The Gospel According to Darragh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. Farewell then, Eugene McGee, Conqueror of the Conqueror of the World

Buaiteoir Buaiteora an Domhain

Alexander II, Tsar of all the Russias, described the Duke of Wellington as the “conqueror of the conqueror of the world” after Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. And it’s a fitting epitaph also for Eugene McGee, who died suddenly on Sunday morning.

McGee was a complex man. One of the greatest Gaelic football managers, while one of its worst players. A sometimes dour, if not downright rude, man who could inspire fierce loyalty. A pundit who was at once blinkered and revolutionary.

But whatever else is said or written of the man, and for all the great and terrible personal loss he is for his family, Eugene McGee will forever be associated with 1982, and the greatest All-Ireland football final the nation has ever seen.

We are lucky that, in an Association whose dedication to preserving its own history is spotty at best, we have a marvellous document of that Offaly team, their spectacular act of giant-killing, and a Kerry Golden Generation that came back from that defeat to become even more lustrous than before. It is Kings of September by Michael Foley, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Ireland. Essential reading.

McGee is not noted as a Gaelic football tactician, as Jim McGuinness or Mickey Harte are. He liked his football, to use his own phrase, “tough, but manly.” Both Roy Keane and Graeme Souness have been preaching the worth of getting to the damn ball and worrying about tactics later in another code. McGee was of their church.

So was he lucky, or was he good? The results are there. Mick O’Dwyer conquered the world, and McGee conquered Dwyer. McGee was successful with UCD in Sigerson football, Offaly in senior inter-county, and even in International Rules, back when the Australians cared in the ‘eighties. (After an Irish triumph, some Australians believed that the Irish had an advantage because the game was played with a round ball. McGee was asked if he thought the Australians would have won if the games were played with the Australian oval ball. “We’d have won playing with a square ball,” spat McGee).

McGee was a proponent of the black card and the qualifier system, and was wrong on both counts in the opinion of the current writer. He believed that the first step to professionalism in the GAA came with sponsored jerseys, and was correct, again in the opinion of the current writer.

But that’s all these things are; opinions. The man’s record cannot be denied, and neither can the personality, the cut, the gimp of the man. He was proudly rural in a way that didn’t even allow for a rural-urban debate. He was who he was, and he made neither bones nor apologies about it.

It is possible that, reading the eulogies today, some misfortunate sophist with a algorithm where his or her soul ought to be will sit down and watch a tape of that 1982 final. He’ll see a game played on a wet day, with poor fitness levels compared to modern standards, poor skill levels compared to modern standards, and a game in which the best team did not win.

Reader, pity that man. There are those who would look on a rose and see only a bush, or hear a symphony and hear only noise.

The scientific approach to sport has its place, of course, but if it reigns supreme then sport becomes just another job, with carefully measured outputs and inputs and strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats.

It’s the sheer human drama of sports that compels, as players battle skills, yes, but also bravery and courage and the huge hand of Fate itself.

Sport is at once serious and trivial. Winning the All-Ireland is the most important thing in the year, after everything else, like births, marriages and deaths. There is a ceiling to how much sport can be parsed.

A wise and thoughtful friend of the blog cried when Kerry lost in 1982. He believed in merit as a child, and that the best team should win. And if that game between Kerry and Offaly were played ten times, Kerry would win it nine times. Of course they would. But the game was played only once, and Kerry didn’t win it. Offaly did, in the most unforgettable moment in Irish sport.

That could not have happened without Eugene McGee. Offaly went one stage further in the Championship every year he was in charge until they won the entire thing, and they did it at that turning point in history when the greatest team of all time were set to collect the uncollectable crown.

If that’s not the very illustration of the sublime, what is? And none of it could have happened without Eugene McGee, now called Home to his Reward. Suaimhneas síoraí dó, agus go raibh príomh-áit aige i nDáil na Laochra Gael.

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.

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.

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.

2017 Football Championship Preview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Football Championship Preview

People used to decry the lack of competitiveness in the Championship during the era of the Big Four. In 2016, the Big Four era looks like a wide-open contest that anyone might win.

Paddy Power is offering slightly better than even money on Dublin winning the 2016 Championship. That is a short, short price in a 32-horse race. There is clear separation from the rest as we look down the board – Kerry are second favorites at 3/1, Mayo 11/2, new kids on the block Tyrone at 12/1 and it’s 16/1 the field after that. So, football is now reflective of Irish life in general – both are a case of Dublin and then the rest.

Is there any point in running the Championship at all? Well, yes there is. Dublin are clearly the best team in Ireland and would win a US-style best-of-seven series against anybody, with very few teams, if any, being able to take them to the seventh game.

But the Championship doesn’t have best-of-seven series. Come August it’s all about turning up on the day and, in knockout competitions, upsets are always possible.

The biggest problem Jim Gavin has is keeping his team focused. The Leinster Championship, to the shame of the all counties involved other than Dublin, is a joke. One-time super-powers like Meath, Offaly, Kildare and others should be humiliated to have fallen so low. Instead, they seem to accept their position in the ashes.

Dublin have always been the big dogs in Leinster, but even when Meath, say, lost to Dublin, Dublin knew generally knew that they had been in a game. That hasn’t been the case in some time, and there is no reason – none – to suspect that’s going to change.

Which means Dublin have three hurdles to clear to retain the All-Ireland. Gavin’s job is to for them to keep their edge in the three months between now and August, when Dublin’s season begins.

Dublin, as ever, are bathed in hype. The modern Dublin team does more to live up to it than its predecessors, but the hype is still there. Oisin McConville was one of few to call Dublin out for being poor for long periods against Kerry in the League Final. People who are interested in winning this year’s All-Ireland should note the mental frailty that Dublin displayed there, and know just how very hard it is to maintain concentration over a long season of going through the motions in Leinster.

The other thing that aspirants to glory should note is that Dublin are very used to having things their own way. What will they be like when things start going against them? Gavin has drawn a lot of praise for having learned the lesson of Dublin’s defeat against Donegal in 2014. Have Dublin really learned a lesson, or have they just not come up against a team that questioned them the way that Donegal questioned them?

The team that will beat Dublin need a McGuinness at the blackboard to plot Dublin’s destruction. Is there anybody among the contenders that could lay claim to such a level of generalship?

Yes, there is. It is Tyrone. Since the era of the manager began in the mid-seventies, only one man has guided two generations of teams to All-Irelands – Seán Boylan with Meath in 1987-’88 and again, with a new team in 1996 and 1999. Mickey Harte has it within his power to emulate Boylan, and to end his time with Tyrone on yet another high. The only question is if his players can execute on the pitch what Mickey will have plotted in his head. And only time will tell that.

Equally, short of meeting them in the final, beating Dublin does not mean you win the All-Ireland. Donegal, 20/1 longshots to win the All-Ireland this year, can tell you all about that. The demise of Dublin would spur on the rest just as much as it would those who defeated Dublin, and open the competition out again.

Kerry most of all. It would be interesting to know whom the average Kerryman would prefer to meet in an All-Ireland, Dublin or Tyrone. Chances are he doesn’t know himself. Tyrone have been under Kerry’s skin since 2003 but Kerry really expected to beat Dublin in the final-that-didn’t-count a few weeks ago. Their frustration at not only not doing so, but getting hammered by a coasting Dublin team, was clearly evident at full time. Kerry can’t be in a good place in the heads right now.

The other major contender that are seldom in a good place in the their heads are Mayo, of course. More on them and their prospects tomorrow. In the meantime, Dublin are the pick but if you’re having a bet, Tyrone is a sensible investment at about 12/1.

Won't Anybody Think of Kieran Donaghy?

The last fancy eats he'll see for a while.

The Gaelic Players’ Association, or GPA, like to make a big song and dance about the suffering of the inter-county player, and the great efforts that the GPA make to help those forced to wear that crown of thorns, that overladen creel, that 21st Century hairshirt that is the county jersey.

As far as the GPA are concerned, the county player, like lovely Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, is worth it.

“County players are separately [separate, that is, to the club players who make up 98% of the GAA’s playing population, and should be glad of the seat at the back of the bus, the scuts – ASF] supported through a Development Programme in specific recognition of their commercial importance and significance to the GAA in three main areas - the sale of sponsorship deals, broadcast rights and gate receipts.” says the GPA’s FAQ page.

What your correspondent can’t get through his cabbage head is why, for all their rhetoric about elite tier players and commercial significance, one of the most elite of Gaelic football’s elite tier players is currently on the brink of penury and ruin while the GPA seems to be doing nothing – nothing! – to support him.

The Indian Summer of Kieran Donaghy was one of the stories of last year’s Championship, and the single most important factor in Kerry’s winning of their 37th All-Ireland. Donaghy has been named captain of Kerry this year and what is his thanks? He’s out of a job. That’s his thanks.

The Irish Independent reported last week that Donaghy has quit a fine job in the bank in the heat of the worst recession in Europe since the 1930s because of his football commitments. What’s the man expected to live on? Air? And him with a young family to support as well. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is. It’s a scandal.

Where are the thousand GPA swords leaping from their scabbards to protest this injustice? Why isn’t Dónal Óg Cusack doing a piece to VT for RTÉ Prime Time, followed quickly by Minister for Sport, Transport and Tourism Pascal Donohoe being asked “but Minister – what about the children?” by Miriam O’Callaghan over and over again?

It’s a long time between now and 2016, when Donaghy will be able to work again. It’s a long time to be without a steady income. The steadfast Gaels of Erin endured rapine, famine and oppression for eight hundred years before our Gaelic culture, handed down to us by Almighty God, was able to take its place among the cultures of the earth, and were glad to do it. Are we now to stand idly by while one of our greatest current exponents of Gaelic football, that jewel of Gaelic culture and sportsmanship and athleticism, starves on the side of the road?

Can we bear the thought of Kieran Donaghy, a hero and role model to the youth of Ireland, living from hand to mouth for an entire year, never knowing where his next hot meal is coming from? Is he to spend the next twelve months using one teabag for four mugs of tea, watering down the breakfast milk and – horror of horrors! – economizing further by ating rice instead of spuds with his dinner? I should bloody hope not.

This column knows where our duty lies. This column calls on all Gaels to rally to the cause. Footballers, hurlers, handballers, Scór tin-whistlers and even whoever exactly it is that claims to play rounders are to get out now and start collecting non-perishable goods, clothing, fuel and other necessities of survival and common human dignity. Parcels are to be made up and shipped to Kieran Donaghy, c/o Fitzgerald Stadium, Killarney, Co Kerry.

Blankets would be good too – with the way the summer is shaping up already, the poor man might be glad of them. And when winter comes around, maybe someone can stick a knife in that damned Bóthar goat and send the carcass down to Donaghy. He can ate the thing himself and then try to flog the skin to a bodhrán-maker to get the price of a bowl of hot soup or something. Star will need all the help he can get in the long, cold winter.

Championship 2015: To Have and Have Not

Pundit and expert GAA tipster Kevin Egan noted some years ago that teams don’t come from nowhere to win football All-Irelands anymore. Campaigns like those of the three successive Ulster winners of the early nineties don’t happen in modern football.

The last team to come from nowhere to win Sam was Galway in 1998, three years before the Qualifiers were introduced. Since then, nobody has won an All-Ireland without serving their apprenticeship first, and many apprentices have come and gone in those years with less to show for it than they might have had in earlier, more innocent times.

Paddy Power’s odds on this year’s Championship show a clear striation between haves and have nots. Kerry and Dublin, winners of four of the last five titles, sit looking down on the rest like Olympian gods. Past performance gives (slim) hope for the next three counties – Mayo, Donegal and Cork – while everybody else just seems to be making up the numbers.

Of the longshots, it’s interesting to see Galway are more favoured than Monaghan or Roscommon – something that will have them hopping from one foot to the other with fury from Boyle to Ballymoe – but that’s the enduring power of a Brand, as the morketing people like to say.

The quarter-finals are the killing fields of the minnows’ dreams. The breakthrough team either meets its Waterloo at the quarter-final, like Monaghan in 2013, or has nothing left in the tank by the semi-final, like Mayo in 2011. The most a team in those circumstances can hope for is a scalp, as Mayo claimed Cork’s in 2011. If the team doesn’t then improve in the following year or two, back to the pack it sinks, while someone else takes a turn.

There is nobody in Leinster who can keep it kicked out to Dublin, sadly. It’s been said that Dublin should not be blamed for being so far ahead of the provincial pack, and so they shouldn’t. But counties with football traditions like Kildare, Meath and Offaly should burn with shame at the shambles they find themselves currently in.

In the other three provinces, there are teams on the rise. Roscommon, obviously. Tipperary, maybe. Armagh, maybe. Monaghan are teetering on that point where they must advance or slide back. Of those four, three have a shout of travelling through the front door while Tipperary claiming Munster would not only a be a shock but it might be the end of them. The Qualifiers are not a fair system.

Nobody will care much for playing Tipperary in the Qualifiers, but whom Tipp meet in the quarters – if they get that far – will determine how much longer they can play football. Tipperary v Roscommon would be a perfect tie for both counties’ supporters, but not, perhaps, so good for either team’s development. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – best for them to take it one match at a time.

Of the five contenders, Cork get the easiest ride for disappointing so often. This is a mixed blessing. It’s nice for the footballers not to get abused on the street as can happen in other counties, but it’s also sad because the footballers know in their hearts that they’re not getting abused out of politeness, but out of indifference. That’s a disgrace for so fine a football county.

Donegal and Mayo are both in periods of transition management, where someone has had to take over from an iconic leader. Donegal choose continuity. Mayo did not. How their seasons will pan out may end up being reflections of those choices. There are those who see Donegal as being on the wrong side of the hill but at least they’ve been to the top – not something Mayo can say, sadly. More about Mayo’s perennial dilemma anon.

As for the Olympians, it’s a 50/50 matchup. If I were to pick one, I’d pick Kerry. They have the richer tradition, which counts, and I’m not sure if this stuff about an un-ending stream of talent on a Dublin conveyor belt is quite true. Dublin have always had a rich pick of players, through good times and bad. What’s happening right now is that Dublin are blessed to have players who are exceptionally talented in the modern game, most notably Stephen Cluxton and Michael Darragh MacAuley, and a player who’d stroll onto any team in any era, Diarmuid Connolly. It’ll be some conveyor belt that will replace those boys.

Why Do Kerry Keep Winning?

There have been two great Kerry generations in the past thirty years. There was the Golden Years team of the 1970s and 80s, featuring men so famous in the game they are known by one name only –Jacko, Ogie, Páidí, Bomber. And there is the Darragh Ó Sé generation, where that great man had the likes of Paul Galvin, Colm Cooper and, of course, his brothers Tomás and Marc to help him out.

But it is mistaken analysis to think that that Kerry rack up All-Irelands the way they do because they enjoy golden generations the way the hurlers of Cork, Kilkenny or Tipp enjoy golden generations. No. Kerry lead the pack in terms of football All-Irelands won, thirty-seven titles in comparison to Dublin’s twenty-four in second place, because whenever a year looks like being below average, when a title is there to be picked up a team that is not outstanding, it’s generally Kerry that do the picking-up.

Above anything, Kerry are hungry for titles. Hungry in a way that’s hard to describe to those who have never experienced such a combination of want and obligation. If Kerry have a choice of playing to tradition or playing to win, they will play to win one hundred per cent of the time, because winning is the only thing. And what’s more, Kerry are dead right in doing so.

All-Irelands are won against teams in the here-and-now. They are not won against some mythical standard, existing pristine and immaculate in the collective Gaelic imagination.

Kerry go into every game knowing what it is they have to do and grim-set and determined to do it. You often hear of lesser teams that “have no Plan B” when they are dumped out of the Championship. You never hear that of Kerry.

Kerry have more plans than the alphabet has letters. Science-fiction fans may remember the second Terminator movie, that featured a virtually-indestructible robot that could adapt itself to its environment, that could be whatever it needed to be in any situation. Reader, that is Kerry football in a nutshell.

You want to play fancy? Kerry will play fancy, and win 3-18 to your 1-22. You want to box? Kerry will box, and win 0-9 to 0-8. It’s all the same to them. There are no asterisks on the roll of honour. All that’s there is a list of years. Thirty-seven of them in Kerry’s case, with room for plenty more.

And that’s exactly what Kerry did yesterday. Instead of being too proud to play Donegal’s game, they played Donegal’s game better than Donegal themselves. You dance with the girls in the hall and nobody, but nobody, does that better than Kerry.

In recent year, the nation outside of the Kingdom has been given a precious insight into just how Kerry look at things, thanks to Darragh Ó Sé’s column in the Irish Times every Wednesday, and Jack O’Connor’s before him. They are invaluable insights into a GAA football county that is like no other, and help us to understand how exactly it is that Kerry maintain standards in their Kingdom, year after year, generation after generation.

For instance: it is a thing in some counties to protect players from reading criticism on social media. The idea is that the players will retire to their bedrooms, weeping at the hurt, and won’t come out in play football anymore. In Kerry, they think a little differently about how to make up-and-coming aware of what life in the big time is like.

Billy Keane recounted a story about David Moran, one of this year’s All-Star midfielders, during his first time on the Kerry panel, when Darragh Ó Sé was still the old bull in the field. Ó Sé hit Moran a slap that left Moran with a badly-cut mouth. Keane asked Ó Sé what the hell he did that for.

“David is too nice,” said Darragh. “I was trying to put a bit of fire in him. He doesn't get it yet just how hard it is.” That’s what it’s like at the top. A bit more severe than some randomer saying that you’re smelly on Twitter.

But Kerry have one other incredible asset that no other county has, or is likely to have anytime soon. Kerry has the richest football tradition in Ireland.

One difference between playing Kerry in Croke Park and playing them in Limerick is that you can hear what the Kerry support are saying. And the amazing thing is, they all say the same thing.

In Mayo, if Aidan O’Shea has possession and is travelling towards goal, from the half-forward to the full-forward line, one-third of the Mayo support will urge him to go on and bury it, one third will implore him to pass, for God’s sake, and the remaining third will beg O’Shea, on their mothers’ lives, to take his bloody point.

In Kerry, they all shout the same thing. Kerry football people know exactly the right thing to do at any particular point in the game. That’s how deep football is in their marrow. And what they don’t know, they learn quickly.

Another county might have folded their tents after the infamous “puke football” semi-final of 2003. Kerry didn’t. Kerry learned how to play the new system, and have won five titles in the eleven years since. What they couldn’t beat, they joined.

And that’s the lesson for all the other counties in Ireland, now that the 2014 season is over. If you want to beat them, you have to join them. You must do as the best does if you’re to live with them and hope to beat them.

But that’s for another year. In the meantime, hard luck Donegal, and well done Kerry, deserving All-Ireland winners of 2014.

Mayo v Kerry, Down Through the Years

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Kerry and Mayo are both western, coastal counties, with neither one likely to be mistaken for somewhere in the Golden Vale or the Garden of Ireland. Both are ravaged by emigration, both have Gaeltachta, and they even share an obsession with Gaelic football.

But here is the difference – when it comes to football, Kerry win and Mayo lose.

Every country’s folk literature has prince and pauper stories – two boys who look exactly alike but, through accidents of fate, are living completely different lives. In Gaelic football, Kerry are the royal sons, enjoying the spoils of victory. Mayo … well, Mayo are down in the scullery, washing the potatoes.

It’s hard to believe in the light of current events, but the Mayo and Kerry rivalry hasn’t always been one-sided. Kerry faced Mayo as Munster Champions when Mayo won their third and last All-Ireland, in 1951. They drew the first semi-final before Mayo edged past the Kingdom in a 2-4 to 1-5 victory in the replay.

Few on that 1951 team could have thought that Mayo would win just four Nestor Cups in the next thirty years, in 1955, 1967, 1969 and 1981. For the remaining twenty-six years, Mayo couldn’t get out of Connacht.

Mayo played Kerry twice in the four semi-finals that followed those four Connacht titles in those barren thirty years. In 1969, Kerry were reeling from their third-straight defeat at the hands of Down in an All-Ireland Final, a streak of northern dominance that gets Kerry backs up still, nearly fifty years later.

Mayo had a golden generation at that time that was born, to borrow Thomas Gray’s words, to blush unseen. It was the bad luck of Ray Prendergast, Johnny Farragher, Willie McGee, the peerless Jinkin’ Joe Corcoran and more to be in their pomp when Galway had their greatest-ever team. Mayo finally beat Galway in 1967, and had their best chance at an All-Ireland final appearance two years later, when they faced Kerry in the semi-final.

Mayo lost by a point. They had a free to draw, but it sailed wide. Kerry went on to beat Offaly in the All-Ireland Final, while Mayo went into decline. For twelve years Mayo lost to every county in Connacht in one year or another. Some years Mayo were unlucky, and some years they were just plain bad. But Mayo always lost, year after year.

Until Mayo finally broke through in 1981, and met Kerry again in the All-Ireland semi-final. At half-time it was all going to plan as Mayo led 1-6 to 1-5.

But Kerry’s greatest-ever team woke up in the second half, and scored 1-13 without reply. Mayo were buttered up and down Croke Park, scrunched up and put out with the rubbish. Welcome back to the big-time.

Fifteen years later, the teams met again in the first All-Ireland semi-final of 1996. Kerry had won only their second Munster title in the nine years since O’Dwyer’s men finally fell to Father Time, and were managed by one of Dwyer’s great lieutenants, Páidí Ó Sé. The early ‘nineties weren’t good for Mayo either, as every year the team found new ways to get knocked out of the Championship in a more humiliating fashion than the year before.

John Maughan was named the new Mayo manager in 1995. A former county player whose career was cut short by injury, Maughan had managed Clare to a Munster Final win over Kerry four years before. Mayo had beaten Galway on a wet day in Castlebar to win the Nestor Cup, but when the sides met each other in the All-Ireland semi-final, everybody knew who were the aristocrats and who hadn’t a seat in their trousers. And then the ball was thrown in, and the world turned upside-down.

Mayo have had many sweet days in the summers since 1981, but there’s a strong case to be made for that semi-final win over Kerry in 1996 to be the sweetest. It certainly wasn’t expected – there was strolling room on the Hill that day, room to wander down to another barrier, ask the people there if they could believe it either, and then wander back, shaking the head.

In their dreams, Mayo might have thought about scraping by Kerry, somehow. No-one saw a six-point thumping, 2-13 to 1-10, graced by goals by James Nallen (“Nallen has it now … to McHale … back to Nallen ... GOAL! JAMES NALLEN!”, as Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh put it at the time) and the current Mayo manager, who revelled in the great stage of Croke Park during his playing career.

The 1996 Final and replay were what they were, but none of that seemed to matter on the morning of the 1997 Final. Mayo were back in the Final after beating Galway in Tuam for the first time since the 1950s, and feared no man. Someone said later that Mayo must have been the first team to play Kerry in an All-Ireland final and think they just had to turn up. Nobody told Maurice Fitzgerald, and the Kingdom was restored by a man who is a bigger hero in Kerry than even the medal-laden heroes of the seventies and eighties.

Mayo and Kerry have met four times since, with Kerry winning them all. No; with Kerry unleashing Hell on Mayo, great waves of brimstone-filled fiery wrath and destruction, flailing Mayo to ribbons time and again.

But the defeat in 2011 was not like those of 2004, ’05, and ’06. James Horan’s team is being paid the greatest complement that can be paid a team, and they showed signs of that in the first year of Horanism. Mayo are now streetwise, and not to be tangled with.

By contrast, there is an echo of 1997 about Kerry, with their having discovered yet another skinny magician who seems able to command the very elements themselves. Kerry are hungry to make up for the 2011 Final loss to Dublin should Donegal fail to win the other semi-final, while Mayo have long ago gone past hunger to a deep and awful spiritual want. Who will triumph on Sunday? Reader, watch this space.

Football Championship 2014 Preview

How good are Dublin right now? They’re so good that it’s actually frightening to list their advantages. Send the children out to play, pull the curtains, maybe take a strong drink for your nerves. Here we go.

Firstly, Dublin are in the extraordinary position of being both greater than the sum of their parts, and of having parts that are pretty dang good in the first place. Diarmuid Connolly can win games on his own. Michael Darragh MacAuley, the ultimate twenty-first century footballer, can win games on his own. No inter-county player has ever improved as much as Eoghan O’Gara has between now and when he first burst onto the scene. And so on, and so on.

Secondly, Dublin have home advantage in every game they play. If anything, it’s a double advantage in that their home (and don’t talk about Parnell Park – when was the last time Dublin played a Championship game in Parnell Park?) is the most sacred turf in the entire Gaelic Athletic Association.

Thirdly, the Leinster Championship is currently the worst it’s ever been. It’s 9/1 the field for someone other than Dublin to win the Delaney Cup this summer. If you took the pick of the other ten counties competing, could they keep it kicked out to Dublin? Probably not.

Fourthly, Dublin’s evisceration of Roscommon in this year’s Under-21 football final suggested that Dublin don’t so much have a pipeline of talent coming through as a torrential flood that will wash away all before it. Pat Spillane said on the TV last year that Dublin could dominate football for the next 25 years.

And at that, suddenly, a chink of light. For Dublin to dominate for the next 25 years means that Pat Spillane must be correct in his analysis, and such a thing simply cannot be.

Every dominant team looks unbeatable in its dominance. Until they are beaten, and then suddenly people say well, I was never sure about this, or they were never tested in terms of that, or one hundred and one other things. Barcelona in the soccer this year. The mighty cats of Kilkenny in the hurling last year. There are no unbeatable teams.

In his book Hurling: The Revolution Years, Denis Walsh recounts how Liam Griffin prepared his Wexford hurlers to play Offaly in the 1996 Leinster Final. Offaly were the Leinster kingpins at that time, having played in the last two All-Ireland Finals, winning one, while Wexford had lost sixteen finals in a row, between Leinster and the National League.

Liam Griffin, the Wexford manager, knew that you can’t just pretend those beatings didn’t happen. He hired a psychologist, Niamh Fitzpatrick, to see what she could do to fight the negativity that hung in the air. And it was her idea to ask every member of the Wexford panel to name a reason why Wexford could beat Offaly on Sunday in the team meeting after Wednesday training.

For the first five minutes, there was absolute silence in the room. It was a very long five minutes for Fitzpatrick, who worried that if her idea backfired, it would ruin the team and they’d be butchered.

And then, someone spoke. Fitzpatrick wrote the idea down on a flipchart. Someone else spoke. That idea went down too. By the end of the night, the flipchart had thirty ideas on it, thirty ways by which Wexford could beat Offaly. Liam Dunne went home and told his mother that night that Sunday would be dressed in purple and gold. And so it came to pass.

Are Dublin unbeatable? No, they’re not. It’s just a question of pinpointing what Dublin’s key strengths are, and neutralising them. Easier said than done, of course, but very far from impossible.

Dublin’s empire is built Stephen Cluxton’s precision kickouts, as they guarantee Dublin a constant flow of position. That flow of possession has to be stopped, by whatever means necessary within the rules and the spirit of the game.

Next, a team has to think about MacAuley, Dublin’s fulcrum. MacAuley is central processing unit of Dublin’s imperium. He is Mr Everywhere. Everything goes through him. He’s got to be stopped. And stopping him will hurt, so teams have to be ready to pay that price. Because once MacAuley starts to struggle, the entire team will start to struggle with him.

And then there’s Diarmuid Connolly, the best of a genuinely superb set of forwards. If Connolly gets warmed up he is the best footballer in Ireland, and therefore he cannot be allowed to warm up in the first place.

If your correspondent were to choose any Mayoman of past or present to mark Connolly, I would choose Anthony “Larry” Finnerty. This seems odd, as Finnerty spent his whole career as a corner forward. But when taking on a super-power you have do as Wexford did, and think outside the box.

Finnerty was never a back and probably couldn’t mark a bingo board, but he is one of the wittiest men ever to play Gaelic football. Finnerty’s job would be to keep Connolly apprised of how he’s doing in this particular game, and of other matters pertaining to the city and the world in a constant flow of repartee. This will bring extra pressure on the other five defenders of course, but shutting Connolly down will be worth it.

And as well as all this, of course, your own players have to play like gods – all the above does is reduce Dublin from the Olympian to the merely excellent. But events can build their own momentum, and once the camel gets his nose into the tent, you’d be surprised how quickly the rest of him arrives in afterwards.

So, if not Dublin, who? Is the team that beats Dublin the automatic All-Ireland winner? Yes, of course, if it happens in the final. Not necessarily, if it happens earlier. A team could be spent having beaten Dublin, while all the others up their game, seeing daylight where there was once only the jeering of the Hill. Which means that we can divide up the contenders into those who could beat Dublin and take advantage, those who could beat Dublin only to get beat themselves, and those who could inside track it, and seize a chance left by Dublin’s exit.

There has never been a better team at picking up All-Irelands than Kerry, but whether the current Kerry could beat Dublin – and they want to beat Dublin very, very much – is open to question. Kerry are in a better position to replace the Gooch than any other team and they have an excellent midfield, but the backs are raw and that could cost them. Kerry are never to be ruled out, however.

Cork or Donegal could beat Dublin in theory, but it’s not that likely. Cork need a little seasoning while Donegal are on the slide – it was an impossible dream that the McGuinness lustre would last.

Monaghan could beat Dublin but might not win the All-Ireland. Derry can’t beat Dublin but could win the All-Ireland. Tyrone are the best value bet, having the confidence recent All-Irelands brings, the youth coming onstream and the best manager of his generation, if not the best ever. A lot depends on their up-and-coming players, of course, but if it’s in them, Mickey Harte will find it.

And Mayo? Well. Tune in tomorrow, friends.

All-Stars and the All-Ireland Final

Des Cahill, genial host of the Sunday Game, tweeted an interesting question after the All-Stars presentation on Friday night. Not interesting in the way that getting figs into fig rolls is interesting but interesting in that the All-Stars give us the last occasion to have a row over GAA affairs in the year. We know they don’t matter but dammit, what else is there?

Des Cahill’s question was this: in the light of no Mayo forwards getting an All-Star this year, despite Mayo having gotten to the All-Ireland Final and having the top scorer of the Championships among their ranks, when was the last time this happened? When was the last time not one forward on a team that participated in the All-Ireland final failed to win an All-Star?

Funnily enough, it wasn’t that long ago at all. But even funnier, it wasn’t the runners-up who drew the duck egg up front.

Cork, All-Ireland Champions of 2010, had no All-Star forwards in 2010. Down, whom Cork beat in the final, had three – Marty Clarke, now in the land down under, Danny Hughes and Benny Coulter. The other three were Kildare’s John Doyle, the Gooch and Dublin’s Bernard Brogan, who also won footballer of the year.

The All-Ireland runners-up have failed to win an All-Star among the forwards seven times in the 42-year existence of the All-Stars – Mayo this year, Cork in 2007, Mayo again in 1997, Galway in 1983, Roscommon in 1980, Dublin in 1979 and Kerry in 1972.

The 1979 forward unit was made up of four Kerrymen – Ger Power, Seán Walsh, Pat Spillane and Mikey Sheehy - Seán Lowry of Offaly and Joe McGrath of Mayo. McGrath was there because of an epic display in the Connacht Final when he belted 2-5 past Roscommon. The fact that Mayo still lost by eight points tells you something about just how good that Roscommon team were in their day.

1979 is one of six times that the All-Ireland winners have supplied four of the six forward All-Stars, which is the record for most forwards from one team. The other years were Tyrone in 2005, Kerry in 1981, 1980, and 1978, and Dublin in 1976. In the light of the negative pall that hangs over Mickey Harte’s Tyrone, it’s interesting to note that they got such a haul of creative players in 2005.

The record for the losing finalists is also four, which is held solely by Meath of 1991. Tommy Dowd, Brian Stafford, Colm O’Rourke and Bernie Flynn were joined by Greg Blaney and Ross Carr from the Down team that beat them in the final, taking Sam across the border for the first time since 1968.

Every All-Ireland winning team has had at least one back win an All-Star, while five runners-up failed to win any All-Stars in the backs at all – Down in 2010, Kerry in 2006, Mayo in 2006, Dublin in 1994 and Cork in 1993.

Midfield pairings are not common among All-Stars. The runners-up have only 14 midfielders of the 84 awarded, an indication of how important the position is. Only twice have both midfielders come from the same county, and the county won the All-Ireland that year – Kerry’s Jack O’Shea and Seán Walsh in 1981, and Derry’s Anthony Tohill and Brian McGilligan in 1993.

There is less of a spread in hurling, where not as many counties compete at the highest level. The All-Star hurling midfield has featured one or both counties that contested the All-Ireland eighteen times out of forty-two. Of these, the midfield of the Champions has taken both positions three times – this year, 2003 and 2001, while the runners-up have taken both positions once, something that never happened in football. However, that year was 1994 and, although it was small consolation to them, it was the least Limerick’s imperious Mike Houlihan and magical Ciarán Carey deserved.

Is there a position where an All-Ireland final appearance or win especially helps to win an All-Star? Yes, there is - it's football goalkeeper. The All-Star goalkeeper has gone to a man between the sticks in September 33 of the 42 times it’s been awarded, in contrast to the 24 times in hurling.

Of the football goalkeepers, the goalkeeper has been on the winning team 20 out of those 33 times, with the losing goalkeeper winning 13 All-Stars. The last time the All-Star went to a goalkeeper who watched the final from the stands or the comfort of his own home was 2008, when the award went to Gary Connaughton of Westmeath. Connachton was the third of a three-in-a-row of All-Star goalkeepers who didn’t participate in the All-Ireland Final – Stephen Cluxton won in 2007 and 2006.

Dublin have won 14 goalkeeping All-Stars since the awards began in 1971, shared between three men – Paddy Cullen has four, while John O’Leary and Cluxton have five each. Cluxton is probably good for a few more too and, if he had won Footballer of the Year as well this year, few could have argued against it.

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.

Addressing Inequality in the Football Championship

The Championship has never been equal. The hurling is the more unequal of the two major codes in Gaelic Games, with three counties holding 75% of the All-Irelands, but that doesn’t seem to get the same why-oh-why coverage about inequality.

Maybe football gets more coverage because it’s played more widely or because, football being a simpler game than hurling, people always think every county has some sort of a mullocker’s chance at football. Mullocking will never save you hurling against Kilkenny, but playing Kerry on your patch on a horrible day – well, men can dream, can’t they?

Maybe that’s why the current inequality seems so traumatic. Even though the Championship is built on counties, and counties have never been equal, in either population or football tradition, there was always that chance of dogs having their days. Now even that is gone. The other reason has to do with the state of the modern Championship, of course. We’re four weeks in now and nothing’s happened. Nobody’s lost. They’re all still there, waiting.

So what to do, with this inequality built into the system? People write in newspapers or post on message boards about new Championship formats, some of them quite byzantine in their complexity, but none of them address the basic inequality, that some counties are bigger than others and always will be.

To find out if inequality is an issue, the GAA has to ask itself what is the Championship really for. Is it to achieve the highest standards in athleticism, or is it partly that, but more so a pageant of county’s pride and heritage, where the flying of the colours is more important than winning or losing?

If it’s the former, what will that entail? Do we do away with county boundaries? Do we amalgamate counties, redraw provinces, introduce a transfer system, go professional? Will Irish children support teams in the future the same way they support English soccer teams now and in your youths, through dumb luck with no local connection, no pride of place? Is there any turning from this road, or is it an inevitable evolution?

Your correspondent hopes not. Your correspondent, dreadful old Tory that he is, misses the nobility and the honour of the old Championship, when it was all about representing home, hearth and heart in one ball of white summer heat.

All that is gone now. Now, not only are the historical haves and have-nots with us, but the gap is now greater than just population and tradition. The gap has increased exponentially by the new professionalism that exists in the game, where scientifically devised methods of training have created a new breed of footballer playing a new type of game.

Workrate is the buzzword in football now. Workrate is what you have to up when there’s some buck in a suit standing at your shoulder in the office with a clipboard ticking off how many times us visit Facebook or the GAA Board or, God save us, An Spailpín Fánach, that well-known blog on contemporary Irish life, when you should be filling your spreadsheets or writing your few yards of code. Football is meant to be about glory, drama, fun – all those things that work is not.

How did it come to this? An arms race, at the start. County A starts spending X pounds a year on the county team, with dieticians and GPS trackers and psychologists and what have you. County B has to catch up, so they sign up for all that and throw in cryogenic chambers and bonding sessions in upscale resorts and motivational speeches from retired rugby players. And then County C have someone fly home from ‘Merica on his private jet with a slideshow and a bag of used bills and a plan to set up the old homestead on the map, yes sir, you see if I don’t. And then County A realises it’s fallen behind again and – well, you get the picture.

That creates one level of division. What really stretches it is that this new level of training has created a football that isn’t really recognisable as football any more. None of the great teams of the past could live with a modern All-Ireland contender. If a modern team played Eugene McGee’s Offaly of the 1980s, the modern team would eat Offaly without salt.

Spit and sinew was the underdog’s only chance against the big gun. Now, it’s the big gun’s chief weapon. Offaly’s skill level would couldn’t for nothing against the modern team’s workrate, and there weren’t many soft boys on that Offaly team. It’d be like fifteen frogs being fed into a combine harvester. Whirr, splat.

The rules have failed to evolve with the greater physicality of the men playing the game at the highest level. And it’s only through the rules that change can come, and some of balance can return between physicality and the more finesse type skills of the game.

Perhaps there should be rule differences between county games and club games? There is already a time difference – why not introduce a few more differences? Limit handpasses, redefine the tackle, be less naïve about tactical fouling. Identify the true skills of the game and reward them. It’s not that hard to do if people put their minds to it.

This isn’t about punishing good teams to level a playing pitch. The greater team must always beat the lesser, but that greatness must be because they are greater at football, and not because they are better at pumping iron or at eating more boiled chicken for breakfast.

FOCAL SCOIR: Second Captains let themselves down badly on their podcast of last Tuesday week by having a crack at Leitrim’s potential place in the last twelve of the country. “Leitrim playing into the middle of July having not played a county from Ireland … [compared to Tyrone], who have just engaged in a war with the best team in the country and now have to win three Qualifiers to get to the same position. I mean, it’s just utterly ridiculous.”

Your faithful narrator doesn’t get how beating New York and London makes Leitrim children of a lesser god. How is that a lesser achievement than Kerry also being in the last twelve having beaten Waterford and Tipperary by a combined total of 6-39? Either county can only dance with the girls in the hall.

Leitrim aren’t even in the Connacht Final, but if they do make it it’ll mean the world to them. A provincial final appearance means less than nothing to Kerry. The Second Captains should pick on someone their own size.

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.

By the Numbers - the Gaelic Football All-Stars

Donegal’s haul of eight All-Stars puts Donegal 2012 joint second on the list for the most dominating performance of All-Ireland football champions at the All-Stars. Of course, the All-Stars aren’t quite the most accurately calibrated metric in a country that is generally adverse to precision, but come on. The winter is almost here and we need to make the most of what’s left of the summer’s fun before the frost covers the green isle once more.

Besides; questionable though the process behind the All-Stars might be, they are very much part of what we are. Or at least, the poster is.

They don’t seem to make them any more, but once the All-Star poster was an essential feature of any self-respecting Irish bar, and it is a reasonable rule of thumb to posit that the older the poster, the sweeter the poster. There’s a fine selection the GAA museum, with those distinctive black borders and the mugshots of men’s men. Reader, treat yourself sometime.

Looking at the 630 awards over 42 years, we discover that the typical All-Star team breaks down at an average of six All-Ireland winners, three runners-up and six of the rest. The football of the year, which began 1995, is generally from the champions too – Peter Canavan in 1995, Steven McDonnell in 2003 and Bernard Brogan in 2010 are the exceptions.

The biggest haul of All-Stars for All-Ireland champions is nine, which happened twice. Those years were 1977 and 1981, the bookend years of Kerry’s four-in-a-row. This year’s Donegal join Tyrone in 2005 with their eight awards – 2005 saw only three counties, Tyrone, Kerry and Armagh, honoured at the All-Stars, the lowest number ever. So much for the back door shining a light on the little guy.

The lowest haul of All-Stars for the champions is four, which has happened four times. Offaly won four in 1971, the first year of the All-Stars, when a highest-ever ten counties were honoured. Dublin got only 4 All-Stars in 1983, when they boxed their way past Galway in a notoriously ill-tempered game.

Down, astonishingly, got only four All-Stars in 1991 while Meath, whom Down defeated in the final, got six. This is the only time the losers have got more All-Stars than the champions.

There have been three years when the All-Stars divided equally between the champions and the losing finalists – 1971, that great year when all men stood equal saw the champions, Offaly, and the runners-up, Galway, got four each. 1996 and 2010 saw five each to the winners and losers of those years.

The most honoured of the runners-up were Meath in 1991, which was also the year of their famous marathon encounter against Dublin in the Leinster Championship. Three Dubs from that remarkable series had to decide between beef or salmon in the Burlington that year – Keith Barr, Tommy “Tom” Carr and Mick “Michael” Deegan.

Mayo have four All-Stars this year, which is above the average for All-Ireland runners-up. There has never been a year when no runner-up was nominated but there have been two years when just one runner-up got an All-Star and nine years when they got just two. There is nothing like getting tonked on the fourth Sunday in September to make footballers look bad before the gentlemen of the press.

There have been seven years when the All-Stars who didn’t play in the All-Ireland made up more than half the All-Star team. The biggest assembly of these was in 1983, of course. Ten players from seven different counties were awarded that year. Down and Offaly got two each, even though neither won their provinces. Jack O’Shea, who was captain of Kerry in 1983, got one as well, almost certainly on the strength of his sheer Jacko-icity.

Nine All-Stars came from outside the final in 1997 and 2007. The 1997 Leinster Champions Offaly got only one All-Star, corner-back Cathal Daly, as did Ulster Champions Cavan, whose great midfielder Dermot Cabe was slotted in at wing-forward.

Each province knows what it is to be left without a representative on the All-Star team, but only Connacht has had that dubious honour more than once. Seven times, in fact – 1975, 1982, 1988, 2005 and three years in a row, between 2007 and 2009. Sligo’s Charlie Harrison broke the duck in 2010.

Just four counties have won over half of the 630 awards over 42 years – Kerry have 127, Dublin have 86, Cork have 64 and Meath have 49. Tyrone is the leading Ulster county on 40 while Galway heads the list for Connacht with 37. There are seven counties, including London and New York, who have yet to win any All-Stars at all, with Limerick and Longford perhaps the hardest done by out of those seven in recent years.