A BRIDGE TOO FAR FOR MAYO:
Tomás Ó Sé on why this heroic Mayo team will fall at the final hurdle again
W HEN I look at the journey Mayo have been on this year, I can’t help but think of where Kerry were in the summer of 2009.
I have such a vivid memory of standing on the field in Tralee, Sligo about to take a penalty late in the game that would surely beat us. The whole country would have been down on us like a ton of bricks if we lost, but – somehow – we got away with it. The penalty was saved by Diarmuid Murphy and that save bought us another week to try and find our form.
Ordinarily, when you’re defending a penalty, the backs are primed to be on their toes, ready to devour any rebound off the goalkeeper or woodwork. But, if I’m honest, I was standing there on the flat of my feet, thinking, ‘How the f**k has it come to this?’
The idea of Sligo coming to Tralee and knocking Kerry out of the championship almost beggared belief. But that’s how low we were at that moment. Psychologically, I had already conceded that they’d score that penalty and we’d face into maybe the rawest postmortem ever held in Kerry football.
As Diarmuid made the save, I was standing like a cardboard cutout, hands on hips, frozen to the spot. I hadn’t been playing poorly. On the contrary, my form that year was really good but, as a collective, we were a mess. Nothing seemed to be working, nobody seemed to be gelling.
REFUGE
That was the famous night both Gooch and myself would seek refuge, separately, in a few pints. Me in Dingle, him in Killarney. One week later, the two of us were left sitting on the bench for an Antrim qualifier in Tullamore, Jack O’Connor trying to make a stand. But the dirt was still in the Kerry system and, before half-time, Jack had thrown both of us on, his opportunity to lay down a marker denied him.
We got away with it that day too and were drawn to play Dublin in an All-Ireland quarterfinal. Then, and only then, did our championship really start. I see a lot of something similar in Mayo this year, the same earlyseason struggle to find any kind of coherence. Falling over the line in games you should really be winning in second gear. Stinking the place out, but surviving. Always surviving.
The big difference, of course, is that that Kerry team had won three of the previous five All-Irelands. Mayo are still looking over their shoulders to ‘51.
But there’s a book to be written on the journey they’ve taken this year alone. So many of these men have nearly ten years’ service given, but this one has asked more of them than maybe any other.
My view at the start of the year was clearcut. I couldn’t see anything different about Mayo. One of the early nights on ‘The Sunday Game’, three of us were in agreement on that. Des Cahill asked Ciarán Whelan, Dessie Dolan and myself could this Mayo team win an All-Ireland? “No!” we responded in unison. Now? Let me say that I think Mayo are better now than they were last year. And that’s some leap from what I was thinking earlier in the season when, to be fair, they were hanging onto this championship by their fingernails.
So I saw so much of Kerry ‘09 in how Mayo scrambled this year through their games with Derry, with Clare, with Cork, with Roscommon in the drawn All-Ireland quarter-final. Because there were so many times you’d be looking at them, thinking, ‘They’re gone!’
Had they lost any of those games, they’d probably have got dog’s abuse.
Would it have been fair? Probably not, no. But given what Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly had said in that remarkable Irish
Independent interview with Martin Breheny, I’d say there was precious little empathy around for a group that had, effectively, sacked their joint managers in 2015.
But, two-and-a-half months after looking so close to defeat against Derry in Castlebar, here they are back in another All-Ireland final. And, better still, they’re here with the momentum of a runaway train.
That game on July 1 asked really serious questions of the group. Remember the match-clock read 68.26 when Conor Loftus buried that magnificent goal to put Mayo 1-11 to 0-12 up. The goal was a masterpiece of everything Mayo do well, specifically their support running. Within a minute, Loftus followed up with a Mayo point. What happened then? The clock read 71.16 when Mark Lynch fisted an equalising goal for Derry. When that happened, I could hear a voice in my head shouting, ‘F**k sake, same old Mayo!’ Now I’m not sure what I meant by that because, if this team has shown us anything in recent seasons, it’s that they have a resilience beyond the norm. And, of course, they hammered Derry in the extra-time period. Went to town on them to win by 11 points. Something tells me that was the real start of Mayo’s season. I mean they’d kicked just 11 points in 68 minutes of football, everybody thinking how cat they looked. But they found stuff inside themselves that day that told them, nothing might be flowing in our game, but we’re not slipping quietly here away for anyone. They found a bit of life in how they survived. And, in the weeks that followed, even though they still struggled, that spirit never wavered. If you compare the technical side of Mayo’s game against Kerry the last day with the technical side of their game against Derry, the two are miles apart. Nobody from Kerry was getting easy runs down the spine of their defence on August 26. What we’re looking at now is a Mayo group that has grown stronger mentally and become, tactically, more accomplished.
They’ve begun to vary their play more. Their two goals against Kerry came from long deliveries, as did three or four points. Previously, a high ball seemed almost to offend their constitution.
More than that, they had every invitation to lose the first game with Kerry and, yet, they dug a replay out of it. Mark my words, the character required to do that will be referenced in the Mayo dressing-room tomorrow. It has to be. They’ve got to accentuate the bloody-mindedness shown when it seemed they were on the ropes.
Because that’s what’ll stand to this Mayo team if tomorrow’s game is on the line with five minutes to go.
You can throw what you like at them, but if you suggest they’re not mentally tough well you just haven’t been paying attention. Let me put it this way. Their resilience has been challenged a lot more forcefully than Dublin’s has this summer. And that could be significant. Dublin simply haven’t been tested.
You have to give Mayo’s management team great credit in this regard too, because it seems to me that we’re seeing steady improvement in players who’ve been on the scene for some time now. David Clarke is a hugely improved goalkeeper for example. In the first Kerry game, Tom Parsons and Seamus O’Shea were killing themselves taking up positions on the sideline, then sprinting into landing areas.
In the second game, they just swarmed the centre, creating a group of maybe six players to give Clarke multiple options around the middle third. That told me that these fellas are thinking about the game, figuring things out, looking to adjust.
IMPROVEMENT
Look at the improvement in Andy Moran. Some of his scores against Kerry were phenomenal. If I’m honest, I thought he was a guy who’d left his best days behind and I certainly didn’t see him in the running for Player of the Year. But a big final tomorrow and he might well get that.
So how can you not admire that about Mayo? Show me another county getting a 33-year-old corner-forward to give some of the best performances of his life.
Beating Kerry had to be a huge thing psychologically. In my time as a county footballer, we always felt it important to deny them hope. It puts me in mind of that line from Red (Morgan Freeman) in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ about hope being “a dangerous thing”. Our mindset with Mayo was that you had to drive them into the ground so early and so hard that they’d realise the game was over.
We did that in the finals of ‘04 and ‘06, but this is a different Mayo team.
Personally, I think if they can win this final, it’ll be one of the greatest stories in the history of the GAA. A story of men simply refusing to be put down. Of living through psychological horrors and the plámás of fellas like me, patronising them with stuff they don’t want to hear. I get that. We all do.
I can say, hand on heart, I’d love Mayo to win the All-Ireland. But I don’t do sympathy. I don’t buy this idea of anybody deserving to win Sam. If you get it, you deserve it.
Mayo have progressed as a team in fairness. They had to. I was reading an interview with Jim Gavin on the GAA website this week and, if I’m honest, I take anything that Jim says before a big game with a huge grain of salt. But he said something in this interview that stuck with me.
“You must keep improving,” he said. “You cannot remain static.”
He wasn’t talking just season-to-season, he was talking match-to-match.
Look at Dublin’s forward line right now compared to, say, the one that finished last year’s All-Ireland final replay. The likes of Niall Scully and Con O’Callaghan were nowhere to be seen then.
O’Callaghan didn’t even feature in this year’s league. His main role was with the U-21s, but he’d obviously found a place in Gavin’s mind. I remember all the talk about O’Callaghan before they played Carlow and, coming away after, my gut instinct would have been that he wasn’t anything special.
But Gavin knew this kid was a serious talent with huge potential. Now look at him. The idea that Dublin might win an All-Ireland leaving Diarmuid Connolly on the bench would have seemed far-fetched a year ago. Today it’s highly possible.
On the Mayo side, I’ve questioned Aidan O’Shea in the past. He’s a big, big Mayo player and one of the points I made in that article was that he almost never, ever loses a throw-in. But that first day, Jack Barry caught the ball and, immediately, I thought, ‘This is Kerry making a statement now!’ What happened next?
Barry goes running down the wing, O’Shea catches up with him, takes the ball and – basically – f**ks him out over the sideline. That was him laying down the marker.
MARKER
Needless to say, he went and won the throw-in for the second half and both throw-ins in the replay. In other words, O’Shea got the ball – one way or another – from all four throw-ins against Kerry. That’s some marker to lay down.
He is vital to Mayo’s hopes tomorrow, that’s for certain. I suspect Philly McMahon will pick him up and that battle alone will be worth the price of a ticket.
My long-held view has been that Mayo don’t have the forwards to close this deal. But Andy Moran is having a year I couldn’t possibly have imagined was in him. Jason Doherty has been outstanding. Cillian O’Connor is on the brink of a new scoring record. In many ways, Mayo should have blown my opinion out of the water by now. But have they? I’m afraid not. Defensively, I just think Dublin will set Mayo a challenge on a different level to anything they’ve faced this year. Put it this way, the ease with which they ran through Kerry won’t be repeated because, defensively, Dublin are brilliant at getting bodies back to set up road-blocks. And they do it with absolute ferocity. They’re like vicious Rottweilers when you step into the scoring zone.
I’m not entirely sure that there’s much point in Mayo pushing up on Stephen Cluxton’s kick-outs because it just doesn’t seem to bother Dublin’s goalkeeper now. In fact, I don’t believe they should because the danger is they could just end up shooting themselves in the foot.
For the record, Cluxton is my Player of the Year going into the game. What I see in Dublin today is an ability to dismantle opposition teams – a crew which clearly does the most detailed of homework.
And that’s the problem here. Dublin have the ability to wipe the floor with anybody, Mayo included. It could happen too, even though I don’t think it will. My suspicion is that Mayo will stick with the Dubs. But beat them? I’m sorry, that’s just a bridge too far for me.
Mayo won’t be beaten because of any mental weakness, though. They don’t have one in my opinion, this year has proved that beyond doubt. They’ll be beaten because Dublin are simply better.
MAYO WON’T BE BEATEN BECAUSE OF ANY MENTAL WEAKNESS. THEY DON’T HAVE ONE IN MY OPINION–THEY’LL BE BEATEN BECAUSE DUBLIN ARE BETTER