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

A Kerry Perspective on Mayo v Roscommon

Every week, a retired Kerry footballer gives his considered insight on the past week in Gaelic football for one of the national papers. With the help of a friend currently domiciled in Hong Kong, An Spailpín Fánach has sensationally intercepted this week’s copy and can print it here this morning. Now, read on:

Look, everyone knows about Roscommon’s football tradition. Kerry people certainly do, as it was Kerry who met them so often when they got to the All-Ireland Final. There’s nothing you can tell us about the pride Roscommon men take in the primrose and blue.

I remember Páidí telling me once that, when Kerry went down 1-2 after five minutes to Roscommon in the 1980 All-Ireland Final, he turned to John O’Keeffe and said “Chrisht, they must have a red-haired woman inside in the dressing room.” Páidí believed in what we call the piseog, and the bean rua was among his greatest fears.

Thankfully we didn’t meet any mná rua when we travelled up in the car from Kerry to Castlebar. It wasn’t the best day of the summer but look, Championship is Championship and it’s always good to get out and get to a game. Besides, Mayo are now one of the top, top teams in the country and you can never see enough of the real contenders.

We got to Castlebar at about half-past two, got a handy place to park there on Linenhall Street, and then in to Mick Byrne’s for six or seven pints before the match. Up the hill then and through the cinema, where they had Man of Steel on as the matinee. But the real men of steel were inside in McHale Park, wearing the green and red.

I’ve always had time for Mayo. They play the game the right way. People remember those finals where we were just lucky enough to get over the line, but they forget we’ve lost to Mayo too. We haven’t forgotten it though. When Páidí lead us back to the Munster title in 1996, the very next thing we did was lose by six points to Mayo in the All-Ireland semi-final.

I remember John Maughan coming in to the dressing room afterwards, to remind us about him managing Clare in 1992 as well. I meet John doing the media work now and we often laugh about what happened next. Well. I do, anyway.

Mayo were in a different league to Roscommon on Sunday. That’s no shame on Roscommon, any more than it shames Clare anytime Kerry go up to Ennis and bury them. I remember Páidí telling me about coming home on the bus from the Milltown Massacre in 1979 and Pat Spillane turning to him and saying “Banner County? Wisha, another bating like this and they’ll have to change the name to the Bodhrán County. Bodhrán – do you get it? Because of the beating? Do you not – “ Páidí just hit Pat a box and went back to sleep. I’m surprised O’Rourke doesn’t try that on the telly. It’s not like he’s a stranger to it, after all.

But look, Mayo are a different team to the one we beat in 2011, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 1997. Those teams were all the same, but this one is different. And I think I’ve spotted two reasons for that difference.

The first is Donie Buckley. Donie is a Kerryman and one of the greatest coaches in the country. Donie specialises in defensive coaching, which is unusual for a Kerryman as in Kerry we didn’t even know how to tackle until we played Tyrone in 2005, a point Jack O’Connor made on the first page of his book. Donie must have read about it in a book or something. Anyway, he’s got the hang of it now and he’s making a real difference in Mayo.

The second reason are the O’Sheas. Aidan and Séamus are in midfield of course, and there’s another brother, Conor, on the bench, ready to come in. The O’Sheas’ father, Jim, is from Kilorglin.

Kilorglin, County Kerry.

But for all that, Mayo still have some questions hanging over their heads. This is something we discussed in the car on the way home – we had to roar at each other now, as we all had our heads stuck out the windows, trying to sober up before the wives took out the breathalysers again – but we made some progress in our understanding.

The two things Mayo are lacking are goals and a killer instinct. You could say the two travel together – if you want to be big, you need to run up the big score on minnows. You can’t be feeling sorry for them or empathic for them or anything.

Look at the Gooch – isn’t he beautiful? But it’s not just that he’s beautiful, he has the killer instinct. Five more minutes, five more points, he told the boys against Waterford. That’s the attitude you want, and that’s what we’ll see in the Munster Final against Cork.  Do Mayo have that same killer instinct? We’ll have to wait ‘til later in the summer to see.

Football Championship Preview 2013

As the counties stand like greyhounds in the slips on the eve of another All-Ireland Championship, the 2011 Champions find themselves in an unusual position. It’s not that their being favourites to lift Sam is all that unusual, of course, but it is odd that this time there is no inflation in Dublin’s price. And what is positively eerie isn’t the absence of inflation but that it would be impossible for anyone but the most ardent of anti-metropolitans to begrudge them.

We have seen hyped Dublin teams in the past but for whatever reason – and it’s almost certain a combination of reasons, some planned, some happy happenstance – the current Dublin team are on the verge of forging a dynasty. They have quality in every line, radiating from captain Cluxton in goal all the way up to the full-forward line where Dublin have as many options as a Kardashian has shoes.

Opponents of Dublin’s chances talk of peaking too soon or being spoilt for choice or complacency or hype but it’s all clutching at straws. It’s hard to see anyone keeping the ball kicked out to Dublin in Leinster and after that it’s the luck of the draw whether they have sacrificial lamb for dinner on the August Bank Holiday weekend or they meet someone who can give them a game of it.

Who that someone might be is hard to pin down. The odds for the Championship make the past four All-Ireland Champions the favourites for this year, but it’s 10/1 on Mayo or Tyrone after that and then it’s an astonishing 20/1 the field.

If those prices are reflective of the counties’ relative standings, this could be one of the most unequal Championships in over a generation. What’s more, there are big question marks hanging over the other three top contenders, starting with the Champions.

Clare’s genius, Jamesie O’Connor is quoted in Denis Walsh’s excellent Hurling: The Revolution Years as saying that things fell apart from Clare because what it takes for a particular team to win its first All-Ireland is not at all like what it takes to win their second. Donegal are discovering that now. Like Loughnane’s Clare, Donegal were not so much men as a force of nature last year – will they be able to harness that again? The Bitegate business is a distraction that they didn’t need, and the other thing they didn’t need was to start their Championship against Tyrone. There are no easy games in Ulster, but some games are harder than others. If Donegal win, the adventure begins again, but it’s unlikely the Qualifiers would suit them.

There are many easy games in Munster, of course, and the same two teams will be present in the last eight, irrespective of which of them wins the Munster Championship. After that though, it gets a bit murky.

Neither county will ever suffer from a talent shortfall, but both Cork and Kerry have old panels, nearing the end of their days. Cork must be aware that their talent level of the past five or seven years deserved more than the one title they won, while Kerry are Kerry. The Kingdom are never satisfied, never to be written off, and always in the mix. Kerry are disregarded at your absolute peril and, if there is such a thing as a “soft” All-Ireland, it’s generally Kerry that wins it. It’s what they do.

Tyrone, Kerry’s bêtes noirs of the 21st Century, are looking good in Ulster. Seán Boylan is the only manager of the modern era to have won All-Irelands with two different teams. It would be fitting, and a feat begrudged by nobody, were that good man Mickey Harte to equal Boylan’s achievement. That said, anybody with a scintilla of romance or a feel for the history of the game will have noted Cavan’s stirrings at the Under-21 level and dreams of the day when Breifne rises again. Cavan take their bow this weekend against Armagh; best of luck to them.

In the lonesome west, Roscommon are ideally positioned. All westerners dream of relaxing in the long grass, the better to mount an ambush as the hay ripens into June and July. That’s where Roscommon are now, silently waiting on the winners of this weekend’s game in Salthill.

The penny is dropping for the nation that it’s been a long time since Galway were good. A man who studies football closely remarked to your correspondent a few weeks ago that Mayo would stroll Connacht, on the basis that Galway haven’t brought their Under-21s through. “But bejabbers,” says I, “what if this is the year?”

The danger is always lurking. If Galway do beat Mayo it means that Galway are back, and there is suddenly another contender to keep the ball kicked out to Dublin. Whether that will be enough to stop what looks like a skyblue and navy procession through the summer of 2013 is something we’ll have to wait and see.

As for Mayo – we’ll take a closer look at their chances later this week.

The Championship - Magnificent, in Spite of its Flaws

Francie Grehan surrounded by Tommy Joyce, Padraic Joyce, Alan Kerins and Ja Fallon. St Jarlath's Park, Tuam, 2001.

One of the quirks of the current football Championship structure is that, even though it takes twenty weeks to run the thing off, fully half the counties in Ireland are zapped over just two weekends.

Eight counties will rattle the dustbin on that weekend when June melts into July, and eight more bid glory a sweet adieu for another year fourteen days later. There are eleven games scheduled for that weekend of June 30^th/July 1^st – the eight Round 1 Qualifiers on Saturday, and then the second Ulster semi-final and both Leinster semis on Sunday. The Connacht Final is the grace note after the second Qualifier cull in the middle of July.

Having to keep tabs on eleven games in one weekend and nine in another is a Herculean ask of any football analyst. Thank goodness the RTÉ ones generally couldn’t bother their bottoms analysing anything. They and will merrily wing it, just like always. I believe Paddy McPlayer is playing very well for his club – isn’t that right Joe?

Of course, in between those rolling rocks of qualifier slaughter there is only one game. This year’s Munster Final sits in splendid isolation on Sunday July 8^th, even though Kerry and Cork are on the one side of the draw this year. Can most ardent of Déise, Treaty or Banner patriots, each more excellent than the last, expect anything other than one-way traffic in that one?

Nobody on any of the provincial councils has a phone number for anyone on any of the other councils, or for Croke Park. Every year they try to get the schedule right, and every year they can’t quite seem to manage it.

It was ever thus. The qualifiers are a joke, the scheduling is bockety, and the national broadcaster makes a very middling effort to give Gaelic football the serious analysis it deserves.

And despite all this, the glory of the Championship itself, for all its flaws, still shines incandescent through the summer. It captivates, infuriates enthralls and enraptures us, summer after summer, year after year.

This time last year the Championship looked like a two-horse race between Cork and Kerry. But the rebels got cold-cocked in the quarter-finals when Mayo forgot their place behind the door and Kevin McMenamon did what so few have been able to do in over one hundred years of All-Ireland finals – deliver Kerry a knock-out blow.

One year on, and Dublin have blazed a trail for the rest. Cork and Kerry remain favourites of course, but where Dublin lead other can follow. Dublin can even follow themselves – they enjoy home advantage all through the Championship, and have the boost that winning the title brings.

Mickey Harte is trying to do what only Seán Boylan has done before in the modern era, and build two different Championship winning teams. Kildare’s knocking on the door is getting louder and louder. Derry remain a mystery and Mayo – well, Mayo are a question for another day.

Sligo and New York fired the first shots of the Championship the week before last, and there are five games this weekend to keep things rolling. Of those five, Galway’s trip to Roscommon and Donegal’s trip to Cavan are the most appealing to people outside the counties involved.

The RTÉ panelists will hold their noses after the games. Somebody will dutifully patronise the players, while emphasising that none of this matter a whizz outside of June 10^th in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Which is exactly the attitude of people who can’t tell Jedward from Beethoven. To see the Championship as only being about the contenders is too see the great Pyramids at Giza and think they’re nice, alright, but wouldn’t they be even nicer with a nice bit of decking out the back?

The very existence of either the Championship or the Pyramids is a miracle in the 21^st Century, and something we should make the most of while either or both are still here.

Somebody will win the Championship this year, but that’s not the Championship is about. The Championship is about all these fantastic local rivalries, the myriad border words that are its heart, its soul and its splendor.

Besides, it’s a knockout Championship. Anyone can win the thing if their sails catch the wind and the ball hops right. Reader, think on the Hyde on Sunday and the great summers ahead, and drink deeply of the fine and tawny wine of its glory.

The West Wind - Mayo win the Connacht Final

Just how bad was the weather at the Connacht Final yesterday? Take a look at this picture of the graveyard end goal ten minutes into the second half.

The net behind the goal is billowing like the sails of the Santa Maria as she sped Columbus to America. And it’s a net – it’s full of holes for the wind to pass through. That’s how windy it was all during the game in Hyde Park yesterday, without respite, and that’s not even mentioning the rain, relentless and unforgiving, arriving in great sheets sweeping in from the west.

But someone had to win and that someone was Mayo. It would be unwise to read too much into the victory, or attempt to analyse a football game where so very little football was played. On a day like yesterday’s, victory is a bar of soap, grasped more by luck than by skill.

Gay Sheerin was harsh in his criticism of Roscommon on MWR afterwards, but that could be because his great heart was breaking, and that’s understandable. It seemed like it was more than a football game to Roscommon, and that’s a heavy burden. Fergal O’Donnell’s best policy may be to focus on the many positives from the game, put it behind them and get ready for the next day. There is no better man to do that than O’Donnell.

He could do worse than borrow a page from Wexford’s book in 1996, and have the squad assemble next weekend to watch Tyrone play Armagh for the right to play Roscommon and go on to Croke Park. Put a blackboard next to the screen and anytime any Roscommon panel member sees a reason why Roscommon can beat Armagh or Tyrone, up he goes and writes it on the board. After seventy minutes, Roscommon will be ready for action again.

As for James Horan, yesterday was vindication. His appointment came about in peculiar circumstances – to the say the least – but a Nestor Cup in your first year as manager of a team that contains youths so callow that they must follow Cúchulainn in smearing their chins with blackberries so the men of Erin will think them men, not boys; well, that’s pretty good.

And of course it’s not over yet. The quarter-final awaits, and whomever Mayo will play will find it hard to take Mayo seriously. That suits Mayo just fine. If Mayo win the quarter-final, there will be another reason to do down Mayo and that will continue until Mayo win an All-Ireland.

Maintaining perspective is one of the hardest things to do in life. This blather about Mayo’s sixty-year wait is just that; blather. John Maughan made football in August commonplace for Mayo support. Before that, there was only silence and the Galway hurlers.

The past twenty years have been the best years to support Mayo since the 1950s, and the county’s inability to give itself credit for those great years is one of the reasons why the final step was never taken. But it is by no means as far away as people would have you believe.

It may happen this year; if you’re good enough you’re old enough, and stranger things have happened in the history of the Association.

It may happen next year; Horan’s is a young team and there are fault lines in it that may be exposed later, even among those who don’t need the blackberried chins to be taken for men.

Or it may take longer than that, in which case; what’s another year, after all? All that matters is that Mayo are playing to the level of their ability and things look bright for the next couple of years. Everyone in Mayo can live with that. Maigh Eo abú.

The Connacht Final. Kind of a Big Deal

Sunday’s Connacht Final is a big deal and a sideshow all at the same time. Whoever goes home with the Nestor Cup on the front dash of the bus will be licking their chops at the prospect of a trip to Headquarters. Who loses will either run up a white flag or else realise that they can be right back to where the Connacht Champions are in seventy short minutes. But it’s not a given that shoe will drop and it’s fairly certain that nobody will want to take the chance if they can help it.

Fergal O’Donnell cannot be praised enough for all he’s done with Roscommon. To develop minors is a challenge. To integrate those into a shell of a team that’s been destroyed by various events over the past decade is a challenge.

But to do both those things, win a Connacht Final and now be in a position to dominate Connacht and challenge for national honours – because that’s what we’re talking about here – is nothing short of breath-taking. The man can’t be praised enough for what he’s done in his county’s hour of need.

Roscommon can win if they can shut down the O’Sheas, not let Mayo score heartbreaking goals and deliver ball to the boys that can use it – Shine, Kilbride and the rest. If that happens Roscommon return to Croke Park one year wiser from their loss to Cork and, of the teams left in the qualifiers, it’s only Cork they should fear. If they can go one step further, Roscommon are seventy minutes away from the All-Ireland final. That makes for one hell of a summer, and one that doesn’t have to end there either.

Mayo can win by doing the opposite of course – the O’Sheas dominating midfield, starving the Roscommon frontline while serving up the sort of ball that can make the Mayo inside lin the toast of the heather county.

Everything after that is a bonus for Mayo. Winning a quarter-final would be wonderful – and, like Roscommon, Cork are the only team in the qualifiers whom Mayo should fear – but age is against them. It’s a steep learning curve for manager and players. Of course, there is still that voice ag cúl an chinn that whispers: good enough, old enough. It’s no harm to listen to that voice every now again. What use a summer where dreaming is banned?

While the blood will course through the winners’ veins, the losers should allow themselves one night’s sulking, and no more. On Monday, they are only one game away from being in exactly the same position that the Connacht Champions are in, and they must get that truth into their heads quickly.

Everything that went wrong in the Connacht Final can be righted by one game, and then you’ve exactly the same chance as the Connacht Champions. It would not be great to draw the Munster Champions in the quarters, just as it would not be great to draw the Munster losers, but there you go. The odds are on your side either way and, if it’s a matter of a semi-final, Goliath might just wonder for a moment when he sees David marching from the West, thoughtfully swinging his slingshot and eying up the big man.

FOCAL SCOIR: Nobody really knows what’s going to happen over Roscommon Hospital and any protests to do with it at the Connacht Final. The people of Roscommon have clearly been led up the garden path on the matter and are right to be annoyed – more so because of the lies than the closure of the hospital itself, even. Everybody understands the country is broke but being lied to is hard to take. For all that, it would be a crying shame if the game were disrupted or fans were delayed or anything bad were to happen. I hope Mayo and Roscommon and the Galway minors can celebrate the west on Sunday, and it won’t be the last day out for any of us.

Champions League Format Me Hat - in Defence of the Irish Summer

There are three events that mark every Irish summer. They are, in reverse order, the climbing of the Reek, the saving of the hay and the well meaning but hopelessly naïve call for the GAA to scrap the Championship and replace it with a “Champions League” style competition.

Keith Barr and Mick O’Keeffe are the latest men to make this argument. You can read them yourselves, as there’s no need to break down the piece sentence by sentence here.

The reasons the Champions League style format is nonsense are many. Here are the two biggest.

Inter-county competition will always be unequal as long as there are unequal populations in the counties and unequal interest in the GAA within those counties. That is a fact of life. You might beat one of those realities, as Offaly have in their history and please God will do again, but you can’t beat both.

The only way to create an equal playing field is do away with the birth qualification for players, so that counties could pick from the same pool. The cost of that would be soul of the Association itself.

An Spailpín suspects that the single most important thing that drives the GAA is pride of place. A Mayo team that can only be filled by Mayomen is worth one hundred All-Irelands lost. A Championship team of ringers and mercenaries is worth less than nothing.

Pride of place is more important than the game for the majority of people, myself included. Inequality is the price of regional identity. It’s a price worth paying.

The second reason is given to us by Doctor Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs. How we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

A Champions League style format doesn’t present us with things we see every day. It presents us with things we’ve never seen before. It seeks out things to covet, and ignores what we see every day, and think about every day, and look forward to every day.

A Champions League style format on the Barr/O’Keeffe model wipes out over one hundred years of history, and wishes us to pretend that a game between Mayo and Laois will have the same attraction as Mayo v Roscommon or Laois v Offaly.

Well, it doesn’t and it won’t, even though Laois played in Division 2 this year and the Ros Division 4. It might, of course, in the 125 years it’ll take the Champions League format to be as old as the current Championship, but it doesn’t seem sufficiently likely to bet the organisation’s future on it.

We don’t seek out things to covet. We covet what we know. Mayo playing Galway nearly every year isn’t boring. If Mayo playing Galway ever year is boring, then so is Christmas, so are the Galway Races, so is the Rose of Tralee and so is the US Masters. They are all infinite rhapsodies on a central theme. Always the same, always utterly different, every single time.

The Championship needs reform, of course. Even the Eifel Tower gets a soupçon of paint every now and again. An Spailpín’s own reform would be to return the Qualifiers to the Hell from whence they came. Nothing good can come of a system that supports the strong and punishes the weak. Failing that, deny a qualifier place for the current Champions, and see who takes their provincial championship seriously then.

But the chief thing An Spailpín would like to see is a little deeper analysis of what the GAA and the Championship actually are, rather than simplistic comparisons to what happens somewhere else.

Because there is nothing like the GAA Championship, anywhere. It’s doubly unique – a hugely popular amateur association that insists on loyalty of place being more important than exultation of talent.

Irish writers, poets and scientists should be pouring over this thing, and celebrating it for what it is – a unicorn, a magical mythical creature that somehow still exists in a base and materialistic world.

Instead, we get people wanting to burn the horn right off the unicorn to have it look like just another pony, and then wonder in a few years why nobody comes to see it any more.

Beware, Beware the Ross on the Rise

Michael Foley of the Sunday Times is one of today’s best GAA journalists, but he was wrong to write a fortnight ago that this year’s Connacht Championship would not be a good one. It may prove one of the all-time greats.

It seems an article of faith in the national media that Connacht is a two horse race, just as Munster is. Foley went a step further, by suggesting that Galway’s current and undeniable decline is a reflection of a fuller provincial malaise.

Michael Foley is wrong. Galway are in decline, certainly, and it’s hard to see how they’ll turn it around by the summer. They’re bunched. But Connacht is bigger than Galway alone.

Leitrim welcome the return of Emlyn Mulligan and with him around they are always a threat if they don’t get scutched at the back. No team has more to prove than Sligo after calving in Connacht Final last year. Mayo aren’t too bad but Roscommon is the team that An Spailpín is keeping a close eye on this year. The primrose and blue have a lean and hungry look, and it’s not just coming from spending too much time at one of Luke Flanagan’s clinics.

The two horse race analogy was never correct in the first place. Roscommon teams are not the strangers to September that analogy would have you believe. Roscommon have not as many Nestor Cups as Mayo or Galway, but they have more provincial football titles than the four Munster counties who aren’t Cork or Kerry combined.

The backdoor works against Roscommon, and it’s possible that their missing decade was due to psychological damage after being the first real victims of the back door. Being managed by Tommy “Tom” Carr didn’t help either, of course.

But that was then and this is now. A veteran St Brigid’s team will face Crossmaglen in the All-Ireland Club Final on St Patrick’s Day, hoping to go one better than the Clann na Gael teams of the early ‘nineties. An unrated Roscommon Under-21 team dogged out a win over a very highly rated Mayo Under-21 team in Castlebar on Saturday. And the Roscommon golden generation that won the minor All-Ireland title in 2006 is being skilfully woven into the senior side by Fergal O’Donnell, who managed them to that win in 2006.

Roscommon are playing Division 4 football now, of course, and can’t afford a slip-up as they fight for promotion. They haven’t slipped so far, and An Spailpín Fánach can’t get it out of his head that winning against Fermanagh and Longford in the League can’t be all bad – not least in comparison to losing against Mayo, Kerry and whoever else shows up as Galway are currently doing.

The national media may not be aware of the sound of drums along the shores of Lough Ree, but Connacht is. Not least in Mayo. People talk about border rivalries in football – Mayo has the greatest border rivalry of all, as the Ballaghderreen club isn’t even on the border. It’s six miles behind enemy lines.

Heart is mentioned in the Roscommon county motto – the constant heart of Ireland. An Spailpín Fánach knows of no prouder county, and can only imagine how O’Donnell and the rest of the Roscommon brains trust are mixing the scalding hurt of the past ten years with the still-bright memories of the great Roscommon teams of the past to make a very potent football potion.

Mayo will not run scared of Roscommon. There are garments being rendered at the prospect of relegation after defeats to Kerry and Armagh currently of course, but there is no life outside the high summer in the GAA now. Mayo have had some good under-age teams too.

But while Mayo will not run scared of Roscommon, they certainly won’t be thinking they only have to show up to beat them. Not least in Ballaghderreen, where the smoking altars to their strange and pagan Roscommon gods, Kee-gahn, J’gerr, Muh-ree and the rest remind the Mayo faithful that Roscommon are on the rise again.

Two Gaelic Football Bets for the Weekend

Tradition is the funny man. The lazy notion that’s been prevalent in some media about the Connacht Championship being strictly an either/or affair between Mayo and Galway down the years is not true.

Roscommon have had a nightmare decade but they have a proud football tradition – not as successful as Mayo or Galway but considerably better than the other three Connacht teams combined. Roscommon have two All-Ireland titles, nineteen Nestor Cups and four All-Ireland runner up appearances, and every man, woman and child in Roscommon are fully aware of that as they fly under the radar to the Connacht Final in Castlebar on Sunday.

Roscommon were never as successful as Cavan in their pomp but Roscommon haven’t fallen as far as Cavan yet, although it looked very bleak for a while. Boxing Sligo’s ears for them would be something that would help remind the new generation of their responsibilities to those that wore the primrose and blue with such staggering pride in the past.

An Spailpín has seen the Rossie support at matches in recent years, their constant hearts breaking as humiliation heaped on humiliation. But still they came back. They never deserted the colours. The desolate stands at Salthill or as expected later today at Headquarters are hard to imagine replicated in the Hyde, and that fierce pride counts.

Counting against Roscommon is the fact that Sligo are the better team this year, any way you slice them. Sligo have better players and, while you can only dance with the girls in the hall, Sligo’s will and resolve will have been tempered by a path to the Final that went through Mayo and two games with Galway.

Historically, Sligo would have wilted in the replay after Galway reeled them back in Salthill, but this is a New Model Sligo. If the Yeats county do win on Sunday they are the unquestionably the greatest Sligo team ever and there’s no reason why they should set a horizon on their ambitions.

The media will set the provincial title as the limit of their ambition but if you look at the road to September and of whom Sligo should be afraid – well, it could be one Hell of a summer for them yet.

But first they must get past Roscommon. Sligo are no price at 2/7 and, while we wouldn’t be surprised if the Ross rose again, we wouldn’t expect it so much as to part with folding green in a recession economy.

However, there is a good bet available for the Connacht Final, and that is that there will be more than one goal scored between the two teams, currently quoted at 4/5 and rising on Betfair.

The Sligo fullback line is dodgy and Roscommon suffer from a lack point-scorers. This suggests that a few scuds into either Donie Shine or Karol Mannion on the edge of the square will be an avenue that Roscommon will be eager to explore.

Equally, the Sligo corner forwards have shown an assassin’s touch so far this summer and the mighty Cake is no longer between the sticks for the Ross. Over 1.5 goals in the Connacht Final is a good bet.

Only a madman would bet on Derry v Kildare or Offaly v Down, as not one of the four of them can be relied upon to play up or down to recent form, which is very much when the only way to make money is to keep it in the póca. Cork will almost certainly slaughter Wexford, but they’re no price at all and that’s no good to us.

However, Armagh are quoted at 13/8 against 6/4 on favourites Dublin at a deserted Croke Park later today and that is one price that An Spailpín cannot get his head around at all. The matchless Kevin Egan believes that Dublin can win pulling up but Dublin appear a team in disarray swirling down the crazy river to your regular correspondent.

Armagh have their problems since the glory days ended but my goodness gracious, 13/8? I am kurious, Oranj, but that’s a hearty bargain that doesn’t come along every day. A bag of groats, then, on the Orchard County this evening before looking to the blessed West tomorrow.

Rosserini Fight the Good Fight

Roscommon is a fine county, and it’s always a highlight of the summer when Mayo play the sheepstealers.

Roscommon and Offaly - midlanders both - are two of An Spailpín Fánach’s favourite GAA counties. They lack the population of Dublin, Cork, Galway or Mayo but what pride and heart they bring to the occasion. You may win against them but you will never defeat them. For them, the road goes ever on.

Mayo supporters are spoiled with success. Certainly the summers of 1996, 1997, 2004 and 2006 did not end as the Mayo support would have hoped, but until the throw in on those fateful September Sundays, didn’t we have days? Didn’t we? Rich memories to call back in emptier times – the first Mayo supporters to walk up the hill as winners in Tuam since 1951. Defeating Kerry in 1996. Beating Galway after conceding 1-3 in the first ten minutes. Beating Tyrone. Beating Dublin.

Roscommon have existed on the other side of the football world in the past twenty years, as the magical era of Earley, O'Connor, Keegan and Lindsay fades to sepia. Living on scraps. Suffering a cruel and hideous fate in the first year of the qualifier system. Going through managers the way the HSE goes through money – that is to say, like a devouring flame, leaving a scorched and barren earth behind them.

That may change on Sunday. It may not. Hard to say without seeing a team, of course. But from what we can read from the runes of the year so far, many things will have to go wrong for Mayo and right for Roscommon for the Ross to claim their first win in McHale Park since – can it be? – 1986.

Mayo’s boy-king Aidan O’Shea is the cornerstone. He will almost certainly start at full-forward and if he goes well in there the Rossies might be heading for the gates by half-time. If, however, John Nolan or David Casey can keep him under control, then it gets interesting.

If Barry Moran starts beside O’Shea he can give the Rossies more of the same and something, surely, has to give. If it’s Andy Moran, however, shutting down Aidan O’Shea and stopping Conor from hitting the deck for those soft frees may reduce the Mayo scoring rate entirely. Dillon will cut away from distance and Pat Harte always threatens a goal-rampage, but Mayo are reliant on the Shea-on-the-square strategy for 2009. If it’s not happening for O’Shea, Mayo will have cause for concern.

But even then it’s still an uphill task for Roscommon. Michael Finneran in midfield is a Rossie of the old school but Mayo have a choice from McGarrity, Parsons and Harte to take him on and the Roscommon midfield may be living on scraps. The forwards have to maximise those scraps then against a Mayo rearguard that are certainly improved from last year, and the Rosserini have to do it without Cathal Cregg and for whom Senan Kilbride may not be functioning at one hundred per cent either.

Ladbrokes have made Mayo five point favourites for the game on Saturday, with Roscommon 4/1 longshots for the upset on the outright. Antrim were 9/2 last week against Donegal, and John O’Mahony will be able to use that to cut out any complacency from creeping in. It looks like another bleak day at the office for the constant hearts but, in the light of all they have suffered and their inviolate pride and immense appetite for the fray, it will be hard begrudge Roscommon should they have a famous night in Castlebar.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, culture, GAA, football, Mayo, Roscommon, Championship 09

John Maughan, Colm Coyle, and the Butterfly Effect

John Maughan fell on his sword as Roscommon manager last night. The writing has been on the wall for some time. Maughan was always an odd fit in Roscommon, as any Mayoman might be in that fiercely proud county, and once the results started to go wrong the rope was always going to be twisted for him.

It’s unfortunate, too, that this ugly business has developed between Maughan and the Roscommon supporters. GAA supporters can be astonishing in their levels of abuse. It should be noted, however, that Roscommon has some of the best supporters in Ireland. We often read in the papers how winning an All-Ireland is “necessary” for some counties in order to promote Gaelic football in those counties; this is not necessary in Roscommon. Even now, when Roscommon’s May 18th Championship fixture looks likely to make Salthill look like Normandy in 1944 you may rest assured that, even against daunting odds, the Rossies will be there in numbers, chests out, primrose and blue flags fluttering amidst the shot and shell.

Perhaps John Maughan himself will be there as well, doing radio commentary with RTÉ. Whoever is the new manager of Roscommon has a free throw at this Championship; if he succeeds, meaning beats Galway, then he’s a Messiah, and if he loses it was all Maughan’s fault anyway. It’s hard to win.

No-one knows how hard it is to win more than Maughan himself of course. Now, in 2008, having been run out of Roscommon, run out of Mayo in his second coming and having walked out of Fermanagh, John Maughan is synonymous with being a loser. He is hated in Mayo for falling out with players like David Brady, Kevin O’Neill and Peter Butler. And all the incredible, genuinely incredible achievements of his career as a manager are eclipsed by the fact that Mayo did not win an All-Ireland while John Maughan was manager.

Before Ger Loughnane led the hurlers to glory in Clare in 1995, John Maughan managed the Clare footballers to victory over Kerry in the Munster Final. Astonishing. Three years later, post the Jack O’Shea and committee management eras, Mayo were languishing in Division 3 of the football league – one division below where Roscommon are now, you’ll note – and Maughan led Mayo to a League semi-final and an All-Ireland Final replay. There was strolling room on Hill 16 when Mayo hammered Kerry by six points in 1996, and the porter was sweeter on Dorset Street than it’s been before or since. Who remembers that now?

Critics of Maughan say it was his inflexibility that cost Mayo those All-Irelands. Without that inflexibility, that frightening drive that he could summon, would Mayo have got there in the first place? On the evidence of the prior four years – humiliated in Tuam, humiliated by Leitrim, humiliated by Cork, humiliated by Donegal – not hardly. In his marvellous book on the recent history of Mayo football Keith Duggan recounts Maughan training regimes with Clare, where he shamed the panel by having his wife, Audrey, outrun the Bannermen on the beaches, and with Mayo, when Maughan devoted himself to getting Anthony “Fat Larry” Finnerty fit. It’s Full Metal Jacket stuff, but it got results.

But not the result. The ne plus ultra result.

It’s untrue to say that it was inflexibility that cost Maughan those All-Irelands. What cost Maughan everlasting glory in the county Mayo was the fact that Colm Coyle was able to point from seventy yards – on the half-volley! – to draw the first game in the miracle summer of 1996, and then got sent off instead of John McDermott in the second.

Everything else follows from that. The performance against Kerry in 1997 was abject, and by then the novelty of not being on our knees had worn off in Mayo. It was time to pick holes. By the time Mayo lost another Ireland, in 2004, the County Board spent 2005 waiting for Maughan to slip up and when he did, it was so long, thanks for nothing.

Colm Coyle is at the heart of the butterfly effect that saw John Maughan run out of Roscommon this morning. The butterfly effect is that phenomenon of Chaos Theory that states a butterfly’s wings flapping in Hawaii can cause, ultimately, a hurricane in Kansas. And so it’s come to pass. If Colm Coyle had not pointed that shot, Mayo would have held on to win their first All-Ireland since the ‘fifties, and John Maughan would never have been manager of Roscommon, because we’d still be buying his porter for him in Mayo. That’s the difference.

How thin a line is it? This thin: before, in their infinite wisdom, replacing it with Des Cahill’s rather disappointing Road to Croker, RTÉ had a magnificent GAA magazine show called “Breaking Ball.” One of the segments of that show was called Heaven and Hell, where great GAA figures relived moments of either Heaven or Hell from their careers. Coyler was on once, and they asked him to shoot from seventy yards, to see if he could do it again. He didn’t get close of course, and fell around laughing at some of his attempts, in the way that only the man that has the ballast of the All-Ireland medal in the back pocket can. And at the other end of the continuum, the scorching wind of Coyle’s seventy-yard shot still buffets and reverberates around John Maughan.

It’s easy to point a finger at John Maughan now and damn him as inflexible, as callous, as aloof, as tanned. If it’s any relief to him, Maughan can identify his butterfly moment, the seemingly inconsequential moment at the time whose reverberations have got bigger and bigger as the years march on. Reader, who among us can do the same? You may call John Maughan loser, punk, bum and tanned if you must, but remember: there but for the grace of God go we all.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, GAA, football, John Maughan, Colm Coyle, Mayo, Roscommon