THE FINAL CONFLICT
Mayo and Dublin are just 70 minutes from immortality, but only one will taste that glory
ANTICIPATED as the final football wanted, this is in actual fact the final football desperately needed. The Championship to this point was as passionate as weak tea. The provincial competitions are suffering from a variety of ills, but predictability is the great curse.
That problem has now spread to the All-Ireland series, with Mayo’s dramas against Roscommon the only diverting quarterfinal.
The westerners’ penchant for the operatic emerged in the semi-finals, too, before they exposed Kerry in another replay.
Dublin players, though, will have been more challenged by the demand for tickets than the pathetic showing of Tyrone three weeks ago. However, a system undermined by glaring flaws has nonetheless managed to produce a day we can truly savour.
That is a credit to the two squads involved, and to the contrasting impulses that have driven them back to a place where they gripped the country, twice, 12 months ago.
Greatness, not Mayo, is Dublin’s quarry. That was obvious from the moment Jim Gavin (right) spoke after the Tyrone rout and reminded the country that Dublin had not played to their desired standard in last year’s drawn final and replay.
This was, inevitably, seized on by some skittish Mayo supporters and it fed some brief social media fury. However, Gavin was correct: Dublin did not match the standards they had produced all season in the finals. This was largely because of the resistance they met but, even allowing for Mayo’s physical strength and footballing nous, Gavin is entitled to demand excellence from his men. It is, after all, the level that has driven them to this point in his management. His comments broke loose a memory of something Jack O’Connor said after the final in 2006. Kerry had vaporised Mayo in a game in which the Connacht team were, as usual, the neutral’s fancy. There had
been the predictable talk of Mayo’s long wait in the build-up to the final; to that point, it had been 55 years since they last claimed the Sam Maguire.
But O’Connor said Kerry’s wait for the Championship, extending to all of two years, had been every bit as painful as Mayo’s. And what he said was absolutely believable: he was in charge of a team who didn’t care about opponents or history. All that would sate them was winning.
They couldn’t get enough of it, and, on the days they didn’t win, it ached like a decades-old wound.
There is that cut to this Dublin team. They want nothing but glory. They are a group seasoned in joyous Septembers, and they do not want to surrender that.
And satisfaction, not Dublin, is the preoccupation of Mayo. They are not trying to overcome history or tiresome talk of curses.
Instead, they want the ultimate recognition of a seven-year-long maintenance of incredible standards and ambition. They want to be the best team in Ireland, not because it is 66 years since a team from the county managed that, but because it is the terminus of the campaign they have waged for all these seasons.
Until they win an All-Ireland, this group will always be pursuers, no matter how dedicated they are and no matter how well they play on other days. Until there is green and red tickertape streaming down around them as the sun slips into the west, they will remain wanderers. Peace can only come to them in one form. That competition between established winners and ceaseless triers is why this final is so appealing. It helps that these two squads are the finest in Ireland, but the attraction is deepened by the roles they have been assigned in the popular, romantic imagination. Dublin are the rich metropolitans enjoying the financial and logistical advantages accruing to county with the capital city within its bounds. Mayo are the windswept outsiders, backed by truly extraordinary supporters, bent again towards the ambition that unites a people. It is a storyline that would have made old Walt Disney grin, and there is a cartoonish simplicity to it.
Last year, for instance, intercounty spending for every team in the Championship exceeded €23 million. One of the teams involved today headed the list of spenders – and it wasn’t Dublin.
A total of €1,632,448 was spent on Mayo teams in 2016, of which 62 per cent went on the senior footballers. Dublin spent €1,514,394 on their county sides.
The money swirling around Gaelic games is certainly extraordinary, but it is not confined to the east of the country.
Those figures are illustrative of the standard at which Mayo and Dublin now operate, but it is staggering that Stephen Rochford has managed to coax another tilt at the final glory from a group many thought were done after 2014.
That is where Mayo are defying expectations, as Gavin can tend to his squad and introduce fresh talents like Con O’Callaghan this season.
If there are differences between the groups, they are not so great as to make the outcome today inevitable. And that, this morning, is where the excitement kindles.
On the biggest day of the year, nothing is certain.
Glory waits to be claimed.