Mayo's road back towards top starts with honest appraisal of where they are
Micheál Clifford
IN FOOTBALL’S LAND of the cursed, the only sense of law and order is in the legislation sponsored by Murphy.
You know the one, ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’
They certainly know it in Mayo, where football folk long acclimatised to the concept of misfortune are now in danger of drowning in the stuff.
A quick recap of the last couple of weeks: they lost a Connacht final to Galway which they could, and possibly should, have won, which was compounded by a shock home defeat to Cavan in the opening round of the All-Ireland series.
Even when they were not playing, another unexpected result went against them last weekend when Donegal lost to Tyrone, ensuring that when they meet the Ulster Champions in their final round match, Jim McGuinness will not facilitate them with weakened and distracted opposition of the kind that allowed them to avoid relegation and claim an unlikely place in the League final back in March.
On top of that, their manager Kevin McStay announced this week he has to step back because of health concerns.
That news was confirmed at an emergency board meeting attended by the GAA’s top brass which revealed that the board is €7.8 million in debt.
In most other counties, such a sequence of events occurring over a generation, would frame a weighty tome entitled the “the dark years”, whereas in Mayo, such is their level of exhausted immunity to an ill wind gusting, that it is just about newsworthy enough to make it into the Tourmakeady weekly local notes in the Mayo News.
And they are not done yet; they head to Omagh this Saturday evening, a destination that has more the feel of ruination about it than redemption.
Perhaps the darkest hour is before the dawn but that lie has been peddled so often, they could be forgiven for thinking if that is truly the case then by some warp in the equator, they are permanently inhabiting a Faroe Islands winter rather than a Foxford summer.
The temptation is to suggest that there is no point wondering where it all went wrong when it hasn’t gone right in 74 years, but that’s simply not true.
They can lay claim to producing one of the great teams of the modern age, and those who will argue they were not worthy of that acclamation need to know that trophies don’t necessarily validate greatness alone; your eyes and pulse can take that measure too.
But from there to here, they have not just gone back, they have pretty much fallen off a cliff edge.
This weekend serves as a powerful reminder as to when that happened, too. Of all the mischievous tricks played on them, the cruellest was when in finally beating Dublin in that 2021 semi-final, it opened the door for the most winnable of finals against a Tyrone team who had ambushed Kerry.
The potent sense that it was a game that would bend to fate rather than form has rarely if ever been as intoxicating to Mayo’s public, and when the penny dropped that in sport there is only a scoreboard to be balanced and not a heavenly ledger, the fall-out was toxic.
That was four years ago, but things have never been the same since.
What made Mayo the team they were – apart from a hybrid defence as good as ever seen – was a sense of unity all the more remarkable given that players and supporters shared more pain than joy on the biggest days, but tolerance has its limits.
The toxicity in the aftermath of that final revealed the fracturing of a bond. The result against Cavan this month was not the only surprise, the fact that little over 7,000 was in Castlebar to witness it was another.
There was a time – and we still remember the clutch cramp from a traffic jam outside Ballindine on the way to Tuam on a miserable January afternoon not that many years ago – when they could get that many for an FBD game.
If you want to take a measure of the Mayo mood, the excellent Mayo GAA Blog is the place to go for passionate commentary, but in the aftermath of the Cavan defeat the civility that was its hallmark was undermined.
‘Yesterday was one of the most difficult days for ages,’ wrote John Guinnane, founder of the blog, under his hardly needing to be explained nom de plume of ‘Willie Joe’.
Of course, the reason that Mayo are no longer the team they were is not because some of their supporters have forgotten their manners, but it is because in so doing they refuse to see their team for what they are now rather than what they were.
The team of 2021 was a shadow of the team that lost that epic final of 2017, and the team of 2025 is a paler silhouette of the team of ’21.
That is not to say that they could not be better. Few teams have adapted as poorly to the rhythm of a transformed game. Set that tape at its easiest to measure point, and Mayo have scored just 16 two-pointers in 12 games, and just three in four championship games.
True, Kerry have not feasted on the edge of the 40 arc either, choosing instead to play a high tempo attacking game to exploit the spaces beyond it, hitting 27 goals in the process. Mayo have managed just 10.
Perhaps they could be better, but the fact is that Mayo are now a team on the fringes of the leading pack, far from menacingly snapping at the front like they used to. They simply don’t have that kind of talent. Quick question: is there a single player that would make the best 15 in the land?
Ryan O’Donoghue? Really? In a game where you have the Clifford brothers, King Con, Oisin Conaty, Darragh Canavan, Michael Murphy, Michael Bannigan and Sam Mulroy. Truly?
The only thing that can go wrong now for Mayo is demanding their team of today be judged by the standards of their team of yesterday.
If they can pull the brakes on doing that, their tomorrow might come quicker.
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