Superior Kerry skills should swing balance

AND so it has come to pass once more. The closer they get to a big game the more optimistic Mayo’s supporters get.

It’s in their genes to be this way. They truly are football people. As Darragh Ó Sé eloquently put it a couple of months ago: “Mayo was the only county you’d go to Mass in where they’d nearly be marking you in the communion line.”

It’s poignant that it should be Ó Sé who uttered such a precise description for he was the embodiment of Kerry in the eyes of the Mayo players during the 2000s. In him they saw a chief whose plain stubbornness and unyielding desire for battle had them rolling on their heels before a ball was thrown-in. What other man could dwarf his own 6ft frame in action?