The Mayo mantra: Bring it on
Ó Sé’s side had just beaten Mayo in the 1995 All-Ireland U21 final replay and Carney was upset with comments made by the Kerryman after the drawn game.
“I think Paídí said something like, ‘we like playing Mayo because they play nice football’,” remembers Kerry’s 2004 All-Ireland-winning captain Dara Ó Cinnéide.
“There was no thinking behind it. He just said what he thought but it was the first time it struck me that maybe Mayo people have a complex about the way they are perceived.”
In truth, that perception has haunted Mayo football. Often seen after high-profile losses it has become confused with mental weakness on the pitch. The roots of that insecurity is tied up in the county’s history.
Having come out of the bleak and depressing 1970s to a slow, steady march to the ’89 final, the graph was positive. However, even when they reached that final, the hoopla and hype masked a sense of inferiority borne from years of emigration and unemployment in a region that felt forgotten.
There was never a huge belief that they could go all the way. Even in 1996, ’97, 2004 and ’06, with Meath and Kerry standing in the way, deep down most Mayo supporters struggled to believe.
Niall Cahalane captained Cork to an All-Ireland U21 final in 1984. Keeping Liam McHale scoreless that day set him up for a crack at the senior team but Cork’s two losses to Meath in ’87 and ’88 left them questioning themselves — just like many Mayo teams had in the past. When Cork met Mayo in the decider the next year all the pressure was on the Rebels but, although they struggled, Cahalane felt it was Mayo who were left with the major regrets.
“We were raging hot favourites at the time, raging hot. We didn’t see Mayo as a soft touch going into it but within ourselves we were confident,” he said.
“Okay, we won it but I think Mayo contributed to leaving it after themselves as well. After that, did we see Mayo as a soft touch? We didn’t but we always believed we had too much in the tank for them. Looking back on it, Mayo would have won that game if they had a bit of self-belief.”
But could this team be different? Nice Mayo is gone. This year, under James Horan, it’s Game Five of Year Two. And this year Mayo people are not alone in their praise of what the team is doing.
While bookies think it will be another tale of woe, Mayo’s steps into the modern game of high tackle counts and counter attacks have made optimists of many.
That Mayo lost 22 of the last 25 finals they have contested between minor, U21, senior and club is an indictment. But that it should have any affect on this Mayo team is ludicrous. An inter-county panel cannot be accused of having the same failings of teams bearing no relation to them.
But Mayo are not the first team to suffer that accusation. It’s been around so long that it might feel like that but that negativity comes with losses.
It reminds Ó Cinnéide of his first two years on the Kerry team. Having won All-Ireland U21 titles in ’95 and ’96, they met Mayo in a senior semi-final with the expectation of a county that hadn’t claimed Sam since 1986. Suddenly they were being overwhelmed with pressure from supporters. It was everywhere. Negativity was starting to creep in.
“In 1996 Mayo hockeyed us in Croke Park,” said Ó Cinnéide. “I remember John Maughan coming into the dressing room after with a pair of shorts on him and I think his top was off and we were there thinking ‘what the f**k is this fella at?’ He meant nothing by it but they were the team with the fire, not us. In ’96 people said to us we over-celebrated our first Munster but the reality is we were beaten off the field. I remember being at the All-Ireland that year and for some reason I hung around the Mayo team hotel afterwards. The Mayo boys were all togged out in their suits after the drawn game and I was thinking, ‘these lads are light years ahead of us in what they are getting’. This was where we wanted to be. I won’t say we looked up to them but we wanted what they had.
“Everyone will remember the next year for the Maurice Fitzgerald display but there was no talk at that time of a Mayo fragility. It wasn’t even there in ’04. That year Mayo had beaten a team Kerry couldn’t beat in Tyrone. Going into that game we were vulnerable because Seamus Moynihan and Darragh Ó Sé were out. I remember watching the video the days after it though, and seeing Liam McHale giving an interview where he said it was all doom and gloom and defeat at half time.
“I was shocked by that because I know if it was a Kerryman he’d be coming out and saying, ‘we’re 49 points down but we’re going to do something here, be it a row or what’. But McHale was beaten at half time. I couldn’t believe it. Even with that though. there was no talk of mental fragility.
“That came after ’06 because in a way that was the ultimate humiliation. Mayo had lost two All-Irelands to Kerry now and they were surely not going to be naive again and they were surely going to have a tactic to mark Kieran Donaghy and they didn’t.
“Then you say, ‘ah lads, come on this is innocent stuff’. It was after that people started to talk about Mayo’s mental side, which was unfair on a certain amount of players who didn’t have the baggage from ’97 and ’04.
“That same year they won the U21 and to this day I think Mayo got an awful lot of mental mileage out of that in terms of, ‘yes we can overcome and win finals’.
“There’s an awful lot of baggage which is undeserved about Mayo. They won four Connacht U21s in a row around the same period which has to count for something. They were unbelievably unlucky not to win the 2008 minor final. I think it’s unfair to paint it with a broad canvass and say Mayo is this, that or the other thing.
“That’s the message James Horan gave them. When Paídí took us over in ’95 he said, ‘this isn’t your baggage, it’s unfair to be labelled with it’. One of the first things Paídí said was ‘this is not your history, we’ll draw on the will of our tradition but this baggage from the last few years is not yours and has nothing to do with ye’, and he selected players who had no baggage.
“It’s obvious that’s what James Horan has done. I remember an interview with Andy Moran earlier in the championship and noting that it was actually washing off him like water off a duck’s back. He was making a point that this was not his baggage and it was good to see.”
When John Maughan took over Mayo in the winter of 1995, Galway football was in for a shock. Having beaten their neighbours in that year’s Connacht final by seven points the Tribesmen thought there was little to fear from Mayo. But the storm that followed threw Mayo into top spot and cast Galway aside. So when they met in Castlebar in 1998 it was a fixture the Tribesmen had waited a year for.
“When we beat them — we all felt Mayo should have won an All-Ireland before that — it gave us huge belief,” said former Galway captain Ray Silke.
“It was a key date in the diary. Once we beat Mayo it gave the season a massive lift. Psychologically it was huge. Once we beat them we knew we weren’t a million miles away because they were in the last two finals. But if Ciaran McDonald’s ‘goal’ went in, it was over for us.”
Nearly but not quite is Trevor Giles’s recollection of Mayo too. Having beaten Mayo in the infamous ’96 replay he believes that side never got the credit they deserved.
“They were a fine side with plenty of good midfielders and Pat Fallon coming in as a sub. It was one where you’d wonder if Ciaran McDonald was on the field would they have crossed the line but they nearly got there anyway,” he said.
The view of Mayo football in Kerry before James Horan’s arrival? “All style and no substance,” admitted Ó Cinnéide.
That more than anything else has been the most damaging perception of Mayo football down through the years. From Lahardane to Castlebar, the quest to play the perfect game has all too often affected the result.
“You’ve a lot of former Mayo people in very public positions on the television, radio and newspapers and they don’t talk a winning language,” said Ó Cinnéide.
“They talk defeat and there’s a bit of naivety all the time but Horan is the first fella that you’d actually say, ‘Jesus, this is a hard-nosed fella’. The penny dropped with Kerry nine years ago when Tyrone beat us. It should have dropped for every other county that this was the way football was going to be played and you can put up or shut up about it.
“In the 2011 semi-final against Kerry I think he lost his nerve in a way by dropping the McLoughlin tactic. I think he saw it wasn’t working but fundamentally it was the right thing to do to make yourself hard to beat. But I don’t think he had convinced his own players that this was the way to go and I don’t think his soldiers, his key players, were fit enough to play that game for 70 minutes.
“You look at the goal that Gooch got last year and I don’t think that would be scored again against Mayo this year. I remember reading his post-match interview in the [Irish] Examiner at the time and James Horan’s language was very analytical. He accepted Kerry beat them but was more upset that his team hadn’t done the simple stuff right like playing passes when they weren’t on and being open.”
Giles is of a similar opinion. He doesn’t believe this Mayo team have got the credit they deserve.
“If you look at the quarter-final against Down this year I think three Mayo defenders got yellow cards for, I wouldn’t call it off-the-ball stuff, just tight marking. Giving the forward a bit of legitimate grief. And I said to myself, ‘Jesus, these lads are a little bit different here’. They have the edge that all the teams winning stuff have. A competitiveness is what I’d call it.”
And they all agree this won’t be the one-sided affair many are expecting.
“Donegal, for all their achievements in the last two years, it’s identical to Mayo,” said Cahalane.
“People are saying they are 12 months further down the road than Mayo but does that give them a divine right to win it? No it doesn’t.”
Ó Cinnéide thinks the winning of the game will be defined by how Mayo’s attack deals with ‘the system’. “I’m still not convinced by Mayo’s forwards. I don’t know where the scores are going to come from against Donegal,” he said. “But they are very solid at the back and are very consistent. There’s an awful lot going for them. There won’t be a mental or physical collapse anymore.”
Silke sees similarities with what Horan is doing now and what John O’Mahony did with Galway in 1998.
“They’ve taken a lot of belief from Horan. I wouldn’t always agree with tactics, particularly when he was over Ballintubber. But the backroom team he has put together is probably the most professional ever seen. The players have bought into it. If you see how Barry Moran has developed under Horan, it is a prime example of Horan getting the best out of the players, Moran is a nothing like the player he was a few years ago.”
But the most encouraging endorsement came from Giles.
“Of the four games in the quarter-finals this year, the Mayo forward play was the best of them all. Just pure forward play. The man inside makes a run; he gets a good foot pass, wins it and lays it off to a man making the run. That fella is either getting through for a shot or someone else is making a run off him. That’s the big difference and their forward play is definitely better than Donegal’s.”
So Mayo have changed for the better. But in the put-up-or-shut-up-era perceptions about the county’s football team will only change with victory.
Under James Horan, Mayo will say one thing — bring it on.
