So have Mayo really changed?
Modern football can sometimes be boring said O’Neill, echoing the views of many who are growing increasingly disillusioned with the ‘development’ of the game.
Mickey Harte is not among those who share O’Neill’s view.
Harte is unimpressed with the frequently negative tone of the current analysis of the game, perhaps sensing in the despondency a misplaced nostalgia and a lack of appreciation for innovation.
For Harte and many more football innovators, football isn’t boring, it’s just evolving.
It is unsurprising that Harte, whose great Tyrone team were unfairly accused of ruining football, should come out in support of those who are striving to take his defensive innovation of the noughties to the next level.
But although Harte may have a soft spot for the evolutionary nature of his sport, his real weakness is for winning. Like most successful managers, he does not see himself as being in the entertainment business.
His teams have played some scintillating football at times but the fear of being branded boring is never a driving force for men like Harte. He has seen enough of the joy that winning brings to not worry unduly about whether or not the neutral is stirred by the manner of his victories.
That doesn’t mean that the evolutionists are always right, however.
Just because football has the capacity to reinvent itself, it doesn’t follow that reinvention is always a good thing — as someone once remarked about the perennial search for ‘new Bob Dylan’; what’s wrong with the ‘old Bob Dylan’?
So on one side we have the evolutionists like Harte for whom change is nearly always a good thing, and on the other side we have the alarmists for whom, at any given time, football is never as good as it was twenty or thirty years previously.
In between are genuinely concerned observers like Liam O’Neill who reserve the right to be bored by some of what they see on the field of play.
Either way, tomorrow’s Allianz League Division Two final between Tyrone and Kildare at Croke Park should be entertaining if only to watch the fascinating perpetual motion of the respective half-back-lines. Of course it is nothing new or revolutionary to see such attack minded half-backs but the scoring returns of the likes of Peter Harte and Emmet Bolton have been impressive even by modern standards.
If the pattern of the last couple of years in Division 2 of teams overturning earlier league defeats (Donegal vs Laois last year and Armagh vs Down two years ago) continues tomorrow, then Kildare are due to win. The real bounty of promotion to Division 1 has been achieved but maybe it’s about time Kildare beat Tyrone in a match at headquarters.
Of the four teams taking to the field tomorrow, Mayo are perhaps the most interesting from an evolutionary perspective. Even allowing for the renewal and regeneration ongoing in Tyrone, Mickey Harte is still in his 12th season in charge of Tyrone, Kieran McGeeney in his fifth with Kildare and Conor Counihan likewise with Cork. A few tweaks here and there and we would expect all three teams to assume many of the traits that defined previous seasons.
But James Horan’s Mayo were always going to be a curiosity this year.
We thought they were getting a little more hard-nosed in their approach to the game when they over-ran Cork in last year’s All Ireland quarter final and when they steamed into Kerry in the first half of the semi-final we nodded quietly and said there was definitely something different about Mayo this year.
While the nine point margin at the end pointed to the another dispiriting defeat, Horan’s reaction to the defeat told us that the symbol and starting point for any difference was to be their manager.
In sifting and plotting methodically through the entrails of the defeat in the immediate aftermath of that Kerry game, Horan already had the gait of a man with a plan for the year ahead.
When things resumed in early spring, two wins from the first two and a half games (remember the fog in February?) had the whole county excited and energised about their prospects for 2012. Then came the speed bump. Three straight defeats by Down, Donegal and perhaps most worryingly of all, a one point home defeat by Cork after being in the driving seat in the second half.
All along, Mayo were learning valuable lessons, however. Lessons, perhaps, that are beginning to seep into the entire culture of Mayo football itself. Gone are the days of Mayo folk expecting their team to outrageously good in victory. They now realise that you just have to be good enough to get by.
Thus the consistency of two wins and a draw heading into tomorrow’s match with Cork cannot be ignored. The signs are there that Mayo really are changing their spots.
Take for instance Colm Boyle’s showing against Kerry two weeks ago. Apart from his spectacular equalising goal in the second half of extra-time, Boyle contributed so much more to Mayo’s turnaround after Kerry went five points up midway through the second-half of normal time. It was Boyle who scored the next point to bring the margin down to four after James O’Donoghue’s goal. It was Boyle also who turned over Bryan Sheehan’s quick free to Darran O’Sullivan at the death, giving his team a chance at another attack that culminated in Cillian O’Connor’s equalising free. And it was he once again who was hounding Kerry players as they went in search of a last-gasp equaliser.
There are other signs that Mayo are different this year too. We might not like Kevin McLoughlin’s cynical checking of Darran O’Sullivan’s runs from deep or the even more cynical round the waist tackle on O’Sullivan by Alan Dillon when Mayo were a point down a minute from the end of normal time — but deep down, we understand why they do it. Every other top team, including Kerry, are at it and Mayo too have their limits when it comes to patronising talk of being cursed with bad luck when the reality has been that they’ve been reluctant to evolve with the direction the game has been taking.
So Mayo have changed then? We’ll know more when we see Ger Cafferkey deal with Aidan Walsh. When Cork get used to feeding Walsh the proper ball and when more of that ball sticks inside, the possibilities are endless for them. What Mayo do to stop it will be informative.
At the other end of the field, Cork simply aren’t conceding scores. The only goal they’ve left in from open play all spring came after 12 seconds against Donegal when then full-back, Eoin O’Mahony, got caught in the glare of a watery early March sun, and was duly punished by Michael Murphy.
What tomorrow really boils down to is the most consistent league team in the country taking on the team striving to find the very consistency that’s been a missing ingredient in Mayo football for so long. Were Mayo to win, it wouldn’t be a bad ending to an occasionally interesting campaign. I doubt they will win though. What harm — championship begins next weekend in New York!
