MAYO POWER INTO DECIDER
Connacht men’s class sets up another date with destiny as limp Kerry are blown away
AND so a journey that has long morphed into a pilgrimage has taken them back to yet another date with destiny.
For the fourth time in six years, Mayo will be on the main stage on football’s biggest day and the wonder now is if they have ever been more ready to own it.
Doing epic comes second nature to them, but what made this different was that for once they turned their backs on the dramatic and produced a performance of such chilling ruthlessness that it has the capacity to test the nerve of the winners of today’s anticipated game of football chess.
This was also the fourth successive season that they had faced into a replay against one of football’s big two with the accusation ringing in their ears that they had let their chance slip, but the only thing that slipped here was the noose around Kerry’s summer.
The anticipated thriller never developed; Mayo’s foot pressing so hard on Kerry that they led from the end of the first quarter exuding such confidence that the result was never in doubt.
In the build-up to yesterday’s replay the world wondered whether the Mayo manager would ‘stick or twist’ in his deployment of Aidan O’Shea as an emergency full-back.
In the end he did both; twisting in the opening 20 minutes as both Donie Vaughan and O’Shea’s older sibling Seamus spent time on Kieran Donaghy, but as Kerry’s desperation found articulation by dropping bombs from the sky, Rochford returned to the game-plan that invited such heat last week.
Its success was such that Donaghy, in perhaps the last act of a great inter-county career, was to lash out at O’Shea and left the game at the death with the perfect timing of a pantomime villain.
In truth, he deserved better given that he was of his team’s better players on a day when Kerry malfunctioned horribly.
They were arguably beaten from the moment that Diarmuid O’Connor flicked Donie Vaughan’s harmless looking through ball to the net in the 26th minute.
That did not just give Mayo a 1-7 to 0-5 lead; it applied some badly needed reason to a score-line which up to that point had cruelly undervalued the winners’ dominance.
Mayo won this because they were simply the better team with the better players by a distance. Nothing underlined that more potently than their demolition of the Kerry kickout; they turned over seven in the first-half with Seamie O’Shea and man-of-the-match Colm Boyle to the fore.
It melted Kerry heads to the point that after seeing two of his turned over kick-outs returned for points, Brian Kelly was left with so little space when going short for relief that he kicked one out over on his own end-line.
If there is a comfort for Fitzmaurice, admittedly it is a cold one, it was the manner in how Mayo killed this game.
They had retired at the break leading by 1-8 to 0-6, which forced Fitzmaurice’s hand in abandoning the sweeper and the price was not long in coming.
Andy Moran, who mercilessly torched Shane Enright for the second time inside a week, gobbled up sub Conor Loftus’ diagonal ball, before playing a one-two with Cillian O’Connor before flicking it to the net. Game over. All that followed was heat; David Gough impersonating a card dealer in a flurry of colour which saw Kerry’s Peter Crowley and Mayo’s Paddy Durcan both sent off for double yellow cards, while Cillian O’Connor and Darren O’Sullivan saw black – the latter decision in the 44th minute reeking of injustice.
Not that it mattered, although in the 46th minutes a game of pingpong broke out in the Mayo square as Stephen O’Brien was denied by a goal by a combination of Keith Higgins and David Clarke, with both also conspiring to block Paul Geaney’s follow-up.
That summed up the resilience of a team that refuses to die.