MICHEAL CLIFFORD: O’SHEA WEIGHED DOWN BY MAYO ANGST

Expecting Aidan O’Shea to carry his county’s All-Ireland agonies on his back is both ridiculous and unreasonable

FOR a split second we thought White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally had enough and swapped Washington for Westport. It was just that his gift of turning chaos into crisis in a single briefing was stamped all over the team released by Mayo on Thursday, informing us that Aidan O’Shea will not start against Sligo today.

He may or may not; inter-county team announcements these days invite as much trust as a Vladimir Putin transcription of a behindclosed-doors meeting.

It was the timing of it that smacked of Spicery; hours earlier Bernard Flynn’s eagle-eyed observation, that O’Shea – at the conclusion of a recent challenge game against Meath – had indulged the requests of kids by posing for selfies while his team-mates had gone into a postgame huddle, went viral.

The horror of it all. Perhaps, he should have ploughed his way through the children for the everso-important post-challenge game debrief huddle – apparently they are worth their weight in an All-Ireland gold – to reassure his watching critics his mind was on the job.

Sure, the worst that would have come out of that would have been a Liveline special on how he had gotten too big for his boots.

‘Ah Aidan, why didn’t you think of the children….,’ Joe might lament.

That’s the thing with O’Shea, there is nothing he can do to please most of the people all of the time.

So why then take it out on the county when it is so much easier to take it out on the man.

These days, the stick of choice is to compare him to Michael Murphy – something that former Meath star Flynn and Kerry legend Tomás Ó Sé chose to beat him with in the last week.

Is that fair? Which current footballer would come off favourably when set against the Donegal captain?

How well would Diarmuid Connelly rate if that was deemed to be the measure of his worth? Or David Moran? Or Lee Keegan? Or Brian Fenton?

Hell, even Conor McManus would have to give way. Murphy is the greatest player that Donegal has ever produced; O’Shea is not even in the top three of Mayo’s current team.

In terms of form, skill and strategic importance, Keegan, Keith Higgins and Cillian O’Connor would all rank higher.

That is not a criticism; just a reflection of where they stood in the queue respectively when the sporting gods were handing out the gifts; yet somehow O’Shea is expected to be to Mayo what Murphy is to Donegal.

The only thing that they have in common is they are both big men who struggle to buy frees, but after that they operate in different spheres.

Murphy’s sublime ball striking, soft hands, game intelligence and leadership – so obvious that he was made captain when he was just 21 – makes him a glorious freak of footballing nature.

O’Shea is a good player, a very good player, but he has neither the mobility nor anything near the finely-tuned skillset – most obviously in terms of kicking skills and game smarts – to match Murphy. Despite that, the implication is that he should still be able to heap this Mayo team on his shoulders and carry them across the All-Ireland line. All he needs to do, apparently, is change his attitude, shake himself up and sort himself out.

The accusation that he is in the game for fame is the cruelest and most unfair jibe of all.

He invites that warped perception simply because he chooses to be himself rather than be the monotone, one-dimensional personality the modern game now demands of its high-profile practitioners.

From his social media presence, to his appearance in a reality TV show (the same one which Murphy appeared on and which did not raise a peep), to playing basketball, to speaking his mind in an interview, all amount as invites to his critics to hammer him.

And justifying the desire that he be put back in his box every time he cocks his head out to breathe is the constant and wearisome demand that he has not earned the right to be himself because he does not possess an All-Ireland medal.

Tomás Ó Sé made that point last weekend when claiming that O’Shea should not have been moved to commence ‘throwing a few stones’ at Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly recently in an interview because, without an All-Ireland medal, he has no ground to stand on.

But what about it if the Breaffy player never manages to win a Celtic Cross?

Does that deny him the right to challenge those who peddle what he believes to be mistruths about his application to the game?

For pity’s sake, because he does not have an All-Ireland medal, should that define the borders in terms of how he lives his life? That makes no sense. What makes even less is the notion that somehow it is in O’Shea’s gift to end Mayo’s All-Ireland famine.

Yet it is the line that is spun almost every time.

They have not crossed that line for a multitude of reasons – from defensive mistakes, to poor team selections, to bad luck and, above all, to not being good enough.

Not even in Spicer’s black-andwhite cartoon world would Mayo’s failures be heaped on the shoulders of one man.

That alone should behove the rest of us to acknowledge that truth.