Is much of the football played now actually worth watching?

And so it came to pass that in the week before an All-Ireland football final, the most intriguing stories come out of Mayo, writes Paul Rouse 

Mayo may not have made the final this year, but the lack of general public interest in the meeting of Tyrone and Dublin demonstrates again just how central Mayo have become to the story of Gaelic football in the past decade.

To dispatch the irrelevant first of all: Talk of a curse and of that curse being rendered null and void by the fact of Pope Francis signing a Mayo jersey is, of course, just a bit of fun.