Desperately seeking a scalp

Connacht football badly needs an All-Ireland quarter-final win or two — preferably against a big name

A COUPLE of weeks back, the blog mayogaablog.com observed one of the oldest rules of pre-championship reportage: when trying to crank it up, ask them for their opinions.

“Who’ll win Sam in 2011?” was the question. Cork was the answer for 31 per cent of the respondents. No reason to fall out of your standing there.

What genuinely surprised – even allowing for the extreme, endearing form of partisanship so common to the games of the Gael – was the next headline figure: Mayo 30 per cent.

That put them a comfortable 17 per cent ahead of Kerry, and 21 points in front of Dublin. When breathlessly tweeting the breaking news, the blog’s proprietor, the estimable ‘Willie Joe’, reacted with the only comment appropriate in the circumstances: “Some serious drug-taking there.”

The reality is that Connacht looks unlikely to offer up any serious contenders for ultimate glory this summer. Again. Those brief few years where the west provided teams capable of going all the way have long since passed, and the province is badly in need of a fresh dose of impetus.

From 1996 to 2001, Connacht was genuinely in the mix. Three years in a row – 1996 to 1998 – Connacht teams contested the All-Ireland final. The only previous times Connacht made it so far so often on the trot were 1932-1934, 1941-1944, and 1963-1966.

In fact, had Mayo managed to beat Cork in the 1999 All-Ireland semi-final, it would have been a six-in-a-row of final appearances by Connacht teams. Two titles – both won by Galway – may seem a paltry return from what is now deemed to the most golden era of Connacht football since the 1960s, but two out of six ain’t bad after zero out of 32 over the preceding three and a bit decades.

So, we hope we’re establishing the case. From 1996 to 2001, Connacht really mattered. Not just in July, but when the evenings started to shorten and the kids were back at school.

Since then, the graph has slipped steadily downward.

Galway haven’t won a single senior championship match in Croke Park since that famous walloping of Meath in the 2001 All-Ireland final.

Mayo appeared in two All-Ireland finals since (2004 and 2006), but got hammered in both of them by Kerry, and fell into a tailspin that James Horan is trying to get them out of now.

No Connacht team has reached the All-Ireland semi-final since 2007. That means that the Connacht champions have been beaten on their very next day out for the past four years – all of them losing by three points or more.

The backdoor boys haven’t been any better. No Connacht team has even made it through the Qualifier series to the All-Ireland quarter-finals in the same period.

For those who remember, it is eerily like the 1970s and 1980s all over again. In those straight knock-out, pre-backdoor days, the only time Connacht teams got to the All-Ireland final was when they beat Ulster teams in the All-Ireland semi-final — for, bizarre though it reads now, Ulster was the other soft touch in those years.

And when I say ‘only, I mean ‘only’: the complete, unabridged list of All-Ireland final appearances by Connacht teams from 1977 to 1995 is as follows, with semi-final victims in brackets: Roscommon 1980 (Armagh), Galway 1983 (Donegal), Mayo 1989 (Tyrone).

We may have laboured the point, but it is worth making: Connacht has been lying in a slumber deep, as the battle-cry goes before it gets into its stride. The backdoor has masked the matter somewhat, but what the past four years have shown is that when the championship really got down to business, Connacht teams made excuses and left.

Can 2011 bring about a lift in fortunes? Might it even be the 1995 (Galway running Tyrone in the All-Ireland semi-final) to the era of relative Camelot that followed? From where we’re standing, that’s about the best Connacht can hope for this year.

Despite the unrelenting gloom of the foregoing, there are some straws in the wind. Horan will give Mayo a lift. Of course, they’re clean out of steps to tumble down after last year’s ghastly depths, but, in Alan Freeman and league goal machine Jason Doherty, Horan has potentially the most lethal inside line available to the county in a generation, or two, or three.

The other sleeping giant, Galway, got a pre-championship boost with the U21s not so much winning, as sweeping, an All-Ireland title. It was a boost they needed, but, despite the rapid promotion of some of the leading figures to the senior squad, we fancy Tomás Ó Flaharta will not be able to successfully import the style, rhythm and soul of the team Alan Mulholland built.

By now, given that they contested last year’s Connacht final, the Rossies and Sligo will be bristling at the fact that Mayo and Galway were assessed first. Just the way the cards fell. Sligo have unfinished business after failing to perform in that decider: Roscommon’s apparently steady progress was checked by the league final defeat to Longford.

Connacht could be won by any of those four this year (apologies to Leitrim and London, while New York are already junk in the trunk.) But provincial titles mean less in the greater scheme of things these days. What Connacht really needs is a team, or two, or even three, to win an All-Ireland quarter-final, take out a big name or two from outside the province, and create some hope for the immediate future.

The rise of that tide would help to lift other western boats, as it did in 1995 and 1996.