Kieran Shannon: If James Horan can get Aidan O’Shea firing bullets, Mayo can still find holy grail

Physically there isn’t a more durable and courageous player in the country than Aidan O’Shea. But the fact is he again went scoreless in a final when he has so much potential scoring power

Mayo's Aidan O'Shea and manager James Horan at Croke Park after their All-Ireland semi-final win. Photo by Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

This time they won’t have a year til Saturday. Indeed in exactly six months’ time, the pair of them could be getting ready to rumble and growl at each other again, football’s Sugar Ray in the blue corner looking across the ring to find its indefatigable Jake LaMotta in the red and green.

Just as the 2020 All-Ireland final was played on December 19, the 2021 All-Ireland quarter-finals are set for June 19, which means should they both navigate that stage as well as their respective provincial championships, Dublin and Mayo that Saturday evening would be entering a two-week lead-in to what be the 10th time in nine years that they’ve clashed in the last four of the championship.

In truth though, James Horan has probably began prepping for that day already.

For all the strides his team made this year, and all the new blood he has infused into the setup these past two seasons, and as much as he believes the profile of your opponent is secondary to your own preparations, Horan is smart and pragmatic enough to recognise a few realities.

To do what he and his county want — need — to do, they’ll have to go through Dublin.

And while he’s yet again laid the groundwork for Mayo to be consistently competitive for another decade and a constant top-four team for as long as he himself will be at the helm, time is finite.

In 2020, Eoghan McLoughlin, Ryan O’Donoghue, Tommy Conroy, and Oisín Mullin may have declared that they’re here for the next decade, the way that Lee Keegan and Colm Boyle announced themselves in 2012. 

But nobody plays forever. Keegan, Cillian O’Connor, and Aidan O’Shea are now about where servants like Alan Dillon and Andy Moran were back then: still class, smart operators but on the back end of their careers. Now those two are retired, with no Celtic Cross to their name. There has to be an urgency to this Mayo project as well as a certain patience.

In a way, Horan’s second coming is mirroring his first. There were a lot of similarities between 2019 and 2011: securing some precious, psychologically-boosting silverware earlier in the season before reaching an All-Ireland semi-final and putting it up to a champion side for the first half.

Likewise, 2020 has had a lot in common with 2012: again there was significant improvement and his team made it to an All-Ireland final, possibly a year ahead of schedule and while being only the third-best team in the country, but it was an experience which provided the platform for them becoming an undoubted top-two team thereafter.

In 2013, Mayo entered the All-Ireland final almost neck-to-neck with Dublin, according to the bookies; for all the finals the county has contested over the last 30 years, that was as close as they’ve been to being favourites.

In 2021 there is no chance that Mayo or anyone else will be anything but huge underdogs in any prospective game against Dublin. But that’s not to say Dublin can’t be beaten, especially by Mayo.

For one, Horan is an even better and shrewder and more experienced manager than he was in his first tenure; he has the brains on the line to win the ultimate. But the big challenge for him now will be to assemble a cavalry on the line good enough to come in and win the fourth quarter and the battle itself, something Mayo didn’t have in either 2013 or 2020 or in any other battle with the auld enemy those two finals bookended.

Mayo have taken a lot of plaudits for bringing last Saturday’s match to the fourth quarter, and in a way rightly so because it’s something so few sides have been able to do in recent years and Mayo had so many newcomers. But now that they’ve reasserted themselves as a proper podium team, that has to be the baseline for Mayo and any side having any business being in the last four of the All-Ireland.

Several former players of Horan’s have spoken about a maxim that he tends to work by: if it’s 50-50 between a new player and one that has been around for a while, he’s going to give the benefit of the doubt to the younger player. 

And for the most part, that creed has served him well, especially this year when he could so easily have opted for a Boyle or Higgins ahead of an Eoghan McLoughlin: for the fifth time in 10 years, the young footballer of the year is bound to be a Mayo man, it’s just a question of which one from three.

But what the last quarter of the final and indeed most of Mayo’s games this winter showed is that when it comes to subs, the corollary to that maxim might work better: if it’s 50-50, the veteran should get the benefit of the doubt.

Keith Higgins looked rusty in his one cameo in Salthill, and it goes without saying that Horan is privy to training ground form that we aren’t. But last Saturday evening, who do you think would have triggered a greater sense of respect and even fear from Dublin: the sight of a Higgins coming in for Paddy Durcan, or Michael Plunkett?

There is now a real prospect that Higgins has played his last game for Mayo and that along with him, another class of exceptional warrior could depart too: Boyle, Vaughan, Seámie O’Shea, Tom Parsons. But while some retirements, voluntary or enforced, are inevitable and indeed necessary, Horan will want to ensure it’s not an unnecessary deluge, à la Cork 2014. Instead of being finished, a couple of them could be finishers next summer.

He’ll also recognise that some of his starters can get even better. As in so many other campaigns, Mayo would not have reached this All-Ireland final only for all the possession and frees Aidan O’Shea won; physically there isn’t a more durable and courageous player in the country. But the fact is he again went scoreless in a final when he has so much potential scoring power. 

It was one thing him being held in 2015 when he was repeatedly fouled and then in 2016 when he couldn’t eke out enough space to get a shot off against Philly McMahon & Co, but what excuse was there in 2020, when he had the availability of the mark?

Mayo at times last Saturday used it brilliantly, carving out scores for Cillian O’Connor and even an advanced Stephen Coen.

But why couldn’t they create out similar chances for O’Shea? No one would be able to stop him winning that 10-to-15 or 12-to-13 diagonal ball to his outside.

The suspicion is that a bit like another man mountain, Shaquille O’Neal, didn’t like going to the free-throw line, O’Shea isn’t suitably comfortable having a free shot at the posts. If Horan can get him to work on that, and get back to the kind of relationship he had with the posts circa 2015 just as Cillian O’Connor this year rediscovered his free-taking form of 2011-2016, O’Shea can win an All Star from full forward just like he did that year — and far more importantly, land that elusive Celtic Cross.

Because at this stage, Mayo have to exhaust every option; O’Shea as a scorer is not a nice-to-have but an absolute necessity. In any other era, you could fall over the line to win your All-Ireland, like Cork did against a Down. But nowadays you can no longer win an All-Ireland like that one was one in 2010: Dublin are simply too good and unforgiving.

And neither can you win an All-Ireland like Dublin themselves in 2011. That year the underdog got the breaks from the referee, Joe McQuillan missing Kevin McManaman’s double hop in front of his own goal, and Ger Brennan’s hit on Declan O’Sullivan. 

But since then it’s the champions — invariably, the Dubs — that have got the breaks on the big calls in the big games, Fitzsimons on Keegan and Cooper on O’Shea only the latest in a litany of similar incidents. And there’s no point in anyone from Mayo or elsewhere bemoaning that. 

That’s just the way of the world, that’s just a referees’ reflex and a champions’ privilege, one Dublin have earned. Instead you simply do what Tipperary did against Cork after they had a goal disallowed for square ball and looked certain to be as misfortunate as Limerick in 2004 and 2009 and 2010 were on the cusp of a historic breakthrough: by being six points a better team so you end up winning by three.

There was no shame in Mayo losing last Saturday. As easy as it was to revert to the usual narrative of another final defeat, the reality is it would have been far more damaging to this team and thus the Mayo psyche if they had lost any earlier in the campaign — in truth the truly nightmarish years for Mayo have been nondescript campaigns like those 2000 and 2003, 2007 and 2010, or 2018, not the ones you and their hardcore can rattle off, from 1989 to this latest one in 2020.

The only shame would be if they didn’t come back wiser, better.

The suspicion is they will. As awesome as Dublin are, there is still an All-Ireland in Mayo over the next two years.