Colin Sheridan: Let me tell you what it is like to be a Mayo man in Galway this week...

Mon, 18 Jul, 2022 - 16:44

Watching Galway win All-Irelands as a Mayo man is like watching the girl you love marry someone else. Watching Galway win All-Irelands as a Mayo man living in Galway is like watching the girl you love marry someone else, the someone else is your best friend, with you as the best man.

Being from Mayo, you think you know pain – the sporting kind – the pain of being good, but not quite good enough to win it all. The pain of being bad, but not quite bad enough to make you quit caring. The pain of hope and the pain of inevitable disappointment. The pain of the perpetual pity. There’s all that pain, and then there’s the pain of your glamorous, indifferent neighbour coveting the one thing you so desire. It’s a whole other level of pain. You tell yourself it’s better to have loved and lost, but, on those days, when Galway wander up to Dublin and perform the most brutal of eye wipes, you wished you’d never loved at all.

Kids complicate things. You raise them hoping to instill within them a sense of the place that you are from, not the place they are from. Before they become old enough to know better, they sing the songs and ignorantly wear the county colours you choose for them. You make videos of it and share photos, partly because, by making it public you secretly hope it’ll stick, but also because you know, deep down, it’s not going to last.

Soon, by age 7, they will figure some stuff out for themselves, especially if the place they were born is in an All-Ireland final, and the place you – the parent - is from, is not. It’s a sobering moment on the family journey of this sporting life, and in that moment you can feel rather foolish and guilty for ever willing upon your children the muscle memory of misery and crippling burden of low expectations that has defined your formative sporting experiences. To intentionally corrupt their innocence with a legacy of trauma is not the act of a selfless parent, it is the folly of a fan riddled with a persecution complex. In Mayo, we romanticise the struggle. Our children, born outside the county, have a chance to be free of it. Strapping the load to their back like a bag of turf serves no purpose. Trust me, they won’t thank us for it.

There will be no hysteria in Galway city this week, and that only adds to the sense of desolation Mayo people living there can feel on weeks such as this. There will be little or no talk of it in the butchers and bakers. Any maroon and white flags will likely be the product of some contrived social initiative, complete with pithy hashtag, rather than the impromptu act of a football- mad house. There are no photos of the 1998 team in the jacks of Tigh Neachtains or Busker Brownes. Taaffes yes, but they are an outlier due to their proprietor owning a couple of Celtic crosses of his own. He’d never let it be known either. It’s what makes it so easy live there during peace time, when Galway are crap, or at least crappier than Mayo, but it’s that very nonchalant, collective shoulder shrug from the county that needles Mayo people in a time of crisis such as this. Galway in a final. Like the fella who doesn’t lock the back door or turn off the cooker switch on the wall or put the sides on the beds so the kids don’t fall out, they stroll through life with the same things to worry about the rest of us do, they just choose not to, and they are better for it. Mayo people, ones like me anyway, sarcastically dismiss their indifference as some sort of bourgeois excess, a privilege few of the rest of us, born prisoner to the trauma of our parents, could only dream of enjoying. What know they of love and loss and anguish and glory if they have the temerity to only care every quarter of a century or so?

Not everybody feels like me, which I reluctantly concede is a healthy thing. If you’re from Ballaghadereen or Charlestown you have border disputes of your own to settle, and if you live way back west in Kilcommon, what Galway are up to may concern you little. Some Mayo people are even happy for Galway, something I shall never understand, but have learned to tolerate with age. Weeks like this I envy them, those masters of magnanimity, for their ability to disassociate Galway’s potential glory from our perpetual PTSD. I don’t think they care about Mayo any less; theirs is just a more collegiate way of living, but for those living in the border parishes around Shrule, Cross or Ballindine, or, worse still, behind enemy lines, you are tattooed with a permanent ink to remind you that you may have left the back door open, and once every 25 years you might get burgled by your handsome, worldly neighbour.

Back to the kids. I often wondered what the most traumatic, non-serious event of the beautiful lives of these young Galway footballers? Was it – spoiler alert – Mischa Barton being killed off in the penultimate episode of the O.C? Was it Halo nightclub closing its doors for the last time? This is a generation that grew up when the Galway Races were in their pomp, when the skies above The Claddagh had more choppers in them than during the fall of Saigon. To paraphrase Kavanagh, I’m inclined to lose my faith in the Galway youth till the ghost of Anthony Finnerty’s goal comes whispering to my mind, and I think of his son Robert, not just the son of Anthony Finnerty, but the son of a moment in time for a county for whom that goal – into the Canal end against Cork in the 1989 All-Ireland final – was arguably the birth of a movement, one that has ebbed and flowed for Mayo people ever since.

Next Sunday, Robert Finnerty will play in All-Ireland final, a son of Mayo, but a man of Galway.

As for my own offspring…well, I asked them who do they want to win next Sunday, stupidly hoping they would still be young enough to share my apathy for all things Tribesmen. “Galway”, they replied succinctly, a little incredulous I even offered them an alternative. When, more out of curiosity than disappointment I asked them why, they offered the most damning of critiques’ to my pathos – “because it’s where we’re from”.