New champions, new rules for the grand old game
Donegal and Mayo won’t be an unusual final, it’ll be a unique one. And not just because they’ve never met in a September showdown before. Both have overcome prejudice and perception this year and last, with two young managers managing in that short period to redefine how we all think about the game. Including those charged with beating them now.
James Horan reminded his inquisitors after yesterday’s remarkable 35-point scorefest in Croke Park that Mayo have been averaging 2-17 in the Championship to date. He needn’t have bothered. Scoring has never been a difficulty for Mayo. But when you lack graft, grunt and guile, concessions at the other end tend to debilitate.
Horan hasn’t taken a page from the McGuinness play book. This evolution has been a couple of winters in the making. The principal difference between the finalists is Mayo are more expansive in their approach. But both Ulster and Connacht champions have moved the chains in terms of physicality and intensity.
There’s every chance the Mayo dressing room last evening looked like one of those old-time Accident and Emergency units, with players stepping over bloodied bandages to make room for those who needed to be stitched.
But it was the kind of pain players grin and bear as a badge of honour. Despite the second half wobble, this was an intensely gratifying afternoon for Mayo football.
For the previous 70 minutes, Horan’s head must have been awash with confusing and complex dilemmas. How he managed to keep that Puma hat perfectly in place is hard to fathom.
First Colm Boyle cried off, then Lee Keegan dislocated (or fractured) a finger. Enda Varley didn’t make it beyond the opening exchanges of the second half (in an attack already devoid of Andy Moran). It wasn’t long before Kevin McLaughlin was heading from the dressing room too. And all the while, the remaining soldiers who hadn’t yet spilled blood were collapsing with cramp when they weren’t making last ditch defensive blocks. Truly, this was a victory for Mayo’s entire back room team.
However, it’s the way of gaelic football now that we tend to look beyond the head coach to the assistant in charge of physical preparation for the main source of change. It may be overstating Cian O’Neill’s impact on Mayo this season — and diminishing James Horan’s pragmatic attitude — to attribute too much of yesterday’s tour de force to the former, but it is hardly coincidental either.
A paragraph from an interview O’Neill did with this newspaper in 2011, when physical coach to the Tipperary hurlers, offers a glimpse into the attitude he has brought west. “That day (losing to Waterford in the 2008 All-Ireland semi-final), it felt as if we had been hit by a bus. My personal goal after that was to up our contact level — being able to initiate contact and deal with contact — because we were physically bullied that day. It wasn’t that they were bigger or stronger; they were just far more aggressive. So what we said was that the following year we’d make sure that my parts of the session were more ferocious than any opponent could impose on us.”
Barry Moran and Aidan O’Shea have had their critics in Mayo, but in those frantic final stages yesterday, both were immense. And when Aidan finally gave way, his brother rallied with a decisive late point.
“We did well until about 50 minutes and after that they won every break and won everything in midfield,” Horan conceded. “We seemed to run out of juice and they were coming at us in waves and it was last-ditch defending but we managed to keep it out. We showed great character to come through it.”
No more so that when Ger Cafferky got caught under that long, loping ball from midfield, frozen by that sickening sixth sense that told him Bernard Brogan was lurking inside, set to complete the most remarkable All-Ireland semi-final transformation in living memory. Once more though the Mayo man, this time Ballina’s David Clarke stood tall, repaying James Horan’s faith in barrels.
If there is a county more passionate about its football than Donegal, it is Mayo. Since Brian McEniff guided Donegal to an All-Ireland 20 years ago, it scarcely qualifies as a football famine, stood alongside the 61 years Mayo have suffered since their last September success.
Were it not for a Croke Park ban on such things, it might appear opportune for both squads to head off to a late season Algarve training camp.
However, both McGuinness and Horan are loathe to put a lid on the madness in their respective counties this month.
“We’ll do what we’ve done all year,” he says. “We just go and train and try and improve. We’ll train in our normal places at our normal times, that’s been our approach and it won’t change.
“They are playing good football. So are we. It’ll be interesting.”
More than that, James. The last four football championships have provided different winners, but the fifth successive new name will be one for the ages. That much is certain.
