Mayo and Dubs help football reclaim its soul

The Kingdom, the power of Dublin and Mayo.

To whom the glory? Anyone like Tyrone?

The football championship may not have delivered the pimple-faced freshness of this year’s hurling, but it has blown off the froth to present a heavyweight card for the semi-finals. And in the approach of favourites Mayo and Dublin, football has reclaimed some of the ground lost in the last two seasons to a depressing re-evaluation of tactics.

Kerry still bring “intelligence and nous” to the table, concluded Donegal’s Jim McGuinness after the last of yesterday’s All-Ireland quarter-finals, but few disputed Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s rank of his own county as fourth of four remaining hopefuls after their unconvincing win over qualifiers Cavan.

Where Dublin offered the promise of much more in their five-point defeat of Cork on Saturday, Mayo spilled 10 months of waiting into their 16-point dismantling of All-Ireland champions Donegal yesterday at Croke Park. Not since Eoin Liston’s rain dance on the Dubs in 1978 have sitting champions been stripped so bare.

Tyrone and Mickey Harte have pulled themselves from a few scrapes over the years but if they can halt the juggernaut that pulverised Donegal yesterday, it will be some achievement.

The 63,466 who watched open-mouthed yesterday came on top of over 70,000 the previous evening. With two crowd-pulling hurling semi-finals to come, this may prove a summer to remember in more ways than one.

McGuinness admitted his men have had little or no traction this campaign, but nothing could have prepared Donegal for an afternoon where the meanest side in the country last year coughed up 4-17 and 3-4 alone to corner-forward Cillian O’Connor.

Dublin’s Jim Gavin was in Croke Park yesterday to watch how Kerry shaped for their expected semi-final clash, but if he waited long enough to see Mayo’s tour de force, it may prove the most valuable segment of his weekend. The O’Shea brothers set a breath-taking tone at midfield; Mayo were 1-3 to no score in front after eight minutes. By half-time it was 2-10 to 0-4. It was a sobering abdication.

James Horan and his backroom team have moulded a physically daunting unit that has shed much, if not all, of the baggage that has haunted the jersey on big Croke Park occasions. Whether yesterday’s annihilation of Donegal will trigger another damaging wave of euphoric excess in the county over the next three weeks is irrelevant to some degree — the squad’s reaction to it is all that matters.

Nothing that Andy Moran or Aidan O’Shea said afterwards suggested their season had topped out.

“We met a very hungry team today, a team on a mission,” accepted McGuinness. “We had that last year in our play and everything we did. Mayo have it now. Rather than making excuses, the best thing is to acknowledge what they brought to the table — that intensity and that drive, they believe in their manager, they believe in their game plan and all those things push you forward. That’s exactly what we had last year.”

In Donie Buckley, Mayo have a coach whose market value in the modern game has soared with the growing emphasis on the tackle. His success this season was evident in the volume of turnover ball Mayo secured yesterday. However, 13 different scorers yesterday and a combined winning margin this campaign of 61 points (around 15 points per game) suggest Mayo are doing more than just dispossessing the opposition.

They’ve always talked a good game of football in Mayo. Now they’re keeping their most powerful messages for between the white lines.

“All the stuff that we’ve worked on — our skills, our tackling, our movement and a lot of the basics of the game — that we’ve put a lot of effort into came through today,” said a chuffed James Horan.

McGuinness mentioned more than once the importance of momentum; Mayo and Dublin are fired with the Big Mo heading into their respective semis, but Tyrone are better versed in the art of spoiling and disarming than Kerry. The suspicion is that Fitzmaurice may have too many dykes to plug as he prepares to face the Dubs.

The biggest concern for the Munster champions will be a second-half display against outsiders Cavan that turned a routine passage to the semi-final into a stuttering, vaguely embarrassing shuffle across the line. 0-15 to 0-9 looks comfortable, but you had to delve a little deeper into Fitzmaurice’s post-match remarks to discern his displeasure with certain members of his side who decided they’d sing off their own hymn sheet yesterday.

“It was [another] malfunction,” he admitted, “and often when you malfunction in August, you don’t come out of it. I don’t think it’s a physical problem, more bad decision-making. We went so blatantly away from our game plan we were working on all year it was just bad — some of the problems were things we’ve worked on all year to get out of our game and it’s disappointing when we got back to Croke Park they manifested themselves again.”

Kerry enjoyed a 0-11 to 0-2 half-time advantage to silence the raucous Cavan support. Kerry are used to training behind closed doors so they can’t use the lack of atmosphere as an excuse for their fadeout, as Fitzmaurice labelled it.

There was one uplifting storyline, however, for the men in green and gold.

David Moran hasn’t played a championship game for Kerry in over three years. Since then he’s suffered two cruciate ligament tears, eye socket damage and shoulder injuries. Most players would be supporters at this stage, but Moran’s attitude has been so diligent that his Kerry colleagues afforded him a round of applause the night he returned to contact training. Ogie’s son capped a full 70 minutes with a point yesterday and gave his coach something to smile about.

“What that man has gone through psychologically as much as anything shows some steel. But he has never complained and never stopped working.”