Éamonn Fitzmaurice: County of Kerry might be delighted for Mayo but defeat difficult to stomach
Mayo’s Darragh Beirne scores his side's goal. Pic: INPHO/James Crombie
There is always a curse isn’t there? When a team are enduring a historically long drought, black magic is to be blamed. Lack of talent or performance is explained away.
The Boston Red Sox went 86 years without winning the World Series, the famous Curse of the Bambino was responsible after they sold the great Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.
With the Clare hurlers it was the curse of Biddy Early, accused of witchcraft and hounded by the Catholic church in the late 1800s, which they bested to bridge their gap from 1914 to 1995. The infamous Mayo curse has been held up as the cause for misfortune and defeats for long enough.
Yesterday it was purged emphatically in an incredible victory for them, and 75 years no more.
When Mayo lost the Connacht semi-final to Roscommon last April it was the first time we saw the normally genial Andy Moran rattled.
The local inquisitions were saucy. It looked at the time as if Mayo were about to eat themselves from the inside out, once more. However, it enforced a hard reset from Moran. First of all they had six weeks until their next game.
Having been at a few of their games it appeared to me as if they did a block of conditioning work in that spell, a second pre-season. I recall reading an interview with Mike McGurn around that time and while he was speaking about Tyrone the same would have applied to Mayo, during that enforced mid-season break. He felt that teams would go into a phase that he termed 'supercompensation’, where they really ratchet things up, volume, intensity, duration, loads and high-speed running.
The contrast in their power and athleticism from that game to when they hit Croke Park was night and day. The other major alteration Andy made was in team selection, in general, and by giving youth its head, in particular. He wanted an athletic profile of player that could play the high octane game he wanted to play. He dropped some of his closest friends.
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If in doubt about his ruthless nature we saw it with Aidan O’Shea post the Tyrone defeat in Omagh. In the game-winning moments in that contest he made two costly errors, that one would not normally associate with him.
He gave away the two-point free that Niall Morgan nailed to win the match, in a harsh call that could have gone either way. However, the one that probably made up Moran's mind was the shot O’Shea took on to equalise and push the game to extra time. It wasn’t on and he didn’t see a minute of action since. That will matter little to him as he now has the coveted All-Ireland medal that his career has so richly deserved.
I mentioned on Saturday that when anticipating how the new rules would play, before they came in for the 2025 league, Mayo’s style in 2026 is what I would have expected the game to develop into. I love their Vollgas (full throttle) football. Hard pressing, hard running, front foot football.
They discombobulate the opposition with their pressure plays. They don’t sit off and admire you. No soloing on the spot here to set up high-percentage shots. They are in your face and they ask you to beat them, rather than conceding victory.
I thought last week this might suit Kerry. It could force them away from their 2026 measured style and unleash their kicking game in Croke Park. We only saw that for David Clifford’s early point when three consecutive kicks from Seánie O’Shea, Mike Breen and then Graham O’Sullivan set up David for the score.
After that Kerry struggled to break lines. One-twos to open Mayo up were conspicuous by their absence. Instead they gave them targets to tackle, and drew them on. Throughout the contest the All-Ireland champions forced 10 turnovers. They scored 1-8 from this.
The only thing lacking from the eventual winners in their game, particularly in the opening quarter when Kerry raced into the seven-point lead, was the finish. They were short and wide, especially from outside the two-point arc.
They scored four twos from 14 attempts. That four was more than their entire total in last year's championship. However, and this was clear throughout the game, they stuck to the plan, diligently. They were going to live or die by the strategy that had gotten them to the final, admirably so. In the second half when they racked up a few wides Moran could be seen applauding them on the sideline to keep going and to keep trying again. Next ball. Stick to the plan.
This will really hurt from a Kerry perspective. The entire country might be delighted for Mayo but that won’t make the defeat any easier to stomach. The injuries eventually caught up.
Mayo’s legs and energy were too much for a Kerry team that just wasn’t quite at the pitch of it. This will force some sharp introspection. The local championship discussion will be back on the table, which because of the strong footballing traditions in Kerry will be a thorny nettle to grasp. That debate is for another day, but the injury epidemic and the causes thereof will be scrutinised under a microscope, as it was a significant factor this season.
Ultimately, they will rest, come back and go again. There is no other choice. There is still an exceptional group of players and management available to launch an another assault at Sam in 2027. Going back to back is such a challenge. It emphasises, once more, the remarkable achievement by the Dubs during their dominant decade.
What a couple of months of fun lies ahead for the players, management and the people of Mayo. While I’m obviously gutted for the Kerry lads I will give Mayo and in particular my long-suffering Castlebar cousins, 'the Castlebar crowd' as they were affectionately known, a pass on this one. The emotion at the end was incredible. All around me on the seventh floor there were people in tears. And they weren’t all from Mayo.
Jack Coyne’s passionate speech only franked all of this. The atmosphere in the stadium as he accepted the elusive Holy Grail was unique. It reminded me of Donegal in 2012, or the Clare hurlers in 1995. The suffering and disappointments that they have endured since 1989 came flooding out. To Win Just Once blared around Croke Park as the victors paraded the Sam Maguire on the pitch. They did it. But what Mayo don’t realise yet is this will only whet the appetite and could be the beginning rather than the end.
