Not pawns — but true kingmakers
Those of us who occasionally express a distaste for the prevailing trends in football like to argue that sport should be about the celebration and not the suppression of creativity and imagination. More of the samba and less of the sabermetric; more magician, less machine.
It is a worthy sentiment but one that conveniently ignores the fact that all successful teams, entertaining or otherwise, are built on the subjugation of the individual to the collective.
Having accepted this essential truth, neither Jim McGuinness or James Horan will worry too much about offending purist sensibilities.
In a short space of time, both men have built teams that are devoid of ego and oblivious to external distractions.
That both Mayo and Donegal have historically displayed a weakness for the attractions of the sideshow makes the achievement of the sophomore bainisteoirí all the more impressive.
When Conor Mortimer decided to make a stand for his rights as an individual earlier in the summer, Horan managed a potentially distracting situation by shrugging his shoulders, raising an eyebrow and reasserting his team ethic.
Like Kevin Cassidy before him, Mortimer quickly learned that his manager’s ideal of self-sacrifice didn’t allow for self-expression.
In Mayo, where that curious local blend of idealism, optimism and fatalism has seen the ultimate prize elude them time and again, Horan has quietly gone about the business of building a team of ordinary decent footballers — men who prize the humdrum arts of winning above all aesthetic considerations.
Jim McGuinness, for his part, has turned a team bedeviled by a culture of individualism, indiscipline and underachievement into the most ruthless collective in the modern game.
The great chess player Rudolf Spielmann, the master of the sacrifice would have approved. Spielmann believed that “the beauty of a game of chess is usually appraised, and with good reason, according to the sacrifices it contains”. Michael Murphy, having sacrificed his game to suit the team, is the poster boy for the McGuinness revolution but perhaps Mark McHugh is best representative of the elements required to fit into the new world order, where terms like system, method and collectivism are the order of the day.
Where recent All-Ireland winners, Kerry and Tyrone had Brian Dooher and Paul Galvin as prototype wing-forwards, McHugh and his Mayo counterpart, Kevin McLoughlin, are now the frontier men for half-forward play.
Spielmann said that “a good sacrifice is one that is not necessarily sound but leaves your opponent dazed and confused”.
In both their quarter-final and semi-final, against Kerry and Cork respectively, Donegal’s McHugh left a series of opponents bewildered.
After Kerry’s quarter-final defeat to Donegal, Tomás Ó Sé spoke about the levels of concentration required against a system that demands constant quick thinking.
According to Ó Sé, breaking down the system demands a reliance on instinctive football that can prove psychologically exhausting. Forced to live on their wits for 70 minutes, teams eventually find themselves at their wit’s end.
For the first half-hour of the quarter-final Killian Young was charged with tracking McHugh but by the time he was hauled ashore to be replaced by Darran O’Sullivan, Young was left dazed and confused by the demands and the detail needed to make life uncomfortable for McHugh.
The role given to O’Sullivan upon his introduction just before half-time was slightly more nuanced but he too failed to make an impact, whereas McHugh was seen to great effect deep in the second half sweeping across the line and denying Kerry forwards the options and the oxygen needed to get back in the game.
Ahead of the semi-final, Conor Counihan had many in the penny pulpits telling him that he should detail a half-forward to track McHugh and to punish any lapses when his roaming took him back close to his own goal.
There was some surprise when that player was Fintan Goold. The tactic didn’t really work but there were glimpses of the possibilities after six or seven minutes with Patrick Kelly’s point after he brushed McHugh aside to steal a Paul Durcan kick-out. That score suggested that the best chance of solving the McHugh issue was to have wing-forwards, rather than wing-backs, in his face high up the field.
Ultimately though, the reason all direct opponents have enjoyed so little success on McHugh is that he has yet to be confronted with somebody with at least two seasons conditioning for the game he plays. McHugh has always come up against direct opponents who are having to adapt and improvise on a short-term basis to the demands of tracking his lung-bursting counter attacks. Three or four weeks preparation is simply insufficient.
On the surface, it appears illogical to expect James Horan to select his hardest working half-forward for a man to man job on McHugh but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility. McLoughlin is one of the few constants in an ever-changing forward line this season but there are a number of reasons Horan might want to shake things up now.
Kevin McLoughlin is first and foremost a defender. One of the reasons he is being played as a grafting wing-forward is that he doesn’t have the absolute discipline to do an out-and-out man marking job. Against McHugh, he wouldn’t have to.
What he can do however — and what he has done to great effect against Kerry in this year’s league semi-final — is, legitimately or otherwise, arrest the progress of opposition half forwards counter-attacking from deep.
It is a rare ability in championship 2012 and the more often McLoughlin can do it without giving away frees, the more compelling the case becomes to give him a tracking job on McHugh.
What have Mayo got to lose by using McLoughlin in such a role? The 1-6 he has scored in the championship to date, especially the 0-2 against Dublin in the semi-final, indicates that he’s quite comfortable close the opposition goal.
Furthermore, the goal he scored on a slaloming run against Cork in last year’s quarter-final shows his ability to breach the tackle and if Patrick Kelly’s semi-final point proves anything, it shows that McHugh, for all the maturity he has brought to bear on his game these last 12 months, is still learning how to receive kickouts under pressure. That’s what Neil Gallagher and Rory Kavanagh are there for.
While McHugh is at home winning breaking ball off his own full back-line, McLoughlin has few peers at getting into positions on the defensive side of his own midfield.
One of the few luxuries of the modern wing-forward is that they can often bank on a wing-back not following him into the traffic under the breaking ball because no half-back now wants to leave space behind him to be exploited by the full-forward line.
Of course Mayo will realise that McLoughlin will not be afforded the freedom to put good ball into his own inside forwards as he was a few weeks ago but he can still win his trademark breaking ball, particularly on the looping runs around his midfielders from Mayo’s own kickouts.
After trying McLoughlin as a sweeper in a seven-man defence in last year’s semi-final against Kerry, Horan abandoned the idea in the second half when his team had to chase scores.
I think Horan realised that day that McLoughlin wasn’t what he needed at the back but he also recognised that no team could do without an egoless all-rounder who is willing to sacrifice his game for the betterment of the team.
In an era where success or failure is determined by systems and methods that threaten established convention, the last word on last season went to a scoring goalkeeper with nerves of steel.
The final act of endgame 2012 is yet unwritten.
What is still unknown and unknowable is which of the game’s two best wing men is going to have most impact on Sunday?
The smart money is on McHugh but of all the counterbalances to the McHugh model, McLoughlin is most advanced, best positioned and the most mobile he’s likely to encounter.
It’s quite a prospect.
