dread war cry. The more help he has the greater Donegal’s chance becomes.

Galway were the darlings of the League last year, only to again disappoint in Dublin in the summertime. That Galway reign as kings of Connacht is beyond dispute and, should they face Mayo in a Connacht semi-final as many expect, they will enjoy home advantage at the butt of the broad Atlantic, also known as Stáid an Phiarsaigh, Bóthar na Trá. Kevin Comer’s absence continues, which has to be a source of worry.

Again, the word on the wind is that Comer is one of these players who is more than just another member of the team – he is seen, subconsciously at least, as the avatar of the Galway football tradition, and as such he cannot be replaced.

For all that, Galway are spoiled with talent, and learning all the time. Last year there were rumours of difficulty in integrating the Corofin players into the county team. That was noted, and the two teams have been bonding since the start of the year. Almost violently so if rumours of a January challenge match are to be believed, but then, people do like to tell stories.

Your correspondent’s friends insist to him that being afraid of Galway is like being afraid of the dark – an immature, childish terror, not borne out by scientific evidence. Right. Tell that to me again when we’re stuck in traffic for two hours on the Grattan Road after Galway pox a seventy-eighth minute winner over Mayo and we’re all thinking things can’t get any worse, only to see great Cthulhu himself rise up out of Galway Bay, release an eldritch roar, and make a beeline for the Róisín Dubh, foul tentacles thrashing the sea into foam around him. I’ll remember to laugh.

You may notice that there is one contender that remains unnamed. The reality is that Mayo have bounced back so high from taking the road from Newbridge to Nowhere last year that any attempt at rational thought on the part of any Mayo man, woman or child in the matter of football is now quite out of the question.

In her beautiful sonnet, Love is Not All, poet Edna St Vincent Millay remarks that, in a difficult hour, she may be tempted to sell your love for peace, or the memory of this night for food. Your correspondent would sell a damn sight more than that to see Diarmuid O’Connor lift Sam in the Hogan Stand on the first of September, and is unable to sensibly contemplate even the notion of it without either fainting or going insane.

For that reason then, I predict that not only will Dublin not win five-in-a-row, they won’t even reach the final. The final will be a repeat of the 2000 final, a draw between Kerry and Galway, and I’m danged if I know who’ll win the replay.

If anybody’s in Castlebar on the night of September 2nd, by the way, I’ll either be in Byrne’s, McHale’s, or above in a tree somewhere, looing. Up Mayo.

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.

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.

The Year in Sports

The businessmen who run Croke Park are not noted for their wit. A pity; should it be a thing that Dublin win a fourth All-Ireland title in a row, wouldn’t it be funny if the traditional post-match playing of Molly Malone were swapped for Linda Ronstadt’s rather super cover of the Everly Brothers’ classic When Will I Be Loved? It would seem to strike the correct note.

The apparent disdain in which the team is held isn’t easy to understand. Pilar Caffrey’s Dublin, with their notorious Blue Book, were difficult to love. But the Gilroy / Gavin generation are the real deal. They are legit in every way a GAA team can be legit, and yet still Ireland withholds its heart.

Part of this may be jealousy. It would be nice to think there’s more too it than that, but there probably isn’t. Would Kerry of the Golden Years be held in the same regard as they are had they not be rendered mortal by Offaly in 1982?

When Meath were in their dark pomp in the 1980s they were hated. Has time humanised them, or was it the loss to Down (not to take anything away from that fine Down team) in 1991 that had the same humanising effect on them as Offaly’s win had on Kerry?

Those greybeards who remember when snooker was a big deal may remember Steve Davis was never loved until he was past his prime; then he became the Grand Old Man of the Green Baize. Is Ireland waiting on Dublin to lose, to return to the mortal realm, before forgiving them for being so much better than the rest? And when is that to happen, exactly?

Reader, I’m damned if I know. Mayo are in pole position among the challengers for the crown, but the trauma of thinking about my own beloved county actually winning an All-Ireland and all that would imply would reduce your correspondent to writing with crayons on greaseproof paper behind high walls and under medical supervision, so let’s not go there just yet, while the season of brotherhood and goodwill is still with us.

The reality is that it is hard to make a case for anyone living with Dublin, to say nothing of beating them. Leinster is a wasteland and, no more than Mayo, Monaghan and Tyrone can only knock on the door for so long.

Kerry remain Kerry, of course, and the impact of the disgraceful Super 8s remains to be seen, but it’s very hard to imagine any team better suited to a Super 8 structure than the current Dublin setup. Tradition, legend, values – may I introduce you to the Almighty Dollar? God help us all.

Hurling

When historians get around to recording and passing judgement on these changing times, will the publication of Jackie Tyrell’s book be seen as the most significant event of 2017 in hurling? We’ve waited for over a decade for an insight into Kilkenny in the Cody era. Now we have it, does it take from the achievements of that great team? At what stage is a title not worth winning? At what stage can you say a team has gone too far, and it becomes necessary to remind people that sport isn’t life and death; sport is what we concern ourselves with when we need a break from life and death. It’s something to think about.

Rugby
As Gaelic Games slide further from shamatuerism to fully-blown professionalism, it’s interesting – and horrifying – to look at rugby, which has been professional for 22 years. What has survived, what has thrived, and what has gone by the wayside.

Who would have thought, for instance, that domestic French rugby would set the standard for the world game, and that this club standard would come at the expense of the French national team, once the personification of a way of looking at the world that is quintessentially French?

The current situation cannot last, but what will come in its place nobody knows. The fruits of the banal weekly brutality of the professional game is also a harvest that has yet to be gathered, and will not be nice when it is. Dónal Lenihan made this point very well in his very thoughtful and under-estimated autobiography, released last year.

The Lions Tour, once described by the late Frank Keating as a cross between a school tour and a medieval crusade, was one of those institutions marked for doom when the game went professional, but went from strength to strength instead. On the balance sheet, anyway; neither the heads nor the hearts of fans seem quite sure what to make of the Lions, just as they don’t quite know where club competitions, Six Nations Tournaments and World Cups fit in relative to each other. In the light of Seán O’Brien’s strident opinion of the second-most successful Lions tour of New Zealand in over 110 years, maybe even the players are struggling to keep up. Or it could be all those bumps to the head, of course.

Rugby fans in Ireland are at a particular disadvantage as Irish rugby journalists take the notion of fans-with-typewriters to new depths. What Martin O’Neill wouldn’t do for the coverage Joe Schmidt gets, even though Martin O’Neill has nothing like the talent available to Schmidt.

Certainly, Schmidt’s artisanal style of rugby has never got the abuse that O’Neill’s hearts-on-their-sleeves, lead-in-their-boots soccer team habitually get, even though Schmidt has a better selection. And that’s not even counting the chaps who make Michael Flatley of the Clan Flatley seem as Irish as the very Blarney Stone itself.

Mayo Post-Mortem #66: Open Verdict

Recordings of both Sky and RTÉ’s coverage of this year’s All-Ireland Football Final sit on my Virgin Media box, like the regions of dark matter in outer space that so fascinate the astrophysicists currently. I have no intention of watching them, but I can’t delete them either. A situation that is bizarrely appropriate for this particular Final, suddenly the hardest of all Mayo’s many All-Ireland Final losses to come to terms with.

One of sport’s eternal debates is whether it hurts more to get hammered into the turf or to lose by inches. It’s the sporting equivalent of whether it’s better to get punched in the face or the guts. Neither is great, really, but is possible to make a case that one is worse than the other?

There’s something different about this year’s Final though. It’s not a question of so near and yet so far for Mayo, the way 1996 was, say. It’s something different. But what exactly that difference is remains stubbornly hidden in the dark matter that exists beyond the stars, and in the tortured psyche of the Mayo football public.

Partly it’s got to do with the mixed records of the two competing teams. The narrative is that a hairsbreadth separates them. The reality is that Dublin always win, and Mayo always lose.

Dublin, we are told, are one of the best teams ever, if not the best team ever. Mayo can’t win an All-Ireland Final, despite appearing in them with almost monotonous regularity. Other teams have risen and fallen in the past twenty years – Mayo keep regenerating to be almost there, but just not quite. Just that little bit missing, every time.

Is there a lesson there? Are All-Ireland generations essentially destructive, like the economic cycle? Is it the case that every boom must be followed by a bust? And is that why Mayo have never fallen from Division 1, because they never boomed sufficiently to go bust?

It’s a theory. One of many, and not the strongest. The reality of Mayo’s perpetual losing of All-Ireland Finals is more likely to be prosaic than metaphysical. The fault is more likely to be in ourselves than in our stars.

It’s that logical impossibility that exists in the two states of Dublin and Mayo that makes processing the 2017 Final so difficult from a Mayo perspective. If Dublin are one of the greatest teams of all-time, then surely the only team that’s put them regularly under pressure is also somewhere in the pantheon of all-time greats. But entry to that pantheon necessitates possession of a title, and that’s something that Mayo have failed to achieve. Armagh won. Cork won. Donegal won. Mayo ... lost.

A narrative has been proposed whereby, even if they were never to win an All-Ireland, the current Mayo generation would be remembered as one of the all-time great teams. A visit to a Galway football Facebook page a week or two after the All-Ireland Final would quickly disabuse the innocent of that theory. No Celtic cross, no nothin’. Plenty of teams that have won All-Irelands are disparaged as having won “soft” ones. How soft is the one that is not won at all?

And so we come back to the circle that can’t be squared. We have, in the green-and-red corner, one of the all-time great teams that not only can’t achieve what all-time great teams achieve – win multiple All-Irelands – but can’t achieve what legitimate-and-deserving-champions but not all-time-great teams do, and manage to somehow fall over the line. Cork fell over the line. Armagh were damnably unlucky not to win a second All-Ireland, but the Geezer generation got their Celtic Crosses. For this Mayo generation – nada. And for some on the panel it’s already too late.

There’s a new ethos in Mayo whereby any criticism of the team – who owe us nothing – is socially unacceptable, if not worthy of pariah status in cases where repentance is neither swift, clear nor suitably remorseful. On the other hand, there are underground criticisms, most notably those of a mystery man called Jimmy, surreptitious videos of whom are being transmitted through that most pernicious of modern curses, social media.

Filming anyone on the sly is a low act but it’s clear that Jimmy is a legitimate and well-informed student of the game. You may not agree with everything he says – I, myself, do not – but I prefer him saying it so that at least there’s a discussion going on, so that we can get some sense of closure about what happened, why it always happens and what else can be done to stop it happening, rather than people expected to become some sort of Stepford wife-esque cheering section.

For instance: the long and lustrous autumn of Andy Moran’s career reflects brilliantly on a man who is loved within the county and genuinely liked by nearly every other county. But how badly does it reflect on the rest of the forwards in Mayo that the county is so reliant on a man who has many more football years behind him than before him?

The bravest thing Stephen Rochford did was play Aidan O’Shea at fullback against Kieran Donaghy, not least as it took serious guts to back an unorthodox opinion after his most famously unorthodox opinion, that it was worthwhile to drop a goalkeeper for an All-Ireland Final reply, having blown up in his face. Rochford deserves huge credit for that, and surely owns the dressing room now in a way that was less-than-obvious earlier.

However. Rochford’s record on bringing players through is not good to the point of being bad. One of Jim Gavin’s many strengths lies in his regenerating his team without outsiders ever being able to see the joins. Rochford is now in danger of having to replace players en masse and that is a risky business. It is seldom wise not to plan ahead.

These are just two of the challenges facing Mayo as the long quest continues into another empty winter. 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.

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.

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.

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 Dublin Hound and the Mayo Hare

First published in the Western People on Monday.

In these magical years, when Mayo have knocked so hard and so consistently on the Great Door of Glory, a certain amount of energy was wasted every year worrying over where the team’s Achilles’ heel was prior to each particular Final.

People would worry about how the team could possibly mark Kieran Donaghy or Michael Murphy. Childhood friends would fall out over who should take frees on the left hand side. Duels were threatened over whether this game or that game was lost on the line. And so on and so forth.

One of the many remarkable things about this year’s campaign has been the absence of that sort of worrying, even though this 2016 team is, arguably, more visibly flawed than the ones that went before it.

John Maughan’s 1996 team could hang their hats on a magnificent six-point win over Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final, still the last time Mayo beat the Kingdom in the Championship. Maughan’s 2004 team beat Tyrone. 2006 had two incredible victories over the Dubs, the game itself and the battle immediately before it, in the shadow of the Hill.

James Horan’s teams had more glory days than we can count. Even the ill-fated and unhappy reign of last year’s management had that triumphant Saturday evening win over Donegal.

This year hasn’t been like any of those. Worrying, disaffected displays in the League were followed by that shocking Saturday evening in a wet and miserable McHale Park, as Mayo tumbled out of the Connacht Championship for the first time since 2010.

Some people thought a run in the qualifiers would be the making of Mayo. The theory is that the back door allows for building in incremental improvements, away from the spotlight, until you come bursting back into All-Ireland contention.

And that’s fine, as long as you’re incrementally improving. There’s been very little to suggest that Mayo are improving, as they’ve huffed and puffed to get past Fermanagh, Kildare and Tipperary, with only the victory over Tyrone feeling like something substantial.

And now, somehow, Mayo find themselves in another All-Ireland Final, against Dublin. If this were one those hideous reality TV dating shows, there would be no problem telling the metropolitans and the Mayomen apart.

Dublin would be dressed in those Rumpelstiltskin-style shoes, brown and pointy. They’d have drainpipe jeans paired with a pricey-looking shirt – no tie, of course. They’d be clean-shaven, iron-jawed and wearing enough product in their hair to keep the pistons of a David Brown 990 tractor lubricated until well into the winter.

Bedraggled Mayo, by contrast, are covered from head to toe in clay, dirt and the sort of scratches you get from digging with your bare hands. Mayo would look like they had to tunnel in by hand to get there at all. Which, of course, is exactly what they have had to do. For Mayo, this summer has been defined by struggle.

Mayo could lose on Sunday. God knows, it’s not like it’d be the first time. All the balls that bounced their way in the summer could bounce against them.

Someone could get sent off for some bizarre black card infraction. Someone else could forget he’s sweeper this Sunday. If a bolt of lightning were to blow the ball up just as it’s crossing the black spot for the winning point we wouldn’t be entirely surprised. If such a calamity could befall anyone, it’d befall Mayo on the third Sunday in September.

But, but, but. Every now and again, in all of the matches, there have been moments that make you wonder. David Clarke charging off his line to stop the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in those anxious final minutes against Tyrone. Colm Boyle bouncing up and down with passion and fury and sheer, raw want. Aidan O’Shea taking constant abuse and still getting up and going again, time after time, game after game.

It’s hard to imagine these men are thinking of making up the numbers on Sunday. It’s hard to see Mayo willingly playing the hare to Dublin’s hound.

Dublin have that greyhound trait about them – the speed, the relentlessness, always giving the impression that they are born to do this, and only this. What Dublin might not be so good at doing is adapting to circumstances.

The greyhound expects the hare to always run away. If the hare stands his ground, the greyhound has to look for Plan B – if he has a Plan B.

We have seen Dublin shocked twice in recent years. Donegal turned them over as seven-to-one outsiders in that 2014 semi-final that wasn’t played in Limerick, and Kerry shocked Dublin last month. Dublin reacted better against Kerry this year than against Donegal in 2014 but – if it’s not Gaelic Football heresy to even think it – maybe Donegal ’14 had a little more in the locker than Kerry ’16, and that made a difference too.

Dublin aren’t the first team to be hailed as unbeatable. There have been many of them, down the years. But once the unbeatable team goes down as they all have, the mortality that was always there is suddenly obvious to all. Of course the Cluxton kickout was the rock on which they built their church – when that collapsed, everything else crumbled with it. Of course the team had peaked, and had nowhere to go but down. Sure that was obvious, if only we’d been looking.

What is particularly interesting from a Mayo perspective is that, having prayed so long for The Ultimate Team, we are now sending into a battle a flawed team with just a single gift, the gift of doing just enough to win. A team that knows it only has to be better than what’s in front of it, rather than the best of all time. Will the change of focus finally direct all Mayo’s energy to ridding ourselves of that sixty-five-year-old monkey on our backs once and for all? We’ll know by five o’clock on Sunday. Up Mayo.

Galway Shock Mayo in Castlebar

There are two ways of looking at Galway’s shock defeat of Mayo at McHale Park on Saturday. We can take the broad view, or we can take a closer look at the game in and of itself. Let’s try both, and see what we can learn.

The media spent the final weeks of the National League bemoaning that those league games were the last interesting things scribes would have to write about until August. This is because that same media, possibly dazzled by propaganda from the GPA, considers the Championship a fossilized entity, a killing field in which “lesser” teams cannot possibly gain by being exposed to the mighty guns of the Division 1 Super Powers.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Last week, Tipperary of Division 3 unhorsed mighty Cork of Division 1. On Saturday, Galway of Division 2 unhorsed Mayo of Division 1, not only in Mayo itself but with fifty-two of Galway’s best and brightest missing from the muster-roll.

These things should not be happening. Sports science and the great god of the age, money, tell us that a commoner may never gaze on a crown in the Championship any more.

So what happened on Saturday? Is it possible that the peculiar magic of this fossilized Championship, no longer fit for the modern athlete and fan, somehow conjured dream into reality once more? Could it be that helpless Galway, with their missing players and dressed only their lowly Division 2 motley, somehow raised themselves at the sight of the green and red and channeled the spirits of their forbears to make themselves, for that one crowded hour, bigger than they thought they could be?

Could it be that there is something inherent in the very Championship itself, in the warp and weft of its history and tradition, that means Galway can raise themselves against Mayo in a Connacht semi-final in a way that is impossible to imagine them doing against Monaghan, say, in a round 3 Champions League style tournament so much more fitting to modernity?

Who knows? But it does seem legitimate to at least raise the question.

And what of Mayo themselves? This isn’t Mayo’s first time getting ambushed by Galway in Castlebar. May 24th, 1998 is a date that still lives in infamy in the County Mayo. Did Mayo think that sports science and money and TV ads would protect them from piseog, éigse and oidhreacht peile? What can a millionaire American basketball coach writing a motivational book know of the feeling in a Galwayman’s gut when he sees the green and red banners flying so proudly and arrogantly high?

The day was Galway’s and rightly so. While they and Roscommon prepare for Connacht’s banner day, Mayo have to ask themselves what exactly happened. Did they have a bad day at the office, and will they now scorch a path of devastation through the qualifiers in the hurt and fury of their response?

Oisin McConville suggested in the Examiner on Saturday that it was time for mutinous Mayo players to put their money where their extraordinarily big mouths are and, as sure as night follows day, there will be more than one why-oh-why column in the Irish Independent this coming week roasting the Mayo panel for what they did to the previous management.

Yes. And yet, no.

The mutiny is misunderstood by the national media. The mutiny was not a cause; it was a symptom. The mutiny was the inevitable result of the Mayo County Board’s failure to deal with the end of James Horan’s time as manager, a failure that, based on Saturday’s evidence, has yet to be fixed.

The situation at the moment appears to be that the Board wants Pat and Noel but wants no truck with James. Pat and Noel are unacceptable to the players but there is no way between Hell and Bethlehem the Board want Horan back. The only thing either party seems to agree about is that neither of them wanted anything at all to do Kevin McStay and Liam McHale.

Hence, Stephen Rochford. Rochford has no small job to do in the coming two weeks to reassemble the green and red Humpty Dumpty. Mayo were red-rotten on Saturday and, as the man in charge, Rochford has to fix them. Rochford will be forgiven any step he takes, no matter how drastic, so long as Mayo win the All-Ireland as a result. Anything short of that and he’ll be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, of course. Galway have their tradition, and we have ours. Up Mayo.

Mayo at Home Amongst the Nobility

There was a science teacher on the staff of St Muredach’s College, Ballina, in the 1980s called Joe Kenny. Joe was a big believer in bringing the theory down from the clouds and home to where you lived. To this end, used to tell the most beautiful analogy about the nature of chemical compounds.

If you look at the periodic table of the elements, the elements that are listed in the rightmost column – Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon – are called the Noble Gases. They are called noble gases because they have a full complement of eight electrons in their outer shells, and this makes them very, very stable. Noble gases are the upper class of the elements; they do not mix with the lower orders.

The other elements – the metals, the metalloids, the halogens and the rest – are social climbers. They all want to be stable like the noble gases, and they form compounds to achieve that stability. Sodium combines its single electron with Chloride’s seven to form a compound, common salt, with eight electrons in its outer shell.

But leopards don’t change their spots. A compound can never become an element, least of all an element as elevated as a noble gas. Even though this new thing, salt, is supposedly stable, it’s not, really. It lacks the blue blood, and always betrays its humble origins. It will always call the midday meal “dinner” when the noble gases call it “lunch.” It will always answer nature’s call with a visit to the toilet, rather than the lavatory.

And so it goes with the Mayo support. The support are compounds, raised to stability by years of success, but always wondering when will be the next time Mayo lose a Connacht Final to Sligo, or be butchered by Cork by twenty points, or bet toyed with by Kerry as a cat toys with a dead mouse.

The players, however, look at the world differently. 1975 is indistinguishable to them from 1798. 1993 isn’t much different. What’s real to them are their memories of Ciarán McDonald and James Nallen and Liam McHale – the memories of watching them as children, and wanting to emulate them as men.

One of the many remarkable things about the current Mayo generation is its longevity. The most previously-consistent Mayo team was John Maughan’s team of the ‘nineties, which won three Connacht titles in four years and came closer than any other, before or since, to winning Mayo its fourth All-Ireland title.

This Mayo generation has reeled off five Connacht titles and, even more amazingly, has won its subsequent quarter-final in each of those five years.

You will read, or have already read, in this week’s Championship previews that that this achievement is as a millstone around the players’ necks. Not true. It can be a millstone around the supporters’ necks, for whom the bleak days remain very real, but when the players themselves stand among the elite every August and look around them, at the Neons and Kryptons and Xenons of the football world, they know that they belong.

A millstone? Reader, dream on. This Mayo generation know that they have the measure of anyone else out there, including Dublin. The very fact they’re still being talked of as contenders, after the almighty balls that was made of the post-Horan transition, is testimony to the extra-ordinary things that are happening in Mayo right now.

Because for once the current generation, talented though it is, is being pushed from below. The Minor winners of 2013 did not get the recognition they would have got had Mayo not lost (another) senior final the year they won, but those one-time minors showed in the Under-21 victory that there are men there who are ready for their close-ups.

Not that their time is come yet. Most of the current generation aren’t going anywhere, but the strength that can added to the squad by those men who will join from the Under-21 panel is considerable. Cillian O’Connor is the most under-rated player in Ireland but his return to the panel for the dying stages of the league underlined, once again, his worth.

There are tweaks to be made on the team, and question marks here and there. Of course there are – how could there not be? This is a game, after all. Balls bounce funny. But Mayo people, whose fondest wish was once to see a Mayoman lift Sam on the third Sunday just once before they died, are now coming to the realisation that is no longer a dream but an imminent event. Maybe this year, maybe the year after. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Like the weather, there are some details that are known only to the Lord.

But the when isn’t now as important as it once was. When was important when we thought Mayo might win an All-Ireland, when no-one was looking, as nearly happened in 1996. Those days of backing into the party are over. Mayo come in front door now. We are now looking at a Mayo team that will win by right, and God speed that happy day. Up Mayo.

The Year in Sports

Dublin’s All-Ireland title, their third in five years, makes a strong case for Dublin’s status as Gaelic football’s team of the decade. Not least as there could still be more titles to come.

This is not to say that they are invincible. And if anyone wants to quibble with Dublin’s achievement he or she could point out to the poor quality of opposition Dublin have met in finals – Mayo in 2013, and Kerry’s extraordinary collapse. There is also the continuing embarrassment of Leinster football, an embarrassment that looks set to continue with a bizarre venue having been chosen for Dublin’s first Championship away game since Biddy Mulligan was a slip of a girl.

But these are pointless cavils. Dublin are the best team in the country because they have the best players. And those best players don’t look like they’re going anywhere just yet.

Who can challenge them? The stark division between haves and have-nots continues, as mortal counties are crushed between the twin rocks of the back-door system and that most exclusive club that is Division 1 of the National Football League.

Kieran Shannon of the Examiner has made the point this year that addressing the League structure would be far more helpful than codding ourselves that the Championship will – or can – be changed. The Croke Park grandees have paid this not one blind bit of heed, and seem determined to bring back the unloved B Championship. Sigh.

Of the potential challengers, Tyrone may have overtaken Donegal in the pecking order, but otherwise it’s as-you-were for the Big Four. The people of Mayo will wonder if Stephen Rochford is the long-awaited Messiah but the reality is that the team is now manager-independent, really. Unpleasant though it was, the putsch of the previous management team shows that this Mayo panel is now complete in every way.

Everything you read in the papers about Mayo being short a forward or being too loose at the back or not knowing what to with Aidan O’Shea is just paper-talk. Only some truly poxy luck has kept Mayo from winning an All-Ireland since the revival of the 1990s, and luck has to change sometime.

Christy O’Connor had a typically excellent piece in the Indo a few days about the Kilkenny Hurling Imperium, and how it continues even though the playing standard is not what it was. The kings will be kings until someone rises to challenge them, but who that someone might be is anybody’s case.

Your correspondent is a great fan of the Banner County but, although far from a hurling expert, I will eat every single hat I own if Clare win the All-Ireland. Although hailed in the media as a triumph, the inclusion of Dónal Óg Cusack in the Clare back-room team is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Neither Dónal Óg nor Davy Fitz are noted for their ability to get along with regular people. How in God’s Holy Name they are meant to get on with each other is a Sixth Glorious Mystery. It’ll all end in tears before the hay is saved.

Speaking of tears, it is a generally odious thing to say I told you so, but this is the still the Season of Goodwill so I will chance my arm. This is from last year’s sports review piece in this space:

Reader, Ireland have never won a World Cup playoff game in the seven times the competition has been held, including two years, 1999 and 2007, when Ireland couldn’t even get out of their group. The Irish rugby public should think about crawling before thinking about walking.

And lo, it did come to pass. It was speculated here before the event that the Rugby World Cup would be a crashing bore, something that did not go down well with the public at the time. It wasn’t a crashing bore, but anyone who’s paying attention and is brave enough to be honest with him or herself can see that the game is changing massively, both in the way it’s played and the way it’s organised. The question, then, is whether the change is evolution or devolution.

Rugby has generally been the best of all sports in adjusting its rules to remain true to the spirit of the game as teams seek every edge, but it’s behind the times now. There are too many games decided by penalties at the breakdown which, when it comes to great sporting spectacles, make for rather Hobbesian viewing.

A sign of that evolution – or devolution – was in an offhand comment from Brian O’Driscoll while holding a mic for BT Sports during the recent Ulster v Toulouse game at Kingspan Ravenhill. O’Driscoll has a keen eye and praised Vincent Clerc for taking up a particular defensive position at one stage in the game, and that’s great. But nobody every paid in to watch Simon Geoghegan defend, or David Campese or, God save us, Doctor Sir AJF O’Reilly. If rugby isn’t about running with ball in hand it’s about nothing. Dangerous times for the ancient and glorious game.

Rugby has ruled the roost as the Nation’s Choice for the past number of years because people like winning. Martin O’Neill’s achievement in getting Ireland to the European Qualifiers may challenge rugby’s dominance. It was funny to note all the soccer journalists second-guess O’Neill all they way until the team actually qualified, by which time the u-turn was made in a cacophony of screeching brakes and stench of burning rubber.

As it was with the players, not least the much reviled Glen Whelan. It is worth closing, then, by noting that not everyone was derelict in his or her duty by Whelan when nobody was singing because nobody was winning. The great Keith Duggan wrote a marvellous piece in the Irish Times about Whelan, his role for Ireland and the nature of the professional soccer player back last June. Treat yourself friends, and check it out.