SCORE TO SETTLE
Mayo would employ whatever measures necessary to win All-Ireland, says David Clarke
LET’S begin at the end. Mayo open their Connacht Championship campaign on Sunday against Galway and while it signifies the start of a new summer, everything is framed by the endgame of last September.
David Clarke was central to the drama. He knows he might not even be sitting in a chair at the Connacht Council offices outside Claremorris if things had played out differently and Mayo had ended their Holy Grail quest for a first All-Ireland since 1951.
Shortlisted for Footballer of the Year and squeezing out Stephen Cluxton for the All-Star position says everything about his huge contribution to Mayo’s challenge. Yet the title race hinged on the frantic endgame: Cormac Costello throwing away his kicking tee, Mayo players being grappled and held by their Dublin markers as Clarke tried to find a target for the last kick-out after Dean Rock edged Dublin in front in injury time. Clarke spotted a target out near the Cusack Stand sideline only for the kick to bounce out of play.
Given all that went on even before he struck the ball, he retains a level of stoicism that could belong to a major character in a Greek tragedy. He bears no grudge; isn’t wracked with regret. Life goes on.
‘I didn’t think anything too much of it to be honest. Obviously, I didn’t hit the best kick-out but that wasn’t anything to do with the pressure that was being put on. There was a man free that I was aiming for but I didn’t get him. Look, that’s the nature of the game,’ recounted Clarke.
As for players being dragged down to slow down his kick with Ciarán Kilkenny black carded for manhandling Lee Keegan, Clarke again seems to accept the terms of engagement with so much at stake. ‘I looked around and I saw everyone was tightly marked. During the game there were tees being thrown away but I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to it. I wasn’t in a rush coming out with the ball, I was coming out slowly to try and get the ball a bit further out.’
‘That’s what some teams will do. We might have done the same thing if we were in the same position. I had a few tees. It’s happened in plenty of games. You want to win in the right way, you want to be five points up, but if you’re not you might try something different.
‘Maybe if we were in that position… we’d take it if we won it.’
The conventional portrait of a goalkeeper is of an obsessive character, often hard-wired differently to the rest of the squad, the solitary demands often attracting a singular type personality. If that’s the case with Clarke, he hides it well, playing down the idea that, 34 since last November, he faced a long, dark winter of the soul deciding whether to retire or not.
‘There were a few days of disappointment but on the Wednesday I went back training with the club. You just have to get back in the groove. I enjoy playing football so it was a matter of getting back with the club and playing for another two or three months.
‘Come January I had no hesitation in coming back again. I enjoyed the year and the competition,’ he added. That’s not to say there aren’t moments when he thinks ‘what if?’
‘If you were to sit down and think too much about it you could tie yourself into a knot... is it ever going to happen? Obviously I’m getting a bit older now so you try and make the most of every year you’re around the set up and see what happens.
‘But when I go to bed I’m not crying myself to sleep.’
Not with Galway around the corner. He knows Mayo have to come closer to their September form than their spring displays to progress. ‘That’s the standard we’ve been striving towards for Galway but if we don’t hit that standard we have a fair idea what the result is going to be. Without getting that performance against Galway, getting to those levels and standards we talked about, it’s a very slippery slope, it could all be over very quickly.’
And yet, a player who looks pivotal to Mayo’s summer, still carries the same sense of optimism about the Championship ahead. ‘Ah yeah, you do. Obviously most lads on the panel will say they want to win the All-Ireland but you’re not sitting down every day saying that.
‘First of all, I want to make the team. I want to do well at training because there’s huge pressure in my position to do well.
‘Me sitting at home saying “I want to win the All-Ireland” — next thing I won’t be playing on the team at all.
‘You have a general focus at the top of the mountain but it’s all small steps.’
The first step comes at Castlebar on Sunday.