HOW MAC’S KEPT BLUES ON THE UP
Moran and Mayo are improved but Dublin have soared to another level
GOOD players win games. Simple as those four words are, their ageless relevance will be borne out on Sunday. Mayo and Dublin are under the tutelage of two imaginative, bold management teams, and both groups will have devoted dozens of hours to analysis of their opponent in the final.
Because the teams are so evenly matched in categories like athleticism, tackling and plain physical endurance, the final will be settled by the decisions taken by a player or players in isolated moments.
Picking the correct pass, having the gumption — and talent — to hoist over a point, or effecting a turnover that transforms the shape of play to your team’s advantage could be the action that wins the Sam Maguire.
A player with an agile mind or the moxie to take on a scoring attempt that would daunt others is, time and again, the most important agent of change on the biggest day of the year.
Cormac Costello proved that man for Dublin in last year’s replay, coming on and kicking three points that settled the Championship. Two men gave the Galway hurlers the impetus they needed to push past 29 years of accreted disappointment a week and a half ago.
Niall Burke and Jason Flynn were judiciously used by Micheál Donoghue to win the Liam MacCarthy Cup; the replacements scored two points apiece from play to shunt Waterford out of contention.
Behind the veils of tears and the romance of doomed pursuit, this has been Mayo’s biggest problem in the past half-decade. On the day that demands poise more than any other, they have made too many mistakes.
Dublin’s greatness — and they are a very great team, as even the most narrow-minded of their critics will eventually concede — is founded upon making few enough mistakes to win the matches that count.
So it was a year ago — and so it looks this time, too. In answer to the question, who has improved most since 2016, the answer is Dublin.
Jack McCaffrey is the most emphatic reason. The 2015 Footballer of the Year is playing like a man who could be the 2017 winner of that honour. After taking last summer out, McCaffrey has returned at a level of quality and effectiveness that Jim Gavin would not have dared to imagine.
He presents attacking problems for Mayo of the kind that they themselves relied on to bamboozle Kerry and Roscommon, and that speedy, hard-carrying style expands the Dublin attacking portfolio. The form of Paul Mannion is another point by which Dublin’s improvement can be measured. The easing out of Bernard Brogan has not been felt largely because of how well Mannion is playing. What was notable in the semi-final rout of Tyrone, though, was Mannion’s tackling. He dispossessed three opposition runners in the first half, and that is indicative of a willingness to work hard and meaningfully, but also of the quality of Dublin’s tackling now.
It was always high, but is now at least the equal of Mayo’s — and they, thanks to Donie Buckley, are generally acknowledged as the best-tackling team in the game.
The graduation of Con O’Callaghan from anticipated underage talent to senior star has been smoother than he could have dreamed of, but as well as cushioning the loss of Diarmuid Connolly to indiscipline, his emergence has also strengthened the Dublin bench.
Connolly now joins Brogan, Paul Flynn, Kevin McManamon and Eoghan O’Gara as plausible game-breakers in the final quarter. That is not to mention Michael Darragh Macauley and Costello, players Dublin insist are fit but who have been out with significant injury problems for much of the year.
It was the extent of Dublin’s resources that won them the AllIreland last October (Brogan augmented Costello’s impact with a point of his own after coming on) and they have been deepened, most importantly by McCaffrey’s comeback.
At times this summer, Mayo have hit the levels that brought them to within a point of the AllIreland in 2016, but their team has not been improved in the way Dublin’s has.
Stephen Rochford has not been able to call upon a McCaffrey or O’Callaghan, but Mayo have been boosted by players finding good form.
David Clarke has been exceptional; Keith Higgins and Colm Boyle are playing inspiring football to equal anything in their splendid careers to date.
Tom Parsons is one of the form midfielders in Ireland, Aidan O’Shea was a towering inspiration on some gruelling Saturdays through the qualifiers, and the rest of the country is noticing the skill in Jason Doherty’s game that Mayo loyalists have long insisted was there.
The biggest improvement in form belongs, of course, to Andy Moran. He has scored 3-21 from play in nine matches so far this summer, and the veteran forward has been one of the stories of the summer.
If he and Doherty maintain their level of performance on Sunday, then the Dublin defence will be tested in a way it hasn’t been in a year.
However, Lee Keegan has been relatively subdued since Mayo hit Croke Park, and they need him and Cillian O’Connor at their absolute best if they are to get this thing done.
Even then, the problem for Mayo is the bench Gavin can turn to with 50 or 55 minutes played. It constitutes an extraordinary assemblage.
Allow for the loss of one replacement to a black card, and another to cover a struggling defender, and there are still enough forward options to come on and change the game.
There is no reason to quibble greatly with the view that these teams are so close to one another that the game could be decided in the closing stages.
In those circumstances, the Dublin substitutes look like agents of victory.
The evidence to this point indicates one thing: Dublin have improved most dramatically since last year, and the consequences seem obvious.
‘McCaffrey is playing like a Footballer of the Year’