Against Donegal, every time you lose the ball, you die a little

SOME of us who spent days of indulgence and dissipation in the mid-90s watching films will be familiar with the scene: The opening sequence in Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins and as the leaders of the Easter 1916 Rising emerge from the smoke to surrender, a disappointed Collins (Liam Neeson) turns to his comrade Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn) and says that next time next time, “we won’t play by their rules, Harry. We’ll invent our own.”

As we reflect on the achievements of Mayo and Donegal during this weird and wonderful summer of football, whose penultimate game was a blood and bandage affair ending in a score-line of 0-19 to 0-16, it is perhaps inevitable that we should be reminded once again of those words.

The ingenious thing about what James Horan and Jim McGuinness have achieved these past two seasons is not that they have re-invented the rules on how to win matches but that they have done so while managing to keep at arm’s length, the type of outrage that came with the last real dam-burst moment in Gaelic football — the emergence of Tyrone in 2003.