Galway Shock Mayo in Castlebar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. And yet, no.

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

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

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

Mayo's Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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