Blue collar climax as Mayo’s September misery continues
Football not only delivered the summer’s high pulse-rate Croke Park moment at the start of September, it finished it with the All-Ireland champions it deserves.
That’s a good season by most measuring tapes.
It’s not long ago that football’s future was being dissected by renovation and rules committees, who feared, on behalf of its constituents, the game was being defaced by a suffocating equivalent of rope-a-dope.
Donegal won an All-Ireland from their own half and we all tut-tutted and blamed meddling McGuinness for being a tactical genius.
Damn you, Jim.
All that was necessary for the triumph of the mass defence was for good men to do nothing.
Which is why we should see Jim Gavin as a sort of unlikely hero. And James Horan and Eamonn Fitzmaurice to a slightly lesser degree.
Yesterday’s All-Ireland football final was imperfect.
It did not have the sniper efficiency of the Dublin-Kerry semi-final, that starched white-collar shine, but it had much of the same rawness. A blue collar day.
Dublin once again showed us their glass jaw, but they remained true to their creed, stumbling, brawling forward to claim their second title in three seasons. Again, they missed several presentable goal chances but got the job done with a modest 2-12 tally. The tactical textbook would consider it madness to empty the bench by the 53rd minute of a high octane final, an argument substantiated by the fact that Eoghan O’Gara was hobbling around at the end with hamstring woes and Rory O’Carroll scarcely knew where he was after a monster truck collision with Enda Varley. But they prevailed. Again.
Afterwards, though, the press room and chat rooms were full of squeamish complaints about Dublin’s cynicism in the final ten minutes, as if it characterised everything that the champions and their coach stands for.
The result always dictates perspective, and if Jim Gavin was slightly cockeyed in his assertion that referee Joe McQuillan was like an extra man for Mayo, he was also correct in disputing the notion that Dublin were systematic foulers (the unoffical free count was 32-12 in Mayo’s favour). Just as Peter Canavan is seldom short of a reminder that he took out Colm Cooper in the last moments of the 2005 All-Ireland final, there will be plenty pointing at Dublin’s late descent into the game’s darker arts, but we shouldn’t sully their season’s success on that basis.
Anyone who can maintain the strictest sense of fair play hanging onto a slender lead in the dying moments of the last game of a long season, with a cannister a few steps away in the Hogan Stand, belongs at a more ethereal address than Jones’ Road, Dublin 2.
There are absolute conclusions in victory that stand up, if not to forensic scrutiny, then because of the result. Hence Dublin’s bench was the difference as Kerry ran out of legs (not true). Yesterday was because they had more killer forwards. Well, they certainly had the game’s only killer forward. If Bernard Brogan’s art for Dublin’s second goal was only to have the nous to peel away as Denis Bastick roared through the middle, then his first goal was a brilliant piece of opportunism, giving the Dubs a 16th minute foothold in the final they scarcely deserved. Mayo may knot themselves over how Ger Cafferkey and the otherwise inspired Rob Hennelly didn’t clean out Paul Flynn’s arrowed delivery, but that isn’t Brogan’s baby. Just like Paul Mannion’s goal in the semi gave Dublin a leg-up, Brogan’s first-half goal yesterday was a defining moment.
Mayo shovelled their way through an amount of toil and labour in the first quarter, but very little of its productivity was in the red zone. The clash of Jonny Cooper and Andy Moran provided an informative cameo. Moran grabbed two first half points from play, but threatened a lot more with the possession he had. When the sides retired at the interval, the scoreboard offered Mayo meagre encouragement for their dominance, 0-8 to 1-4.
“We had enough ball to win the game, we just made too many mistakes and too many turnovers. It’s that straightforward,” sighed James Horan, who is no means certain to honour the second season of his agreed term in 2014 as Mayo coach. “We dominated the first 15 minutes but we didn’t get the scoring return we deserved. Too many wides.”
Jim Gavin’s head was in a different space. It’s a process, a process. Half-time is a break in play, nothing more.
“The most important thing is that we are ahead at the end,” he said matter of factly afterwards. “Half-time is a time to rest and regroup but there’s no big drama in the Dublin dressing room.”
He threw substitutes into the mix with machine-gun regularity in the third quarter, but none made the impact his earliest replacement, Eoghan O’Gara, did.
The Synge Street man and his attacking commander, Brogan, proved super targets for Dublin’s increasing raids.
And just as they began to put Mayo out of their misery, Dublin conceded an unlikely goal, similar in its creation to Brogan’s first. Fitting too that Colm Boyle — along with Lee Keegan, two of Mayo’s star turns — should be the one to set up Michael Conroy for the tap on for Andy Moran’s 49th minute goal.
Game level at 1-9 each.
If football’s surging graph was to continue its upward spiral, the final 20 minutes of the season should have been titanic. Mayo should have either died with their boots on or eked out an historic success.
Sadly for romantics, they did neither.
Though they were never trailed off, and were only a point away when the music stopped, it was Dublin finding the extra gear late on.
Denis Bastick proved Kevin McManamom isn’t the only impact sub inside the Pale as he came on and immediately teed Brogan up for the second goal. Cillian O’Connor’s frees — he scored eight — kept Mayo in touch, but he had little impact on the final in real terms.
Ger Brennan claimed a point in space, something he’d been used to all day in an apparent shared-space agreement with Mayo’s outstanding utility player Keith Higgins. The rub for Mayo, however, was the loss of Tom Cunniffe — Horan and his brains trust elected to bring Higgins’ defensive experience to bear on the situation after half-time, but it undoubtedly blunted their attack.
The final eight minutes resembled an NBA game — full of time-outs and stoppages and Joe McQuillan. The Cavan official seems to be on everyone’s blacklist. “Not only were we playing Mayo, we were playing the referee as well,” muttered Gavin afterwards.
Mayo’s bench was also perplexed why O’Connor put the final free over for a point after a conversation with the referee about time remaining.
“When you ask the ref how long is left, when you ask him twice, you know...he tells you there’s at least 30 seconds left after the score,” revealed Horan. “That’s a little disappointing.
But, that’s neither here nor there. The game is over, we were beaten.”
