Kieran Shannon: Lee Keegan was the standard-bearer, the best Mayo produced
Minutes before the Mayo team bus headed to Croke Park for a 2012 All Ireland quarter-final against Down, James Horan addressed his players and backroom in a circle in a hotel room in the then Regency Hotel on the Swords Road.
It’s hard to believe now in light of where the respective teams diverged after that game, but a high degree of anxiety would have been swirling around that Mayo circle when it initially sat down. A season, even a management, was potentially on the line. After a promising first season under Horan in 2011 and the high-profile recruitment of Cian O’Neill as coach that autumn, the minimum expected of the group was to reach another All Ireland semi-final.
The only teams they’d had to navigate that summer up to that point were Leitrim and Sligo. Down would have been seen as the weakest of the four quarter-finalists to progress through the backdoor, and for all that county’s reputed Croke Park pedigree, defeat to them would have been catastrophic to a Mayo project that had invested so much physically, emotionally and financially into that season.
To allay any fears, Horan reminded the circle the power that resided within it. He started by referencing David Clarke, someone who had first joined the panel back as a schoolboy 11 years earlier but had only won his first Connacht medal as a starter the previous month; his resilience and persistence was inspiring, as, the circle could testify, was his presence. Horan then went through the full-back line, two of whom would end that year as All Stars, before arriving at Lee Keegan.
Keegan had never started a championship game for Mayo in Croke Park before; he hadn’t made the minor panel, was a fringe player with the 21s, while in 2011 his only championship appearances with the seniors had been a couple of cameos off the bench in the closing minutes of the games against Cork and Kerry.
Horan though had seen enough over the intervening 12 months to make a declaration to the group. For the previous decade, he told them, Tomás Ó Sé had been the ultimate wing back. Now Keegan, much of his game modelled on the Kerry great, was ready to assume the baton. It was his time, and, with a player like him in their ranks, bound to be Mayo’s day.
Sure enough, buoyed by Horan’s words, Mayo steamrolled Down with the most comprehensive championship win the county had enjoyed in Croke Park since 1936, their platform provided by the running power of their halfback triumvirate of Boyle, Vaughan and Keegan.
Horan’s oration proved to be prophetic in almost every way. For exactly a decade Keegan did indeed represent all the best about Mayo, halfback play and football itself. Ten years on from that game against Down, Keegan again played in an All-Ireland quarter-final, against Kerry, only this time he lost, his first and only defeat at such a juncture. Yet even that day in what proved to be his as well as Horan’s last stand with Mayo, he was characteristically brilliant and defiant, curbing and bettering Paudie Clifford who had been rampant throughout the league and Munster.
There can’t have been a best XV of the last decade that excluded him; whether you put his name or James McCarthy’s down first, they both simply had to be there, either both in the halfback line or Keegan shifted into the fullback line and-or McCarthy moved to midfield to accommodate fellow brilliant multi-All Star teammates like McCaffrey and Boyle. Indeed when the team of the millennium is next selected, the pair of them have to be considered, McCarthy for being the ultimate competitor and all the All-Irelands he won, and Keegan for being the ultimate competitor, even for all the All-Irelands he lost.
There has never been a better two-way player to play in a backline. Only Peter Harte, who was a quasi-half-forward anyway, has scored more in championship football as a nominal ‘back’, yet Keegan still managed to be a lockdown defender; Diarmuid Connolly, Ciaran Kilkenny and Seán Cavanagh were all outscored by him in huge games in Croke Park. He first broke onto the starting 15 in the early league of 2012 as a corner back, and while by the end of the campaign he had been moved to the halfback line, those man-marking instincts would never leave him, and would be regularly called upon when a Rochford or Horan needed some inside forward shut down.
He was similarly the team’s standard-bearer away from the lights. This column had the privilege of being a member of the Mayo backroom for three years, and my first encounter with Keegan would have been the same day he’d have been introduced to Cian O’Neill at a pre-season fitness and skills assessment in October 2011. As mentioned, he’d only been a bench player the previous championship but that day he strode into the Breaffy Woods complex as a man on a mission.
The tests that day were conducted in pods, with Keegan in the last group. One of the first times O’Neill and myself would have heard his voice was his query as to what had been the best score to date in both the sprint-repeatability test and a skills test (featuring kick-passing and hand-passing) designed by O’Neill, Horan and Dr Ed Coughlan. After being duly informed, Keegan proceeded to duly smash both records and would never stop setting standards in-house.
The same applied when he was under those lights and they shone most brightly. It goes without saying that he’s the best footballer to have retired without winning an All Ireland; never has a team gone so close so often as that fine team he was part of, and rarely was he found wanting when they fell short.
Just go through it. Every post-mortem of the 2012 final references how Mayo got their match-up on Michael Murphy wrong, but few credit James Horan for getting Keegan on Mark McHugh, the most talked about player entering that game, right. In 2013 he kicked two points from play and was one of the three players shortlisted for man of the match. In the drawn 2016 final he shut down Connolly and then scored a goal off him in the replay before being controversially black-carded. In 2017 he scored another goal in the final while constraining Kilkenny to just eight touches. In 2021 after Tyrone’s second goal he came up to kick a point, a replica of a point he scored at a similar juncture against Donegal nine years earlier.
Even when Con O’Callaghan burned him for those two goals in 2019, one of only three years Keegan didn’t win an All Star nomination, he’d have the defiance to come up and make it a trilogy of goals against Dublin in as many championship games, not to mention the only reason they had made it back to the last four was because of the remarkable man-marking job he had done on Michael Murphy the previous week in Donegal.
It would have been lovely and only right if he had won at least one All Ireland before he called it a day, but whatever about the fine team he played on, he himself will not be defined by it. It’s why he’s happy to walk away now, and declined the temptation to give it one year under Kevin McStay.
Success, as we keep being told John Wooden once said, is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming. Keegan could have do no more. There hasn’t been better, from Mayo anyway. He was the best of them, and as every Dublin player who encountered him will vouch privately or otherwise, the best they faced.
