JOHN O’MAHONY
Mayo remind me of Galway in ’98
THEY call the third round in golf majors ‘moving day’ and when it comes to the Allianz Football League, it is this weekend of matches that should be considered the ‘moving round’. By the third game, teams know what will define the rest of their campaign. Whether it will be a fight for survival or the opportunity to play in the final.
Come tomorrow evening, four Division 1 teams will be nervously looking over the shoulder at the trapdoor while four others will be thinking of a trip to Croke Park on the final Sunday in March.
Mayo supporters have grown accustomed to a nervy spring over the past five or six years. The team have struggled in early season. Last April, they travelled to Ballybofey on the final day, staring relegation in the face, and only survived because of the brilliance of Kevin McLoughlin’s point from distance in the final seconds.
Things are different in this League campaign. James Horan’s team host Cavan in McHale Park this evening, full of confidence and even an expectation of a possible League final appearance. It has been a while since Mayo have looked so good in February.
It has been well-documented by successive management teams of the difficulties in having centralised training for their players in winter and spring, with so many of the Mayo players either working or at third-level college in the capital. Around 20 of the present panel live in Dublin.
But that hasn’t seemed to be a problem this time around, with the team rejuvenated by Horan’s second coming. And they are playing football at devastating pace. They humiliated Tyrone in Omagh last Sunday with 70-plus minutes of power-packed football.
The most pleasing aspect of the performance, from a Mayo perspective, was that it was a crop of young rookies who were leading the way. A consistent criticism of the team since they first got into an All-Ireland final back in 2012 was their failure to produce some fresh, young talent.
This was especially evident in the forwards with Diarmuid O’Connor the last attacker to have graduated from the under-age ranks — and he has now matured into more of a midfielder than the forward-thinking player he was when he helped Mayo win the 2016 All-Ireland Under-21 final.
All of a sudden, over the course of two games against Roscommon and Tyrone, it seems like Horan (above) has unearthed four exciting young players. And he has infused his team with that young talent with the minimum of fuss. Brian Reape scored the decisive goal in the first League game and last weekend, Fionn McDonagh and Ciaran Treacy, on either wing, scored 1-5 between them in Omagh. Further back the field, Michael Plunkett slotted seamlessly into centre-back and shows that the assembly line in Mayo churning out attacking half-backs hasn’t slowed down. But it is McDonagh who stole the show in Omagh and he is the one player everyone is talking about in the west this year. The young Westport man played with devastating pace on the right wing. And whenever the situation called for it, he displayed great composure as well as clinical finishing, never more so than when he took his goal when he could easly have taken the safe option of a point. It was refreshing to see that the veterans in the team — the likes of Keith Higgins, Aidan O’Shea and Andy Moran — have been rejuvenated by the presence of these talented youngsters. There seems to be positive chemistry between these two groups of players and when you marry youthful enthusiasm with the experience of battle-hardened veterans, it can be a potent mix.
In that regard, this Mayo team remind me of our Galway side in 1998, where young talent — five players came out of the under-21s that year — came into a dressingroom with a lot of more experienced players, the likes of Sean De Poar, Kevin Walsh and Tomas Mannion, and gave them a new lease of life.
That’s not always the case. Sometimes, when a crop of youngsters arrive in the dressingroom, the older players can view them as a threat. In Galway, one group inspired the other. Together, they realised what they could achieve together and that helped the gelling process and created the winning formula for Sam Maguire.
Granted, it is only evidence from two League games, but it appears that the young Mayo players have had the same effect on the more experienced lads. The likes of Higgins have got a new lease of life.
Another pleasing aspect was how Brendan Harrison slotted into the full-back position after his return from injury. There has been an issue at the edge of the square for Mayo since Ger Cafferkey had his troubles with injury, but the 2017 All-Star Harrison looks like being the solution on the evidence so far
A word of caution, though. All this optimism out west needs to be weighed against how pathetic Tyrone have been over the past two weekends. They were terrible in Killarney and terrible again in Omagh.
Mickey Harte’s side looked rudderless disorganised and lacking any unity of purpose. Okay, there were a few familiar faces absent in Healy Park but the presence of Colm Cavanagh would have hardly bridged the alarming gap in quality between the two sides.
As much as James Horan has reason to be cheerful after the opening two rounds. Harte has cause for concern. If his team don’t respond in Hyde Park tomorrow, then Tyrone will be in deep, deep trouble.