EASY TARGETS

They’re the best Mayo side for 60-odd years but that never stops the abuse flying in...

It takes one game in February to deem them a spent force

YOU just know when Pat Spillane has to call up his inner shock jock, it’s on speed dial. Even so, there was something mightily impressive about how little time – on the opening weekend of the Allianz League campaign – it took him to condemn Mayo’s season to a state of crisis last Sunday night. The evidence was flimsy to the point of being threadbare as they had lost to Monaghan by two points after starting out with just seven of the side beaten by Dublin in last October’s All-Ireland final replay.

‘The League is very important,’ insisted Pat, before declaring that Clare’s achievement in reaching an All-Ireland quarter-final and Tyrone’s Ulster Championship triumph were both directly linked to promotion last spring.

Funny, then, that he neglected to remind us that Tipperary, who flirted with demotion to Division 4, overcame that stain by travelling further than Clare to reach an All-Ireland semi-final.

And who put manners on Tyrone? That would be Mayo, who lost four of their first five League games last spring and yet ended up playing in two All-Ireland finals.

Yeah, the League matters to Mayo like reason matters to Pat.

But we should not get hung up on the evidence here because with the Mayo footballers it is all about context. When they are not being rolled out to be pitied and patted on the head, they are always good for a kicking. Spillane’s tone on RTÉ’s Allianz League

Sunday, which also informed Mayo folk that the signals were poor for the year ahead, was in response to host Michael Lyster’s request to contextualise their performance ‘given all that has gone in the last couple of months’.

But exactly what ‘has gone on’ in the last couple of months?

Two middle-aged men give a grumpy newspaper interview and suddenly that becomes the tinted window through which the outside world must view the Mayo footballers.

They are no longer just a football team trying to win an All-Ireland; they are now a group that has been fatally undermined by out-of-control egos of a mutinous disposition and who measure their self-worth in the number of followers they have on Twitter rather than the medals in their pockets.

They don’t need a manager, they need a social worker. They don’t need circuit-training; they just need to be frogmarched up and down Croagh Patrick in their bare feet until they are visited with the gift of humility.

Really? Well it’s either that or do what they did 17 months ago when they felt their best chance to win that overdue All-Ireland was to unchain themselves from the management of Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly and seek another way.

We know it’s hard to choose which way to bend, but you will forgive us if we go with our instinct and their body of work on this one.

You wonder will this industry ever weary from probing Mayo for the flawed character which sets them apart as natural born losers.

The latter is an utterly insane label, of course, given that this is the most successful Mayo team in 60-odd years and we reckon, given the changed times and competitive environment they play in, that it is arguably also their greatest.

Yeah, we know, they won no All- Ireland like their back-to-back 1950/51 predecessors, but in far more competitive time their sustained level of consistency in the Championship outstrips those who have gone before them. But it goes deeper than that because they are a team that willed themselves to be this consistent even though they have been hindered by a lack of offensive talent. Indeed, the latest All-Star selection would give credence to such a statement.

It seems outrageous that a team who have defied the limitation of their talent, and who have dialled up extraordinary heat on one of the greatest teams of all times, should time and again be questioned about the perceived fragility of their mind and heart.

Kerry have coughed up four-point (2011) and three-point (last year) leads at the business end of the Championship. They found themselves in a tied match after 70 minutes in 2013 and failed to show up two years later, losing every time to Dublin, but no-one has accused them of being hindered by suspect character.

They have more talented footballers than Mayo – certainly from midfield up – and yet their shortcomings have been deemed physical (a lack of athleticism) rather than psychological.

Contrast that with a Mayo team who in the last two seasons has come from six down with seven to go (2015) and from gifting two first-half goals (last year) to force fiercely contested replays with the champions.

Add that to their insistence for the last six years to put heart-wrenching defeats behind them and come back stronger every time and yet they are still the ones that are deemed to be so fragile that it only takes a few poisoned words to have them up in the dock again.

It then takes one game of irrelevant ball at the start of February to deem them to be a spent force.

They are so much better than that, which they will – with or without winning the All-Ireland – remind us once more before this thing is done.