1975 - Was It Really Mayo's Worst-Ever Defeat?

July, 1975. 10cc weren’t in love in the charts, Muhammad Ali warmed up for the Thrilla in Manilla by pounding Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumper, and Jaws was revolutionising the movie industry in the USA.

Across the broad Atlantic on the west coast of Ireland, the Mayo football team hit the nadir of their sixty-years and counting wait for a fourth All-Ireland senior football title. For some reason, the defeat to Sligo in 1975 is seen as Mayo’s Guernica – the greatest horror among a long catalog of horrors.

And at thirty-seven years’ remove and in a week when Mayo face Sligo in the Connacht Final once more, it’s reasonable to ask why. Why was that 1975 defeat so much worse than any of the other horrors that happened before or since?

Sligo were no bad team in 1975. Barnes Murphy, an All-Star winner in 1974, was coach and captain at centre-half back, and even in those amateur days Sligo went to the effort of bringing Brian McEniff down from Donegal to take some training sessions. Sligo had form, having dispatched Galway to get to the Connacht Final in the first place. And they had Mickey Kearins, Eamon O’Hara’s one challenger to the title of Greatest Ever Sligo Player. Kearins had a lot of miles on the clock by 1975 and looked it, but he was the one man Mayo feared.

Sligo certainly didn’t fear Mayo. In the week leading to the game, the Irish Press quoted a bullish Barnes Murphy on how glad he was that it was Mayo that Sligo faced in the final, a quote that places what Mayo football was like at the time in context: “You always have an inferiority complex if you come up against Galway while Roscommon are a bit of a hoodoo team for us. But we do not feel that way at all about Mayo. After all, in recent matches, we have beaten them as often as they have beaten us.”

The Connacht Final in Markiewicz Park on July 6, 1975, was a draw, 2-10 to 1-13 on a beautiful day for football. Sligo went into a six point lead which Mayo slowly clawed back in the second half. Each had their chances of winning of it in the last ten minutes, but didn’t take them. A replay was fixed for two weeks later in Castlebar. Sideline 50p, schoolboys 20p.

Which of them left it behind in the drawn game was a matter of perspective. The Western People felt that there was a “primary difference between the counties: Sligo’s self-doubt based on years of inferiority as against Mayo’s utter conviction that, when they put their minds down to it, there is no way Sligo can deny them.”

Barnes Murphy didn’t much care for them apples. On the Saturday before the replay, he provided Mayo with more dressing-room material, again courtesy of the Irish Press: “We know we have the beating of Mayo and indeed we had the winning of the drawn game. Remember we were on top in the opening stages and then that unlucky penalty knocked us out of our stride.”

While the drawn game was a fine game, the replay in Castlebar was just plain dirty. It was scrappy, with a lot of needle and no small amount of off-the-ball exchanges. Mayo’s best line was at half-back, but in midfield there were serious problems.

Mayo named Richie Bell and Frank Burns at midfield for the drawn game. Burns, who also played rugby for Connacht, was a veteran, while Bell was part of a Mayo Under-21 team that won the 1974 All-Ireland and came into the senior squad in the winter of ‘74. But Bell got injured before the drawn game, with his place taken by Charlestown’s Eamon Brett. Brett hurt his shoulder two minutes in the drawn game, and Des McGrath came on then.

Mayo makeshift midfield struggled badly in the drawn game, and had to haul Seán Kilbride back from full-forward to bail water. It was a bridge too far in the replay, where Sligo’s mustachioed hero Johnny Stenson bossed the skies and Mayo, even with Kilbride brought back to help out, couldn’t compete.

When you lose midfield your full-backs will be exposed to shot and shell. Mayo famously hauled John O’Mahony ashore after eleven minutes but the real damage was being done on Johnno’s left.

Mickey Kearins had been quiet in the drawn game but he wrecked havoc in the replay, smashing home a penalty and setting up the second Sligo goal. When the dust cleared, Sligo had won by a point, 2-10 to 0-15.

The Mayo News was phlegmatic in its analysis: “This is a young Mayo team. They have the winning of a number of Connacht titles and possibly an even bigger one. They have the spirit and another year will make a better team of them.”

The Western People was more robust: “A total indifference to warnings about the quality of the full-back line, being too smart by half with full-forward/midfield switches, and the employment of doubtful tactics which robbed the half-forward line of impact, finally culminated in disaster, just as emphatic, in fact, as in the league semi-final against Meath.”

Quite the rant, and there was more to come: “There is no use in selectors dodging the issue by asking where the replacements needed might have come from. It was their job to find them and they didn’t have to cast their net very far. For, and make no mistake about it, there are certainly better players around than at least eight of the men who were on duty or standby last Sunday.”

Unfortunately, the Western didn’t go so far as to name an alternative team, and it’s all in the realm of conjecture now. But on the face of it, it’s hard to understand why that game above all others was seen as such a low-water mark.

Sligo might be poor relations historically in Connacht, but that was a good team they had in the 1970s. They got destroyed by Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final, but that Kerry team would munch up and spit out far prouder counties than the Yeatsmen. Cork, for instance. That Sligo team always had a Nestor Cup in them, and it was Mayo’s bad luck to meet them when destiny smiled.

It was also Mayo’s bad luck to suffer that bizarre series of injuries at midfield. Not that Bell playing would necessarily have changed things – he and Stenson both now field the dropping ball in Heavenly pastures, may God be good to both of them – but the makeshift third-string midfield can’t be dismissed as a factor in Mayo’s defeat. JP Kean reflects in Keith Duggan’s magnificent House of Pain that if his shot on goal in the first game had been three inches lower and avoided the crossbar the entire history of Mayo could be different. But of course, it didn’t, it’s not and life is very much like that.

Sometimes it’s not a curse. Sometimes the other guys are just better. Mayo lost to Sligo in 1975 because Sligo were better and wanted it more. Simple as that.

The So-Called Weaker Counties

“It’s hard to know what either county got out of this,” reflected Colm Parkinson on Newstalk after Mayo wiped out Leitrim in the Connacht semi-final on Sunday. Parkinson went on to remark that the current competitive structure is unfair, and that there ought to be a competition for the so-called weaker counties to play in while the top brass went on to contest the All-Ireland series.

There are odds of a gobstopper against a ticket to Australia on Martin Breheny doing a why-oh-why on this very topic in Wednesday’s Indo. After all, all he has to do is change the names and the dates. It’s what you’d call your perennial.

There is once group of voices that are always silent in this, and it is that of the so-called weaker counties themselves. Part of this could be pride, of course; nobody wants to break ranks and say I’m hurting, please give me the salve of an Intermediate Competition. A Baby Sam.

Then again, it’s reasonable to think that if the so-called weaker wanted such a competition they would have organised one by now among themselves. It’s not like you have to play in the All-Ireland football Championship. Kilkenny don’t, and Clare withdrew from the Senior Football Championship for a year or two after the infamous Milltown Massacre of 1979.

So maybe – and this is only a guess now – maybe the so-called weaker counties are playing in the Senior Championship, even though the prospect of a day like Sunday is very real at all times, because they want to. Maybe they think pride in the jersey is bigger than winning or losing.

It’d certainly make for an interesting Connacht Final in a few weeks’ time if Parkinson’s suggestions were implemented, and the so-called weaker counties were saved from themselves. Sligo are currently in the Connacht Final but they’ve only ever won three Nestor Cups in their history, just one more than Leitrim. And Mayo is a hot four to one on to retain the Connacht title.

Better to protect Sligo, and the delicate sensibilities of the Commentariat, and have Sligo delicately shunted into some competition played out of harm’s way in Carlingford or somewhere. The 2012 Connacht Final could then simply be awarded to Mayo in a walkover, by right of noble birth, or Mayo’s fellow super-power Galway could be plucked from the qualifiers to play in the Connacht Final instead. That way, we could all pretend that Sligo didn’t upset any apple carts at all by forgetting their station and sending the aristocrats of Galway to the guillotine by the very own seaside on the 9^th of June.

Hard to see anyone from Sligo buying that two-bed apartment.

An assumption seems to have become widespread in recent years – and the RTÉ pundits have played a big part in spreading it – that the football Championship is falling to bits. Teams in Munster and Connacht don’t get enough games. Teams in Ulster and Leinster get too many. Teams in the qualifiers have an advantage over the provincial champions. The provincial champions have an advantage over the teams in the qualifiers. I don’t like it when it’s hot, I don’t like it when it’s not. Wah, wah, wah.

This childish level of analysis obscures the truth about the Championship and the true nature of the thing. It is this. The Championship is not a professional sports competition. If it were, there would be the Champions League style format and relegation/promotion and a transfer market and games on Sky and equality and maybe even cheerleaders and hot dogs.

The Championship is a cultural competition first and a sporting competition second. Yes, there is a Champion every September and yes, games are played but the true worth of the Championship is in its recognition of place and that all counties are held in equal esteem.

Whether the land is arable, pasture or slathered in concrete, whether they have hills or mountains or lakes, all counties have a day when they send their best to represent the people of that county.

The teams march behind the bands to say we are from this place; this place has helped to make us what we are, and we would not have it any other way. What happens after the band disperses and the ball is thrown in secondary to the expression pride of place, identity, history and culture that the Championship uniquely provides.

Declan Browne reflects the true heart of the GAA. Browne realised that his Tipperary birth was worth more to him than a cupboard of medals with somewhere that was not Tipp. For Browne, medals were temporary but the Premier was forever.

Players come and go, games are forgotten and heroes grow old but pride of place goes on and is passed on, through good times and bad, highs and lows, boom and bust. The people who realise that are the true All-Ireland Champions. Mo dhúchas, abú.

Well Done The Sunday Game, the Most Important Program in Ireland

Des Cahill’s Sunday Game goes from strength to strength. Cahill’s tenure in the most important job in Irish television got off to a wonderful start last year when his effortlessly amiable manner put GAA men at ease, as opposed to the Defcon 1 necessary for a chat with Cahill’s immediate predecessor, Pat Spillane.

The standard of analysis on The Sunday Game is so much better than it was too. Rather than ape what’s emerging as the RTÉ Sport house style of forming panels along the Contrarian/Someone with a clue model, Cahill allows his panelists to share what they know from lifetimes in the game. Not all the panelists are great of course, but still. It’s a start.

Last night Cahill rose to another challenge, and he deserves credit for it. Sligo v Leitrim was never likely to be a feature game when Kerry, Cork and Kildare are all playing. The fact that people expect their TV sports presented in a certain way makes it hard on Irish broadcasters too, because the GAA, to its glory, is not a professional sport.

It exists in a different sort of reality and the Irish media hasn’t really come to grips with finding the correct voice for that, a voice that finds the balance between the journalist’s duty to report facts, and common decency’s duty not to hammer a guy who did his best and has to go to work in the morning. It’s very hard to strike a balance between the marquee needs of television and the pride of village needs of the ordinary GAA person.

But last night The Sunday Game came up trumps. They can’t have been expecting the story of the day to happen in Markiewicz Park on Sunday morning but it did and The Sunday Game were able to change their schedules to accommodate it.

Again, it doesn’t seem like much, featuring Leitrim’s triumphant win over Sligo first in the show rather than down the order, but it was something that was beyond the Sunday Game’s newsroom colleagues at six and at nine o’clock.

Is this because RTÉ have upped their game in the light of Newstalk’s challenge on the radio? It’s possible, but it doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that there is a rising standard in the way the games are covered. Each can make the other better by forcing excellence, instead of settling for the mediocrity that comes from monopoly.

Your correspondent was contacted on Twitter during the weekend over some robust criticism of a GAA piece on The Journal on Friday night, since taken down. My friend told me, in not so many words, that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and, as such, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone so medieval in my remarks.

And I take that on board. Few things are as hateful as bullies. But it’s also important to have standards and if we don’t excoriate the mediocre we can never identify the good. So hail, then, The Sunday Game, for not going through the motions and giving Leitrim their due.

GAA isn’t like other sports. There is nothing more local than the GAA and it’s from this local rivalry that the organisation derives its great strength. The GAA doesn’t exist in the same world of glamour as English soccer or European rugby. But for the people of Roscommon and Letrim in the joyous three weeks of anticipation ahead of them, it’s Heaven descended unto the Earth.

The GAA means nothing in the world of Eurovision or X-Factor or Glenda and Rosanna. It exists somewhere else; in shops where people get messages, marts where farmers look and don’t buy, bars that sell pints of special and locals keep money for funeral pints in jars. It’s outside church gates and chip shops and petrol stations and all the places where people meet to talk and ask well; how do you think they’ll do on Sunday? It’s a magical place, really. I think they call it “Ireland.”

Two Gaelic Football Bets for the Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sligo's Day in the Sun Delivers Another Mayo Football Disaster

Sligo 0-15
Mayo 1-08

Mayo manager John O’Mahony was talking some fighting talk on the radio tonight. Mayo aren’t out of the Championship at all yet, he said. We’ll regroup, we’ll see where we are, we’ll move on, said Johnno. And he reminded the nation that he’s been here before. Galway got dumped out in the first round of Connacht in 2001 and they went on to win the All-Ireland. Why not Mayo?

It’s an interesting feature of John O’Mahony’s public pronouncements in his second coming as Mayo manager that his perception of the team’s potential seems to exist in reverse proportion to everybody else’s.

Johnno’s second coming started four years ago with his contention a team that got to two All-Ireland finals in three years was deeply flawed and had to be rebuilt, and tonight he’s saying that team that got beat out the gate by Sligo has All-Ireland potential.

No wonder he’s in Leinster House. That sort of statement fits right in. We are where we are, moving forward in the light of totality of experience, after all.

Of course, it is possible that Mayo could pull themselves together and make some sort of a run in the Championship. As Johnno said, it has happened before, and that’s the nature of knockout competition – you catch the wave, and ride it as far as you can.

But while it’s possible, it’s by no means probable. It is this blog’s considered view that if the revellers in Belmullet on its great fair day on the 15th of August still have a Mayo team in the Championship to talk about over their glasses of sherry that it will be the single greatest achievement of John O’Mahony’s long inter-county career. Bigger than the Galway All-Irelands, the Leitrim Connacht title and his taking of Mayo to their first All-Ireland final in 38 years in 1989.

The only thing Johnno has going for him is that it can’t get any worse. But out from that, things look pretty much insurmountable.

When Johnno took over from Mickey Moran and John Morrison as manager of Mayo, it was all about rebuilding. And every team he’s fielded in the four years has certainly been rebuilt. The thing is, rebuilding really should mean getting progressively better – as Sligo have got progressively better, for instance. Building, getting flattened and starting from scratch every year isn’t really rebuilding. It’s going around in circles.

There are serious questions arising from all this. About tactics and training and game plans. About why good players deteriorate, as good Mayo players have deteriorated in recent years. About why there seems to be a lack of fitness in the team, in this age of major advances in sports sciences. About how players are injured so often, again in this sports science age. But the startling absence of progress is the most worrying thing.

Sure Mayo could make a run. A Mayo twin tower inside line of Barry Moran and Aidan O’Shea presents completely different questions to anyone Mayo is playing, and Mayo has a rich pick of players, more so than most counties. But what would that mean for Alan Freeman, the one ray of sunshine for Mayo today?

Because it could get worse, actually. Mayo could field yet another “rebuilt” team in the qualifiers, against Longford, say, with McGarrity at corner forward and Conor Mortimer at center-half back, and beat them, and then maybe draw Kildare in Castlebar – to the exquisite relief of the County Board – and beat them, and then play Dublin in Croke Park and get annihilated in front of a baying Hill. That would be worse than today, for instance.

Or maybe getting beaten again by Kerry in Croke Park, with Jack O’Connor having told the team to go easy on us, like Kilkenny went easy on the Dublin hurlers last year. Out of pity. That would be worse. Mayo are in a bad, bad place tonight, and a Hollywood ending seems very, very unlikely. It’ll be short summer on the plain of the yews.

But while Mayo writhe in the horrors, Sligo bask in the joys and good for them. Kevin Walsh has been masterful in his management of Sligo, in the long term and outstandingly so during the game today, and in Eamon O’Hara Sligo have one of the all-time greats of the game, for any county.

Herman Melville wrote of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick that “"he piled upon the whale's white hump, the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.” If you substitute pride and guts for rage and hate you have O’Hara in a nutshell, in every game he’s played. And he was that again today, even as his body finally begins to betray him. Eamon O’Hara is a credit and grace to the game, and the very best of luck to him and everyone involved in the Sligo setup. They deserve their day in the sun, and more than one at that.

Sligo Sailing to Byzantium, Royals Rising from the Tomb

It looks like another mouth-watering weekend at headquarters for GAA men and women this weekend. An Spailpín Fánach knows enough about hurling to know that he knows nothing about hurling and as such will leave speculation on the ancient and noble game to those that understand it better than I. But the Saturday program in the football looks tasty indeed, with one novel pairing and one rather sturm und drang looking rematch.

The pundit nation has been saying for some weeks now that, painful and all as it is for them (the pundit nation) to cast slights and/or aspersions on Sligo’s apocalyptic achievement in winning the Nestor Cup, Sligo are quite clearly chum, prey, born victims, tourists on Store Street, doomed. Everybody in the qualifiers has been licking their lips at the prospect of drawing Sligo in the quarter finals (how Central Council must have been tempted to bend the rules – just this once! – and have Sligo play Dublin) and now to Cork falls the honour of delivering the coup de grace to the plucky Yeats’ Countymen.

An Spailpín Fánach holds a contrary view. Sligo are not used to the big time certainly, and your correspondent would fear for his neighbours’ chances against Meath or Monaghan or Derry. But Cork is the ideal team for Sligo to have drawn, and the reason is this – if Billy Morgan couldn’t get his charges to focus on Louth, with their All-Ireland title pedigree, how will Billy get his team to concentrate for Sligo, with only three Nestor Cups to show for one hundred and twenty years?

How bare that cupboard looks compared to Cork’s, which heaves under the strain of its one hundred plus titles, with one more added only a few short months ago? And as each Cork man stands to attention during the anthem and looks at his Sligo marker, how hard will he find it to suppress his haughty snigger, and the feeling that he’s been challenged to a fight by his kid sister, braces, bangs and all?

If anything Louth have done Sligo a disservice, by giving Cork an early warning of the danger of complacency in a simple game like football, where class lines are not as clearly delineated as popular perception has it. Billy Morgan, the greatest football man in the proud history of a proud county, will have been banging that home to his men morning, noon and night since they left Portlaoise, but deep down, can Cork really take Sligo seriously? And by the time they do, will it be too late?

Of course, Sligo will want to learn how to pop over those thirteen yard frees, or else they’re as well to stay at home listening to their Westlife records. We may take that as read. And, to be honest, they’ll need a goal or two as well, as they just aren’t natural scorers and will need the boost a goal gives. But let’s not forget that Cork don’t really shoot the lights out either, and were having as much trouble finding their new secret weapon as An Taoiseach is currently having finding his bank receipts. Add into the mix the remarkable Eamon O’Hara, as fine as player as exists in the game and a man who, as the picture from the Mayo News shows, can have a remarkable ability to get on the opposition’s nerves, and all of a sudden Sligo don’t look that bad a proposition at all. Least of all with a five point start as offered by Ladbrokes.

The second match is a different kettle of fists. These teams will have no problems at all taking each other seriously – both multiple All-Ireland winners in the past ten years, and both participants in a remarkably violent All-Ireland semi-final eleven (eleven! Can it be?) years ago, which Meath won by, er, a knockout, I suppose.

Tyrone have since made up for the bleak years of the nineties by winning their first two All-Irelands, and are many people’s tip for Sam this year (including that fine GAA man that sets the odds for Ladbrokes, incidentally). However, here your correspondent has to go out on a limb and suggest that Tyrone are now further from the top of the mountain than they may perhaps realise, while Meath are roaring back to the summit with their customary gusto. For all this chat about systems and coaching and what have you, a team is only ever as good as its players, and there is no coaching manual that can turn mortal clay into Peter Canavan, Brian McGuigan or Stephen O’Neill.

In the other corner of the ring, it’s taken Colm Coyle, a Royal folk hero in his own playing days, just one year to restore Meath to the top table. The rise from no-where is as much a part of Meath’s great tradition as rough-housing and the Meath-are-never-bet stuff, and this year might just be another manifestation of that. Fine big boys all over the park, Moyles busting a gut between the fifty yard lines, and a full-forward line that’s now looking as deadly as any in the game, bar Kerry. Add in Graham Geraghty to spring from the bench and that’s some package. Ladbrokes are giving Meath a three point start at 4/5 and a really quite remarkable 9/4 on the outright. An Spailpín’s advice is to fill your boots.

FOCAL SCOIR: I know I’m getting tiresome talking about falling standards in journalism and it seems clear that nobody cares, but this sort of rubbish in today’s Independent really gets my goat. “Croke Park’s decision to cash in on the pulling power of Dublin footballers was rewarded yesterday when their All-Ireland quarter-final against Derry became a virtual sell-out in less than 300 seconds.” It is reasonable to presume from that that 80,000 tickets were sold in five minutes. This is not case, as only 2,000 tickets were sold on ticketmaster, and the rest through usual channels. About the same number and rate as bought tickets for Neil Young in Vicar Street a few years ago. Does this mean that every halfwit hack in the country will now start filing stories about Croke Park’s decision to cash in on the appeal of Canadian singer-songwriters by having a 60x30 handball exhibition between Neil Young and Laughing Lenny Cohen? I weep.





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