The crystal ball for football in 2019 is already in use

More than ever we need a county to excite the public’s imagination — few do that better than Mayo, so who will lead them?

IN the week that is in it, what titillated the Gaelic football nation said everything about just how grim and grey the world it inhabits has become.

After all, this should be its time. We should be consumed by the endless possibilities the biggest game of ball this season will reveal, except no one’s heart is in talking it up and even if they did no one, outside of Dublin and Tyrone, is really interested in listening.

There have been a few halfhearted efforts to tease out intrigue; a brief flirtation with fantasy which suggested Conor McKenna’s initials – the former Tyrone star who is home on his jollies from the AFL in Australia where he togs with Essendon – had been spotted on official team gear and he was set to be parachuted into the Tyrone match day panel, was let off the slip as a runner.

It collapsed in an exhausted heap before it got to the first corner.

Ten years ago, Stephen O’Neill was rumoured to be set for a dramatic return to the Tyrone panel pre the 2008 All-Ireland final, except it turned out not to be not a rumour at all but the sensational truth.

It reminded us of that Jon Kenny sketch, where the psychopathic Under-10s manager laments the declining standard of name-calling in his dressing room.

At a time when we never needed a rumour so badly to come along and sauce the appetite, imaginations were so cowed by the reality that this was the best they could come up with.

Of course, there have been straight-faced efforts to apply critical thinking; talk that Tyrone must bring war, take the fight to Dublin man on man, but by the time you get past the match-ups for Paul Mannion, Con O’Callaghan, Ciarán Kilkenny, Brian Fenton, James McCarthy and Jack McCaffrey, that conversation comes to a premature but yet entirely natural death.

One minute you are talking about a football match and the next you are so tongue-tied that you are getting horrendous flash-backs to an attempted match-up which went horribly pear-shaped at the youth club disco many moons ago.

God bless Mayo, then, who got us all talking excitedly again, but how they did it says everything about how Dublin’s brilliance has blinded those closest to them into being shunted into living in the fantasy rather than the real world.

When we move past the crude and cack-handed manner of how the Mayo executive cruelly humiliated a man who last year oversaw the greatest performance by a losing team in an All-Ireland final, that wee tremor of excitement could be felt.

God knows, comparing the Mayo executive to Albert Einstein is even more of a stretch than suggesting Tyrone can beat Dublin, but it chimed with the latter’s line that ‘Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.’

And that is what Mayo have been trying to peddle. A world where things can be better, but rather than plan to make it happen you just have to imagine it happening.

The ugliness of Rochford’s departure was sugared by the notion that the future belongs to the past. That either James Horan could squeeze something from a group he had parted with almost half a decade ago, or that Jim McGuinness could take them to a place where they can take down Dublin.

Horan’s withering assessment of the Mayo County Board this week hardly qualified as a job application, but his refusal to not rule out a return means that he remains the short-priced favourite.

But it was how McGuinness’ name was used – nourished by nods and winks in high places – that revealed much.

Ultimately, it is not going to happen if McGuinness stays true to his declaration that he is not planning on a return to Gaelic football, but the fact that the possibility was not just entertained this week made a lot of folk go light-headed at the prospect says much.

Almost half a decade after his defensive blueprint was rendered redundant, the distant prospect of his return still managed to send a shiver of anticipation through football’s spine.

That says much about his charisma, but it says more about the game’s desperation to find intrigue even when there is scant evidence for it to exist.

And it is just not Mayo; Kerry’s hate-filled send-off of Éamonn Fitzmaurice has led to talk of new beginnings. It may be the case, but it is Jack O’Connor’s name – whose last All-Ireland senior success was nine years ago — which has got much traction.

It does not really matter if anything comes of it, but it is revealing that football imaginations have become so sterile that it is only names from the past, the Horan’s, the McGuinness’ and O’Connor’s that get it fired up.

The danger with that is it confuses people into thinking that there is a quick-fix solution to challenge the domination of Dublin, which has been established by good forward planning and stable governance.

They know that the future is what you make of it, not what you imagine it to be by looking through the prism of the past.

We never needed a rumour so badly to come along and sauce the appetite