Blonde assassin of ’06 Mortimer says O’Shea must stay where he can be dangerous
CONOR MORTIMER once occupied the place in popular imagination where Aidan O’Shea now resides – the easy target when things went wrong. It went with the bleached hair and desire to stand out from the crowd. In his autobiography, Keys
to the Kingdom, former Kerry manager Jack O’Connor spoke of how they deliberately ‘talked up the blondies’ (Mortimer and Ciaran McDonald) before the 2006 All-Ireland final. It’s hard to imagine O’Connor referring to key players in any other county like that. But that has always been the way with Mayo. Their bigger players have always divided opinion, dismissed by one side in a glib manner.
O’Shea’s personality isn’t as quirky as Mortimer, who once scrawled a tribute to Michael Jackson on his vest for a Connacht championship game, but he attracts attention in the same way. From the ‘crime’ of taking selfies with young supporters in Mullingar to the full-back experiment, which even those with little interest in GAA seemed able to comment on – everyone has an opinion on O’Shea.
Ahead of today’s match, there’s even a misconception that he has never performed in All-Ireland finals, which conveniently ignores the brilliant part he played in creating Lee Keegan’s goal in last year’s replay.
‘It is down to the media, really,’ Mortimer says of why O’Shea comes in for more scrutiny. ‘No disrespect, but they look for someone who is a bit different to the norm. He does his media stuff, has his few gigs, he is not one to sit quietly in the corner and say nothing. He stands out and that brings attention. I had it myself when I played.
‘It is like anything. If you put yourself out there, you have to be willing to take the hits. Take the highs and the lows, because the higher you are, the minute you get a bang, it is a hard fall.
‘He is one of our better players, possibly our best player. He has such potential, he might have 95 or 96 per cent released, but there is another four or five per cent we all know is there. I would like to see him dominate for the whole game. He has to be smart when he is making his runs. You see a lot of players making runs, Ciarán Kilkenny will probably make 200 runs in a game, and maybe only get 30 balls.
‘Aidan O’Shea can’t do that. It is about being smart and knowing when to run and when not to run, that is the big thing for Aidan in this final. Be at the end of moves when it is dangerous. He is
well able to play, the same as Kieran Donaghy. He can get ball low, he doesn’t need high ball.’
Mortimer, who remains Mayo’s alltime scorer, says that O’Shea won’t be under any extra pressure to perform today, despite a reputation, however unwarranted, of not having done it in a final.
‘When you are playing a team game, in order for one player to be good, the player beside him has to be good. But when you have a player like Aidan O’Shea, he is going to be targeted and marked well, it gives other forwards that little bit of space and they have to step up.’
Back in 2006, O’Connor’s plan for ‘the blondies’ worked as Kerry blitzed Mayo off the field and Tom O’Sullivan didn’t give Mortimer, who was superb in the semi-final win over Dublin, a sniff.
‘It was hard,’ Mortimer recalls of that final and its aftermath. ‘Both as a team and personally, because we were s **** and I was s **** . The confidence you get from a semifinal win can drain away pretty quickly if you don’t win your first couple of balls in the final.
‘That is what Mayo have to realise in this final. What beat Kerry won’t be good enough to beat Dublin.’ * Conor Mortimer is a Paddy Power GAA ambassador