Mayo funding fiasco is not for players to fix

CALLS are beginning to be made for an intervention by the Mayo players in the tireless drama around fundraising, millionaire supporters and the county board, that must be mortifying for all involved. The temptation is to suppose that there is no further lurch this mind-boggling row could take towards the pitiful, but a decision by some of Mayo’s most renowned names to involve themselves in the mess could disprove that idea.

This is not the players’ row, or that of the management. Their engagement with it should not extend beyond wondering how on earth they have come so close to winning an All-Ireland in an era when executives in Mayo have stumbled from one embarrassment to the next.

In a week when old slurs were regurgitated pertaining to alleged character flaws in this Mayo team, the backdrop provided by the administrative barn-fire in the county actually sharpens the contours of their efforts since 2012.

Year after year, this group have reached the decisive stages of the Championship, losing four finals by four points, one point, one point and one point.

And while the players and their managers made epic tilts at an ambition that consumes a county, controversies around their executive sporadically broke out, like rashes.

In February 2015, Croke Park took over the loan on MacHale Park, with chairman Mike Connelly telling the Mayo News: ‘In real terms, our repayments will now work out at approximately €33,000 per month. That’s down around €15,000 per month from what we had been paying. The way we look at it, it’s quite sizeable but manageable.’

Repayments of that size are a major drain on resources, even in a large county with vast levels of support within and without Ireland.

The controversies went beyond the merely financial, though. The circumstances in which James

Horan was replaced in 2014 at the end of his first spell in charge were needlessly messy, with Kevin McStay understood to be the only candidate but nonetheless failing to be appointed to the position.

This latest mess is thickened by some of the rich absurdities mixed through. An official referring to Tim O’Leary, the man behind the Mayo GAA International Supporters Foundation, as a donkey in correspondence was pitiful, but the decision to then play the song Shoe the Donkey, as well as Money Money Money over the PA in MacHale Park after a match between a Mayo selection and the Underdogs was risible.

The affair has raised urgent issues around the protocol counties must follow when dealing with fundraising efforts by outside organisations, it appears to have exposed tensions at executive level in Mayo, and it has also drawn the attention of Croke Park, who have summoned Mayo officials to explain themselves.

The clubs of the county should be demanding answers, too, instead of debasing themselves with silly media bans and grumbles about press coverage.

They are the ones who can effect change, and who can ask their elected officers to set and maintain the standards pursued by their footballers for almost a decade.

This is not a row for the Mayo players, but they and their manager must be enormously frustrated.

It has been repeated to the point of becoming trite by many Mayo fans over the past month, but the sentiment is not weakened by retelling: this simply would not happen in Dublin.

Everything off the pitch in the home of the football champions, is directed towards the maintenance of excellence on the pitch. That plainly cannot be said of Mayo.

It was 72 years ago this month that another group of Mayo players took it upon themselves to demand more of their county board.

In a letter that has become famous in GAA lore, the players demanded better. They reached breaking point when playing a League match against Kerry in November 1947 short of two players, and so the county secretary, as well as a driver with the team, had to tog out.

‘Year after year we have seen the County Board bring to nought the hours of training which we have put in, but yet, believing it was outside our sphere as players, we have desisted from drawing your attention to the matter,’ they wrote.

‘Events in Tralee last Sunday have banished our indecision, however, and we feel the time has come when something must be done before football disappears completely in Mayo – unwept, unhonoured and unsung.’

Matters are not at so stark a juncture now, but this latest farrago needs quick resolution – and it should not be up to the players to push for it this time.

‘REPAYMENTS ON MACHALE PARK ARE A HUGE DRAIN ON RESOURCES’