Same old mistakes have come back to haunt Mayo
Poor calls on the line and indiscipline on the field remain a recurring theme
IHAVE experienced a lot of feelings in my time watching football games, but I ploughed new ground sitting in front of the box last Sunday.
It is the first time I ever suffered from motion sickness but that is what happens when you just can’t stop shaking your head with bewilderment.
I trust, not least among Mayo folk, that I was not alone.
I have not come here to salt their wounds but I was simply staggered by the manner of their loss to Galway.
It almost feels like that they keep playing the same game over and over in a tormenting loop and there is no more agonising way to keep losing than the same way.
Nor is there a more damning one, either.
I am going to start at the end because that’s when I got up and went looking for the neighbour’s cat to kick.
I watched open-mouthed as the Mayo management gave Andy Moran the crooked finger in the 71st minute with the game locked in stalemate, with the bones of eight minutes of injury time remaining.
One week later and I am still trying to make sense of it – I remain unsuccessful.
Perhaps, they had an eye on extratime and hoped to knock another five minutes out of him there but in a tied game – with that much time left – that would not constitute forward-thinking, but a reckless gamble.
Perhaps, and I saw this when Darragh was substituted far too prematurely in his final year with Kerry in 2009, they looked at his birth cert and decided to call him ashore.
That has more of a ring of truth to it, but makes absolutely no less sense.
I am not suggesting that had Moran stayed on the field the result would have been any different, but I can tell you the Galway full-back line were thinking happy thoughts.
Moran may not be as fast as he was when I used to mark him, but he still makes those runs. And I use the plural because he will make more than one to lose you and that has never left his game.
In the final quarter last Sunday, when Cillian O’Connor came on the field, he dove-tailed beautifully with Moran – feeding off precise diagonal ball and bleeding a precious point out of one.
Now, if Mayo had a sub on the bench who was like-for-like then I could see some reason in it but, instead, Donal Vaughan came in.
The reason I am obsessing about Moran’s substitution is down to the mindset behind it.
Football is the simplest of games. We keep hearing about how it is a squad game now – and it is – but that does not mean that it is obligatory to go to your bench when it actually weakens your team.
Dublin use their bench to effectively finish with their strongest team. In our good days we went there to get some game changers on the field, which was pretty much what Galway did last weekend as well.
There is no shame if your bench is not good enough, but it is sheer folly to use it in the knowledge that you are deliberately weakening your hand.
But Mayo have form here not just in taking Colm Boyle and Moran off prematurely in a number of games last year, but in not even starting the latter the previous season.
And then, of course, there was Diarmuid O’Connor’s sending off. Mayo lost two Championship games last year – finishing with 14 men both times – with Keith Higgins and Vaughan picking up red cards not through malice but through sheer recklessness. There may have been no malice in that raised O’Connor (left) elbow last Sunday, but it was so utterly reckless that you have to ask what, if anything, is going through Mayo’s heads. Stephen Rochford rightly hailed his team afterwards for the resilience they showed yet again, but while they have wondrous levels of courage, they need to show us something else. They need to show they are learning but instead they have this habit of compounding one mistake by making the same one over again. Remember the failed defensive match-ups in the 2012 final against Donegal which left Michael Murphy to make hay, and how it happened all over again two years later in the AllIreland semi-final against Kerry to Kieran Donaghy’s benefit.
The line is always thrown out about how valuable experience is, but here’s the thing... it is only worth what you make of it. And Mayo have not made a lot. If this sounds like I am enjoying giving then a kicking, I am not.
They have made a championship out of a monopoly this decade, they have some of the most earnest and cerebral men – something I have come to appreciate since getting to know James Horan on the punditry circuit – who have worked with them, and I have little doubt that Rochford thinks deeply about his game, too.
They have one of the most able backroom teams in the game – I can vouch from my own experi-
You must ask if anything is going through Mayo heads
ence that Donie Buckley is the most astute out there – and yet they find the same way to lose over and over again. True, they always find a way to rise again. Will they this time? Most likely, but only to a point. The threat of the qualifiers is often talked up – although should Mayo start out as distracted as last summer against Derry nothing can be ruled out – but they have more than enough for that. But there is no way to sugar the loss of Tom Parsons, and it could mean a change of role when Lee Keegan returns. We saw last year how transformative the conversion of James McCarthy from wingback to midfield was for Dublin. However in Mayo, Peter does not have enough in the bank to go paying for Paul. If they hit the Super 8s, the need for Keegan’s fire-fighting abilities will be required closer to home, They will rally because they know no other way. But will they learn? Too late for that… school has already closed.