Dealing with Donaghy one for Rochford files
In We Got Game, a delightful look back on the Irish basketball explosion of the 1980s, Tom O’Sullivan, who rivalled Liam McHale as the standout domestic player of the era, gave an insight into how the great Burgerland Neptune team won so much national silverware, often edging out their arch rivals Blue Demons who included the remarkable Jasper McElroy.
“I don’t know of any other player where we would have the game plan which would be: keep McElroy to 40 points and we’ll win the game,” said O’Sullivan. “Now, that’s a hell of a lot of scoring! But he was a machine. He could use every part of his body to get open to shoot a ball.”
Donaghy similarly presents such a unique, standalone challenge. He’s not as prolific or as explosive a scorer as a Jasper McElroy or a Conor McManus or Paul Geaney for that matter but he’s a machine who can use every part of his body — and brain — to win a ball and
create a shot for others.
At some point Stephen Rochford made a similar calculation to that which the brilliant Neptune team and their coach Ken Black made decades earlier when it came to McElroy.
Sometimes you’ve to give up something to gain something; in Mayo’s case having to do without O’Shea’s ball-carrying and free-winning ability inside the opposite 45; in Neptune’s, taking either O’Sullivan or Tom Wilkinson, the two best outside shooters in the country at the time, out of the game to bring on the more defensively-minded Joe Healy, because, as Black would explain, “Jasper forced your hand”.
And even then it was in the knowledge that a grafter like Healy could only do so much. It wasn’t a case of winning that particular individual battle, it was a case of not
losing it so heavily as to lose the war. Damage limitation was the name of the game.
There is no doubt that Kieran Donaghy won his head-to-head with Aidan O’Shea. You could say that he got his 40, 45 points with all the scores that went through him.
But the thing is he didn’t go off for 55 or 60 like he and McElroy had in the past. He didn’t post up and dunk it in O’Shea’s face like he effectively did on David Heaney in 2006 and Ger Cafferkey in 2014. O’Shea, Mayo, Rochford, didn’t allow him to.
Minutes before throw in, Joe Brolly remarked that if in the early minutes Donaghy won a high ball and fired it to the net the game was over.
Though this Mayo team have routinely come back from an early deficit, ever since the 2011 All Ireland quarter-final against Cork, the thrust of Brolly’s argument was valid. Some scores by some players are worth even more than the flag the umpire raises.
Jamesie O’Connor once commented that a goal from DJ Carey was really worth two for how it electrified the Kilkenny team and crowd. A goal from Donaghy or one that he set up from plucking the ball out of the air has the same resounding effect. Especially a goal against Mayo.
In the lead-up to the drawn game and again in the aftermath, more than one Kerry commentator expressed their bemusement with Mayo’s emphasis on Donaghy. For them it implied that Mayo were underestimating the threat of a Paul Geaney and James O’Donoghue as well as a hint that the county was still haunted by their history with Kerry.
Neither inference really stands up to proper scrutiny, though it will take a win next Saturday to finally dispel the latter suspicion. The fact Chris Barrett was chosen ahead of Paddy Durcan in the starting lineup underlined just how seriously Rochford and his selectors viewed the threat of Kerry’s corner
forwards.
As for being spooked by the sight of a particular jersey, that ceased being an issue for this crop of Mayo player as far as back as 2011 when they beat the county’s almost-century-old nemesis Cork, or certainly as far back as 2012 when they edged Kerry by a point in a nail-biting league semi-final in Croke Park. Since then the two counties have clashed eight times. Mayo have lost only twice, along with two draws.
Crucially though, each of the four times they won Donaghy didn’t line out. The only time he’s faced Mayo in the league these past five seasons was 18 months ago, up in MacHale Park, a game which swung on him drifting in from midfield to contest an aerial ball that allowed Donncha Walsh to boot to the net. Mayo are no longer spooked by Kerry but history has given them reason to still be spooked by Donaghy and the high ball.
As they’d learn last Sunday, there is so much more to Donaghy than that aerial ball. As he’d tell Marty Morrissey minutes after coming off the field, he had mentally rehearsed for various scenarios, one of which was being taken up by O’Shea.
Last Sunday he outsprinted O’Shea to the ball — just as he was routinely beating Philly McMahon to the ball in last year’s semi-final before pulling his hamstring seconds into the second half. He outplayed him. But crucially, he didn’t outmuscle him. Most importantly, he didn’t bully him or Mayo like he has before.
Countless commentators have remarked how you need years of being a specialist full back to play the position at this level. On the eve of the 2006 All Ireland final David Heaney was in pole position for the full back All Star spot, just as he was before the 2004 decider too.
Heading into the 2014 season Ger Cafferkey was universally ranked one of the best three full backs in the country, winning an All Star in 2012 and the 16th man of the 2013 selection. Yet Donaghy trod all over them. Years of being a full back still hadn’t prepared them for something like Donaghy.
It’s worth remembering that in 2015 Stephen Rochford guided Corofin to an All-
Ireland club title. They’re not measily won. In 2013 the same competition was claimed by another Mayo coach operating outside the county.
At half-time in the final St Brigid’s were trailing a rampant Ballymun by four points when Kevin McStay and Liam McHale huddled together. McHale threw out a suggestion: switch mcentre-back Darragh Donnelly to centre-forward, move midfielder Ian Kilbride to centre-back and throw on Garvan Dolan.
At first McStay rubbished the idea with all its inherent chopping and changing. McHale was fine with that; it was only a thought. Just before they went back into m,address the players, McStay stalled. Hang on, Liam, what was that again? And then he went with it, and thanks to their radical changes, they went on to win the All Ireland.
“We nearly went through the door and said, ‘Nah, we’ll leave it,’” McStay would later reflect. “Maybe it was my poor father who would say, ‘Stop! Don’t do the Mayo thing and die wondering on it!’”
Last Sunday in a post-match interview, Stephen Rochford used those very words. He wasn’t “going to die wondering”. He wouldn’t go so far as saying that he’d stopped thinking like a Mayo man but privately he could have said just as much.
At times Rochford has been too clever, most infamously when dropping an All Star goalkeeper for an All Ireland final replay.
Too often he’s had this team playing tentatively; while it was levelled at James Horan that he didn’t have a Plan B and C, it took Rochford until the Roscommon replay to appreciate that Horan had been bang on when it came to the optimum Plan A for these players.
Now maybe Mayo and Rochford are close to the prefect formula. Of playing with the dynamism of the Horan years, mixed with his own brand of boldness. His deployment of Lee Keegan and Alan Dillon in last year’s All Ireland quarter-final remains his finest hour, again a triumph no donkey could have presided over.
It was interesting to see Jim McGuinness in his newspaper column applaud Rochford and conclude that Mayo now finally have the capacity to outfox Kerry. Clearly McGuinness has thought Mayo have been too orthodox in the past.
He knows: lateral thinking wins All Irelands. Mickey Harte has proven that, never more brilliantly than moving an established midfielder Cormac McAnallen to full-back, all originally because of the unique challenge that was Down’s Dan Gordon.
O’Shea will not play out the rest of his days as a full-back. He may well not play there next Saturday, even though it’s overlooked that the one minute he wasn’t around the square, Kerry pounced for a goal.
Either way Rochford will make a bold decision and won’t die wondering.
