Kieran Shannon: Nothing like that winning feeling for Mayo

CLEAN SHEET: Damien Comer of Galway has his shot on goal saved by Mayo goalkeeper Colm Reape during the Allianz Football League Division 1 final at Croke Park in Dublin. Pic: Tyler Miller/Sportsfile

For the last time a team won the Sam Maguire having lost a championship game at some stage along the way, you have to go back 12 whole years, as it happens the first summer in a decade and a half that Ciarán Whelan wasn’t suiting up for Dublin.

Instead he spent that championship of 2010 in the stands, either as a punter or a pundit, watching Dublin come storming through the backdoor only for Cork, another side who had availed of the qualifiers, pip them in the All Ireland semi-final before going on to win it all.

It wasn’t an uncommon route for a side to go about winning an All Ireland towards the end of Whelan’s career. In 2005 Whelan had put on an exhibition of fielding in the first half of the All Ireland quarter-final against Tyrone, buoyed by having won just his second Leinster medal a few weeks earlier, only for Mickey Harte and Tony Donnelly to completely switch around their team, move Joe McMahon to midfield to stymie Whelan and duly force a replay which they’d win before going on to win it all. 

In 2008 they repeated the trick before Kerry 12 months later would pull it off too, staggering through the qualifiers before ambushing a seemingly-rampant but ultimately-naïve Dublin in the All Ireland quarter-finals. While those teams had timed their run just right, Dublin, as their manager famously put it, had been left running around the place like startled earwigs.

By 2011 Pat Gilroy would rectify and change all that, as Dublin would reserve and produce their best performance of the season for fittingly an All Ireland quarter-final against a Harte-led Tyrone before going on to win the All Ireland itself. And under Jim Gavin they would even more emphatically prove that you could have and win it all. All-Irelands. Leinsters. Even leagues. The lot.

It was a formula that Jack O’Connor ran with as recently as last year, not just pulling off his fourth league and All-Ireland double, but his second treble to go with the one he managed in 2004. The only game his team lost all season was a last-round dead rubber league game to Tyrone at home; prior to that they’d gone six games unbeaten, and afterwards they’d go on to win six on the bounce too.

On Monday though Whelan was one of a number of commentators to suggest that this season could be different, that Mayo may not be able or even advised to pull off a clean sweep.

“Can teams go for everything?” he’d ask on the RTÉ GAA podcast before suggesting that too much was being made of Mayo’s upcoming provincial showdown with Roscommon and another possible April faceoff against Galway. Lose early in the provinces and you could have at least a month’s break or block of training ahead of the group stages of the All-Ireland where a loss there too “wouldn’t be the end of the world”.

James Horan on the Examiner podcast also contended that under the new format the provincial championships had been “completely devalued”. While in 2020 and 2021 his Mayo teams had to win their province to advance to the closing stages of the All Ireland, neither Kevin McStay nor almost any other manager of a contending county is under any such compulsion.

And yet while it might seem like they don’t really matter, in reality they and every championship game this season does. Because almost intangible things like momentum and aura matter, as will another word you’ll hear about this summer more than any other championship before – seeding.

Take the case of Mayo. For all the county’s consistency and brilliance over the past decade and more, there was always a team that had beaten them to the title and sense that this was their year. As impressive as they had looked reaching the league final in 2012 and as rampant as they were for stretches of their wins against Down and Dublin that summer, they didn’t quite have that wave of momentum or air of invincibility that Donegal had gathered after edging Tyrone and steamrolling Derry early on in Ulster. 

Even in 2013 when Horan’s team radiated a sense of mission and looked irresistible demolishing Galway and Donegal, Dublin on the other side of the draw always seemed to have a nose in front on account of winning a league in which they’d beaten Mayo along the way.

In 2019 there momentarily seemed to be something different about Mayo. They’d won the league beating Kerry both in Tralee and Croke Park with a wiser, more experienced manager back for a second stint having rejuvenated veterans and empowered newcomers. But then their first day out in championship they slipped up to Roscommon, and for as much fun as they again provided in the qualifiers for their fans and the rest of us alike, Dublin would expose the vulnerabilities Roscommon and Kerry had earlier in the summer.

To make a breakthrough it can help if there’s a sense or narrative that this is your year, one that not just the team or its supporters but everyone else – the public, opponents, and most crucially officials buy into. 

When a referee or a linesman has to make a snap decision in the blue-drenched terraces and stands of Croke Park – do I black-card Johnny Cooper for that trip on Andy Moran or follow through on Diarmuid O’Connor? Do I black-card Lee Keegan there for holding back Diarmuid Connolly? Do I call Denis Bastick for that pick up off the ground in front of the posts? – all kinds of unconscious biases and factors come into play, what scientists and psychologists call “influence conformity”. 

You can be swayed by what the majority of supporters are urging, or even more subliminally, the prevailing narrative: Dublin win these kind of games, Mayo lose them.

The one year where Mayo got that kind of break was in 2021, a year in which they lifted the Connacht title in Croke Park and were awarded a debatable-enough penalty in the All Ireland final – only to hit it wide and blow their greatest chance.

But now they’re back with seemingly even more about them than ever. A Connacht title to go with a league would compound that sense. Upon getting the job last autumn Kevin McStay spoke about the importance of winning Connacht, not just to establish an edge over their provincial rivals like they had during Horan’s first stint but, as he’d emphasise, to secure top seeding for the new group stages.

And where you finish in the group matters too, even if only four teams out of 16 will be eliminated. Top your group and you have a week’s rest by advancing straight to the All Ireland quarter-finals (an advantage which Dublin effectively had over Mayo in 2019 going into that year’s semi-final) instead of having to participate in a preliminary quarter-final. And finishing second is better than finishing third as you’ll have home advantage in your preliminary quarter-final.

And then there’s making it into the groups of four at all. Next Sunday Clare have to beat Cork if they’re to ever reach a Munster final during Colm Collins’ tenure and participate in this year’s Sam Maguire; lose and they’re condemned to the Tailteann Cup. Which, as a Whelan might put it, wouldn’t be the end of the world either, only they’d have to go on and win it to save their season.

Ulster will still matter too. Maybe not as much as it once did to Tyrone, Monaghan or Derry, but for Armagh on the other side of the draw it represents a glorious chance to win silverware. Too much could be made of their relegation; in truth their form was no worse or different to all the springs they finished in mid-table in the old Division 1B in the Kernan years. But another year without making or winning Ulster would likely signify Kieran McGeeney’s last.

The law of averages suggest you’re going to lose at some stage this championship, and the provinces mightn’t be the worst place to get it out of the way. But the law of recent football history suggests the more you win the more likely you’re to win your next game and win it all.