Mayo are left to dance the blues all over again

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

WHOEVER was choosing the music at half-time in Croker on Sunday got it right. Well mostly. Some of it wasn’t to our taste – hey you can’t please all of the people all of the time – but the song they chose to play just as Mayo emerged for the second half was just about perfect.

The familiar strains started off, an instant spike of recognition and then that most famous of voices came in with words that could have been written with this exact moment in mind – let’s dance.

Over the following forty or so minutes dance they did, these giants of the game. The first half was good. The second half was at another level again. It was everything you’d want in an All Ireland final. Edge of the seat stuff. Barely a moment to draw breath. Big hits. Big moments. Memories to last a life time.

This was easily the best All Ireland final of the decade so far and one of the best of all-time and, yet, somehow for most of us it was a bit of an anti-climax when the denouement came and the Dubs were the ones left standing.

It’s not that we have anything against this particular Dublin team. It’s just that so many of us around the country wanted to see Mayo get over the line. They really are a magnificent bunch of footballers, the character they show, the football they play.

That Mayo seemed poised to finally do it for so much of the game made it all the more difficult to swallow when they didn’t. Mayo had got so much right and had so much go their way that they really should have won this game (when have we heard that before?).

Dominoes Mayo needed to fall began to fall from before the throw-in. Jim Gavin selected the wrong side. In our view the decision not to start Diarmuid Connolly nearly cost the Sky Blues an All Ireland title.

Starting Eoghan O’Gara – presumably for his physicality in what was sure to be a physical game – didn’t really work out as planned and cost Dublin a late substitution as a result.

That Dublin had used up three of their allocation of six substitutions by the time the second half got underway was a huge boon to Stephen Rochford and Mayo – O’Gara and Paddy Andrews were withdrawn at the break, Jack McCaffrey before that with a hamstring strain.

It meant that, to a large extent, one of Dublin’s greatest strengths was negated. Instead of being able to bring on six players in the final twenty minutes, Jim Gavin could call upon just three. The relative weakness of Mayo’s bench shouldn’t have been as big an issue under the circumstances.

Another domino seemed to fall their way when John Small picked up a second yellow card for a challenge on Colm Boyle. Mayo were set to have an extra player down the back stretch of the game and had a free in a scorable position to retake the lead.

Instead Donie Vaughan lost the head and got himself sent off on a straight red card. It was an act of lunacy by a player who’d been playing really well. Mayo not only lost their extra man, they lost their free, they lost the throw-in and conceded a point directly from it.

As an act of self-harm this was right up there with the two own-goals in the first half of last year’s drawn final. The two-point swing was bad enough. The fact that having both teams down to fourteen men played into the Dubs’ hands was even more significant.

It opened the game up at a time when the last thing Mayo needed was for the game to get more expansive. Even then Mayo found their way to goal – Lee Keegan’s strike was, to use that phrase again, magnificent – and found their way to a two point lead with less than ten minutes of ordinary time to go.

There was very little more they could do bar see the thing out. Maybe Rochford should have kept Andy Moran on the pitch – although he did seem to be carrying a knock by then – still the game was in their own hands, literally so in Cillian O’Connor’s case.

There was no guarantee had he pointed that injury-time free that Mayo would have won the game. Surely, however, they wouldn’t have lost it. We’d be loathe to criticise O’Connor for missing it mind you.

This wasn’t evidence for a lack of bottle or anything like that. A man missed a free, it happens. It was within his range certainly, but it was no banker and it came off the upright. Where Mayo missed out was no having somebody under the dropping ball as Andy Moran would have been.

O’Connor’s miss wasn’t the moment Mayo lost the final, but it did all but confirm it. Dublin’s composure saw them get their chance to win and saw them take it. David Clarke’s terrible kick-out straight after Dean Rock’s winner summed up just how frazzled Mayo had become by then.

So for all the talk about how Mayo should have, Dublin did and because they did there can be no question but that they deserved it. To the winners the spoils. It’s just a shame for Mayo that they’ve come across one of the all-time great sides.

It’s even a shame for Dublin that to prove their greatness they had to see off Mayo in the final. Had they beaten any other county to claim a three in-a-row, they would have been more widely celebrated.

Dublin are more respected than beloved. Not that it will bother them unduly. Not when they’re left to celebrate with cannister, while Mayo are left to dance the blues

again.