COUNTDOWN TO THE ALL-IRELAND FINAL
HOW MAYO RESCUED THEIR SEASON
THE notion that Mayo could simply talk their way out of a hole grates with the pragmatist in Stephen Rochford.
Even though the concept that a team can lose and still live has been with us for 16 years, the sight of players getting off their bellies and marching all the way to football’s biggest stage still intrigues.
It hints at a journey of self-discovery and self-healing in contrast to those who are cursed by the relative shallowness of surfing a wave of momentum that comes with an uninterrupted winning streak.
That is why all those who come through the back door have cornered the good-yarn market, like Jack O’Connor who, when he was not stumbling across accidental full-forwards like Kieran Donaghy in 2006, was plucking full-backs (Michael McCarthy in 2009) out of retirement.
And then there is the furniture event bang in the middle of every derailed Championship summer – the obligatory crisis meeting which in the event of the journey being completed becomes reference point.
The way it rolls is that such is the energising force of this truth and reconciliation festival that a band of brothers emerge fuelled by a sense of destiny that will torch all before them. Sometimes, as with the Clare hurlers in 2013, they even get custard cream treats and Miwadi juice to wash all that sincerity down.
Less than 24 hours after Mayo’s bid for a sixth Connacht title in-a-row was ended by Galway, they gathered in Castlebar for their own truth summit on a Sunday afternoon back in June.
While it served its purpose, Rochford cannot help but roll his eyeballs to the heavens when it is suggested that it was the moment his team found their Championship legs again.
‘Invariably every bloody county has one of those meetings after playing and you end up in the All-Ireland final and then it becomes the day that it all turned,’ he dismisses.
‘No, the day that it all turned was going back and putting hard work in on the field, starting to realise that it is only through hard work that you get back to being able to dig out results because, yeah, we are not shouting out a lie here and claiming that we are playing the best football in the country.
‘We know that we have got better performances in us but we have got the ultimate day to go and produce that performance.
‘We know that will only come from putting in the hard work and the labour in on the field and that is what turned around our season and that is what has afforded us the opportunity to win the Sam Maguire.’
While Rochford’s way has been to keep the nose pressed hard to the grindstone, he will not deny that his rookie season as an inter-county manager has been testing.
It was never going to be any other way given the manner in which he inherited the position, the absence of a proper pre-season – which left him locked in a relegation battle throughout the spring – and then that crushing low point against Galway.
He does not deny that moment shook him to the core like nothing else.
‘This isn’t why I got involved,’ he recalls thinking at the final whistle. ‘And it wasn’t the loss; it was the manner in which we didn’t play.
‘There is that element of shock because when we all woke up that morning we felt that we were in a good place.
‘We felt that we had prepared well but sometimes that nearly brings its own threat of taking your eye off the ball and you get too comfortable. We had played a practice game the week before and the probables were just flying and that brought it to a level of comfort but it was the wrong week to have that comfort.
‘At the same time we were four up with 15 to go, so we still were in a position to win that game. But had we won that game would we have moseyed on into a Connacht final with still the same problems?
‘What we have done now I feel is thrown a lot of resolve and resilience into the team and maybe even got a little bit meaner.’
He has done more than that, the team is as different in personnel as it is in attitude.
There are half a dozen players that started that Galway game who are not starters and while some of those decisions were inevitable – Diarmuid O’Connor missed the Galway game through injury, while Seamus O’Shea started on the bench because of a fitness issue – others were brave and radical.
The recurring theme is that he had found new tunes from old instruments, recalling David Clarke, Donal Vaughan, Barry Moran and, most spectacularly, Andy Moran, while giving Alan Dillon game-time off the bench amounts to a declaration of trust in his veterans.
That trust is not shared outside his dressing room, with Mayo deemed by the market to be the next in line to be mowed down by football’s blue juggernaut.
Mayo’s hopes in next Sunday’s final, it would seem, are based on the abstract hope that there has to be one big game in them.
But Rochford’s faith is invested in something stronger than that, arguing that Mayo’s form line is rising steadily for a reason.
‘As they say with a lot of investments, past performance does not always guarantee what future returns will be and likewise, just because you have been playing poorly does not mean that you are waiting to peak for this one day,’ he said.
‘We certainly have been looking to peak at the latter stages of the Championship. I will make no bones about that. In a competition that affords you a second chance, you can play a
We are not claiming that we are the best football team in the country
Had we won, would we have moseyed on with the same issues?
little with that and certainly we were a little later on in our season starting so that did play into us, but invariably the result that will come out on September 18 will determine as to whether we had the right formula.
‘If we don’t perform to the very highest level we are going to be another statistic on a bad Mayo record.’
That is not what he signed up for, but he also knows that he is facing a Dublin team who are hunting down greatness as much as silver. He insists that he does not buy the narrative that Kerry showed that the champions could be got at but they will not be making the journey up for the fun of it. ‘In fairness to Dublin, I thought they were very solid and very fluent from the first minute right through to the 75th minute. Did I see opportunities? That would be telling.’ And, as we know, he is not one for the talk.