Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
FINAL WAS ENDA THE LINE FOR MAYO SIDE
Varley sat at the top table in 2010 but NFL decider sent team into total tailspin..
BY PAT NOLAN
THE 89th, and surely the most bizarre, staging of the Football League concludes this weekend. As time is at a premium there will be no f inal s played as the county that tops each division will be declared champions, with Cork already guaranteed the D iv i sion Three title.
A win for Kerry over Donegal in Tralee this afternoon will secure the Division One title for them though Donegal t h e mselves , Galway and Dublin are still in the mix. It ’s only the second time in the history of the competition that there will be no final staged. In 1936, Mayo won the third title of their six-in-a-row run by simply topping the table.
In hindsight, they would have welcomed a similar arrangement the last time they finished top of Division One in 2010.
They had won six of their seven regulation game s that spring, fuelling optimism that the core of the 2006 All-ireland winning under21 team was maturing nicely under the tutelage of
John O’mahony.
Enda Varley was in his debut season and had been flying, with 2-15 to his name from the opening six matches, before a hamstring injury ruled him out of the latter stages of the League. With Cork already through, Mayo beat them at
Pairc Ui Chaoimh to set up a rematch in the final.
It turned out to be a disaster for Mayo, however, as Cork cantered to an eightpoint victory at Croke Park with the Connacht champions barely firing a shot. They went into freefall from there, losing to Sligo in Connacht b efore Longford beat them in th e quali f i ers, bringing O’mahony’s illustrious i nterc o u n ty ma n a g e - ment career to an undistinguished end.
“It ’s a m a z i n g what one game can do to a team,” says Varley (right, against Sligo in 2010). “We had a lot of younger players coming through and we didn’t adjust and the confidence was obviously low.
“I think after the League final, I’m not messing, we could have played five or six
challenge games I’d say in the space of two and half weeks and, looking back on it now, it was probably panic stations by Johnno because Cork really did beat us that day.
“The inter-county game can be very, very fickle and Johnno probably had a team in his head for Championship similar to the one that went out in the League final a n d o bv io u s ly we g o t beaten comprehensively and then I suppose he tried to, I don’t know, find his best 15 from the challenge games we were playing for the next few weeks after that.
“We got exposed, we were very green. Well, I was anyway. I was very green to the inter-county scene.
“Confidence obviously wilted and Sligo, Longford, it wasn’t exactly the best way to go out.”
Perhaps they would have been exposed by those teams anyway but, at the very least, they would have gone into the Championship humming with confidence if it wasn’t for their League final experience, which sent morale through the floor.
The League finals in the lower divisions have been particularly popular over the past decade or so as the footballers of Leitrim, Waterford and Wicklow have had rare days out at Croke Park.
But it’s likely that the 2021 League will also be compromised by Covid-19 and the GAA may well take a less-is-more approach
Enda Varley scores against Dublin (main pic) a month before the 2010 league final defeat to Cork (left) once again with finals.
And perhaps declaring the table-toppers as champions will become normalised.
“My opinion would be that a l eague format is basically, like the Premier League, after 38 games you top the league, you win the league and that’s it,” says Varley. “There’s no such thing as a semi-final or final.
“So, to be brutally honest, I’d be in favour of that. After seven games, if you’re top of the league I think you deserve to win it.
“I don’t think there’d be a major outcr y fr om the GAA supporters or anyone really if the GAA went down that road and said whoever tops the league, that’s it.
“Yo u’d n e v e r see Croker packed out in March or April for a league final really. It’s just a stepping stone for Championship.”