Gavin’s Dubs not so invincible
ALL season long, I felt that Dublin would claim a third All-Ireland title in a row. The more I have thought about this final, though, the more I believe that tomorrow is set up perfectly for a Mayo ambush.
It’s a shock to contemplate that, especially when I think of the mood traipsing out of Pearse Stadium in the rain back in June, but it is coming from the perspective of my pundit’s head, rather than my Mayo heart,
Mayo looked a beaten docket after losing to Galway. I thought this remarkable team had run out of road. What happened in the qualifiers only enhanced that perception. Derry had chances to end their summer in Castlebar. Cork’s John O’Rourke had a gilt-edged goal chance in the Gaelic Grounds. Even when they arrived in Croke Park, Roscommon raced into a 1-5 to 0-1 lead.
For most of the summer, the hope was that some team would just put Mayo out of their misery. They were even struggling in the League. Beaten at home by Monaghan and Cavan, only surviving on the final afternoon when Aidan O’Shea had to come off the bench to turn the Donegal game.
We have grown accustomed to this Mayo team defying the odds but in the past few weeks, they have defied the odds more than ever. Their defence looked in disarray right up to the drawn match with Roscommon — indeed the Rossies probably should have had another few goals.
Colm Boyle was dropped to the bench against Galway and brought on in the 66th minute, when it was scores that Mayo needed. Boyle was one of three players along with Jason Doherty and Andy Moran who seemed to suffer from the pre-determined changes that Mayo management made for much of the summer. But all three have responded to make it nigh on impossible to take them off in recent games.
The rejuvenation and revival of this team in the past six weeks has been nothing short of a miracle — a very pleasant miracle, from a Mayo perspective.
It’s been well-documented that Dublin have timed their run to peak this weekend — it’s why Jim Gavin gave his players five weeks off between League and Championship — but Mayo are also arriving for this final in peak physical condition, and in the perfect mental state. And there just seems to be a quiet confidence oozing off these players.
There are no doubts about Dublin’s mental state, but there will be pressure on these players tomorrow, knowing that they can carve a place in the history books as better than Heffo’s heroes if they claim three-in-a-row.
And added to that pressure, these players are carrying the tag of invincibility into this game. It’s a burden that has crushed teams in the past.
In 1982, 5-in-a-row tee-shirts were being sold in the Kingdom prior to the final. A week later, they were selling them in Offaly with RIP underneath them.
Ten years later, Dublin just needed to turn up to beat Donegal, who had laboured past Mayo in the semi-final. Some of their players even took part in a fashion shoot before the final. We know what happened then.
I’ve experienced it myself. In 2001, Meath hammered Kerry by 15 points and were considered shoo-ins for the All-Ireland. In Galway, we heard that talk and it energised our players. We even named our team early, we were so convinced we’d get the job done. This Dublin team couldn’t carry the tag in 2014 against Donegal. Nothing motivates players like hearing your opponents are invincible.
Gavin is a superb manager. There were no fashion shoots in the capital this week. But as much as he can guard against an idea seeping into his players’ heads, sometimes it does creep into their psyche.
Unintentionally, Gavin may have added to this aura. By keeping Michael Darragh Macauley and Bernard Brogan on the bench, by giving Diarmuid Connolly a minute or so against Tyrone, the Dublin manager seemed to be saying we can win without these superstars.
For a manager renowned for not giving anything away, his statement that Dublin didn’t perform in last year’s All-Ireland final struck me as strange as it can be interpreted any number of ways, such as we can win the All-Ireland even when we are not performing well.
It is hard to imagine from such a meas-
The revival of this team in the past six week has been nothing short of a miracle
ured individual but I wonder if it was a slip of the tongue. It is something that is usually said in the privacy of a dressing-room, not in a press conference where it can motivate the Mayo players.
And Mayo have shown a knack of pinpointing areas where they need to improve all summer. Look at how the kick-outs were transformed between the two Kerry games. There will be a vast improvement needed for tomorrow but I believe this Mayo team are capable of it.
They need to play on the front-foot, from the opening moments. That means pressing high on Stephen Cluxton’s kick-outs. I know he controlled the 2013 final and led Aidan O’Shea around the field, but O’Shea is a different player now.
O’Shea needs to be utilised around the middle third, especially in the early exchanges. In the replay against Kerry, he set the tone by making a couple of early catches and Kerry’s midfield imploded, after that.
If O’Shea floats between centre-forward and centre-back, it makes it easier to tweak it and throw him in at full-forward for the odd five-minute spell. He possesses the sort of threat that can test the aerial weaknesses within the Dublin full-back line. It is asking an awful lot of O’Shea to have him play so many different roles in the last three or four games, but that is what good players respond to. And if Mayo are to win, he needs to have a big game.
Mayo will need big games from all their big players. The thing is that they have shown they are capable of that. Keith Higgins can score an important point and two minutes later be down the other end of the field making a vital block.
The array of options that Dublin have on the bench tilts the balance in their favour again — both Paul Flynn and Eoghan O’Gara played like men possessed when they came on against Tyrone, but there is little a substitute can do to change the game if all the momentum is with the opposing team. And unlike all the teams that Dublin have faced this summer, Mayo won’t bow the knee or wave any white flag.
I’m expecting a classic tomorrow between two teams at the absolute peak of their powers. But I can’t shake the feeling that all the ingredients are there for a Mayo ambush.
As I have said before, from the biggest challenges come the greatest opportunities for players. It is Everest which this team have to scale tomorrow but don’t be shocked if they do and finally reach the promised land.
‘Things have not come easy for these players’
TREVOR MORTIMER will be just one of dozens of former Mayo players in Croke Park tomorrow, hoping to see a happy ending to Irish sport’s most gripping narrative. It is six years since he last played for his county — the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kerry — but without Mortimer, this remarkable story would have started very differently.
Mayo were moments from a humiliating defeat in London in James Horan’s first Championship game as manager, moments from ‘the shortest managerial career ever’ as Horan would later recall. Mortimer, who had been sprung from the bench in the second half, launched a ‘Hail Mary’ shot 60 metres from goal. It sailed through the posts. Mayo crawled into extra-time where their fitness eventually told.
‘Who knows what would have happened if that shot didn’t go over the bar. The team could have gone in another direction completely. If they had lost to London, James would have probably got his P45 fairly quickly. But we escaped and he used that as the foundation stone. And the other managers have built on that.’
Mortimer’s body was at war with him that summer. Once he pulled his hamstring just 15 minutes into the semi-final against Kerry, he knew it was over. Sort of. He had been getting fed up at home, chasing money for his family’s quarry business during a recession was not fun. His feet were itching and when a friend from Tyrone pointed out that there was plenty of work in the gold mines of west Africa, Mortimer felt he had nothing to lose. So while his former team-mates went on an odyssey that entranced the nation, Mortimer embarked on his own through parts of northwestern Africa. He visited exotic places that people at home had never heard of such as Nouakchott and Nouadhibou. Although he spent some time in Ghana, he lived in Mauritania for the bulk of his six years away, one of the oldest Islamic republics in the world where his preconceptions of the Muslim religion were shattered. ‘It is not only one of the oldest Islamic republics, it is also one of the strictest. There are no bars in the place, the only one was inside the mining company. I remember one of my first days there, I saw a lot of people coming out in the boubou, which is the traditional dress over there, and it covers people from head to toe. ‘The only time I would have seen people wearing something like that before was when I was watching the news and they were showing a terrorist attack or coverage of some trouble in the Middle East. From living there, I have a different perspective now. The generosity of people over there is something I will always remember, and this was a country where a quarter of the population lives on just over a dollar a day.’
He hopes to get back over to Mauritania to see some friends before the end of the year.
‘I would sit down with friends over there and we would watch the Champions League every Tuesday or Wednesday, or the Premier League at the weekend, and it would be the same as it was here, except maybe we wouldn’t be having a few beers,
‘They are strict when it comes to their religion, but there are no real differences when it comes to morals with the west. They prayed five times a day, they didn’t eat bacon and they didn’t drink alcohol, at least most of them didn’t, some of them did. Those were the only differences I saw. I was telling someone recently that their society is probably not all that different to how Ireland was 50 or 60 years ago when the Church was an all-powerful influence,’
From the desert, it wasn’t always easy to see the team that he left behind. While he flew home for each All-Ireland final, he had to make do with the internet to follow the fortunes of Mayo for most of the summer. Planted in the Sahara, as he was, allowed him to make the first complete break from Gaelic football for the first time in his life. And he enjoyed it.
‘I did nothing,’ he explains. ‘From the moment I left Croke Park after losing to Kerry that day, I didn’t do a thing. Didn’t go to the gym, didn’t play soccer. I gave my body a break, it was a clean break from it.
‘I had played for Mayo at various grades for 15 years before that and football had been my life for so long, just took a complete break from it — the work I was doing was physical work, so that kept me in shape but I didn’t do anything.’
He lost touch with former teammates, too. ‘I am not a great man for picking up the phone and ringing someone, so for the five or six years I was away, I didn’t have any contact with the group. Since I have come home to Ireland now, I have got back in touch with a few of the older lads alright.’
He returned home just over a year ago. His fianceé Lola had just given birth to their first child, Joss, who is now 20 months old – they had a second child, Maximus, 12 weeks ago. That made up his mind to stay on.
Construction work seemed to be picking up in the west, too, although Mortimer wonders if the recovery is a little over-stated. ‘It will have to pick up, though. They have to build more houses,’ he claims.
And after six years of not even
touching an O’Neills ball, he was convinced to come out of retirement this year and return to the football field. Two old friends — David Walsh and Liam Garvey — took over Shrule-Glencorrib this year and they convinced the former Mayo captain to put back on his boots, while also giving a hand in the backroom team. His older brother Kenneth also came back. ‘And he’s playing quite well,’ the younger sibling points out.
Trevor Mortimer will be in Croke Park tomorrow and he believes he may witness something special.
‘It’s not going to be easy, they are taking on the greatest team I have ever seen. But there is a quiet confidence in this group that they can get the job done, that is the vibe they are giving off. They know they can match this Dublin team in every sense, they have shown that over the years. And Mayo have never feared Dublin, that is going back as long as I can remember, well before 2006.
‘And the thing is that it hasn’t come easy for a lot of these players. There has been plenty of knock-backs for a lot of them. Take someone like Colm Boyle, he was on the panel, then dropped off and had to come back. The likes of Andy [Moran] coming back from both a broken leg and a cruciate.
‘There isn’t too many players that would come back from one of those injuries, never mind two, in his late 20s and come back an even better and stronger player, but that is the measure of Andy and if they do get over the line this weekend, it will be a reflection of the dedication and effort that he has put into Mayo over the past decade or more.’
Even though his experience of Gaelic football was restricted to flying home, via the Canaries, for whatever All-Ireland final Mayo were in, as well as what he could see on his internet connection, he feels that the modern game would suit him.
‘Yeah, the game is changing to suit players like I was, hardworking wing-forwards. But there is no point in looking back. I had my time and enjoyed it and enjoyed my time away from the game, too.’
Life has been interesting for Trevor Mortimer in the six years since he hung up his inter-county boots. He has gone around sub-Saharan landscapes on an odyssey that rivals that of his former team-mates, but he has returned home, just in time perhaps, to see another remarkable journey reach a fitting conclusion.