'You should be at their level' — How Mayo finally kicked the Kerry hoodoo
A MOMENT IN TIME: Mayo's Richie Feeney celebrates after scoring the winning point in the Allianz Football League Division 1 Semi-Final between Kerry and Mayo. Pic: INPHO/Ryan Byrne
When Jack O’Connor succeeded Páidí Ó Sé as Kerry manager, one of the outcomes whatever about intentions of his tenure was to give Mayo such a shellshock in Croke Park that it would put them on their arses for almost ten f****n’ years.
The same summer of 2004 that Páidí was marooned and winning up in Westmeath, colourfully telling Alan Mangan & Co how a loaf of bread and a grain of rice could relate to football, Mayo were the in-form team in the country, effectively ending the John O’Mahony era in Galway and then Tyrone’s first term as All Ireland champions.
Then they ran into Kerry in the final and were steamrolled. The high diagonal ball into Johnny Crowley and all that. When the sides met again two years later Mayo, under a new management team, thought things would be different because they thought they were different, only for it to turn out almost precisely the same.
Worse, even. In 2004 John Maughan broke the glass and reached for David Brady after 24 minutes. Such was the scale of the emergency in 2006 that Mickey Moran and John Morrison looked to him after just 10 minutes – to go in at full back. “I felt like I was being sent in there to look for survivors,” he’d colourfully tell Keith Duggan in the classic House of Pain. “We were in disbelief. It was all happening again.” Within a month Moran and Morrison had been summarily dismissed, replaced by a man with a proven record of winning All Ireland finals, John O’Mahony. But such was the severity of the damage inflicted upon those he inherited, Mayo didn’t even get back to a semi-final during his four-year tenure. They never even crossed paths with Kerry in Croke Park during those years, almost as if they were purposefully avoiding them after suffering what remain two of the three most one-sided All Ireland finals of the past 46 years.
“To be fair that was an incredible Kerry team, with up to 15 household names,” says Mickey Conroy who was a sub both days. “But the way we lost did definitely put a scar on Mayo for years afterwards.”
Enda Varley’s first season – 2010 – coincided with O’Mahony’s last and you could sense the untold and unspoken wreckage. “Standards were low and so were expectations. There was no belief there.” Then it arrived, in the shape of James Horan and the backroom team he recruited. S&C, psychology, disciplines that were only touched upon before, were prioritised but never ahead of his core message: skills.
“He was the first person I’d seen come in and stress to us the importance of ‘Brilliant Basics’. Like, starting out my career, I’d have been completely left-sided. But by 2013 I was a lot more comfortable on my right," recalls Varley. "I might still not have been as strong on it as I was on my left, but it would have been 60-40. Just little things like bouncing the ball with your right hand to keep the defender between you and the ball; they’ll take you a long way in Gaelic football.
“It was all about standards. Prepare and show up for every training session like it’s a game. Do your gym right. Work on the brilliant basics. Do all that and then see how the ball rolls for you; usually it’ll take you a long way.”
In Horan’s first season (2011), that greater application would take them all the way to an All Ireland semi-final; in the quarter-final they ambushed a Cork side that had won the previous All Ireland and had traditionally been their voodoo county, Mayo’s last championship win over them being 95 years earlier. The next day out though Kerry proved to be a step too far, a step up in class.
“We weren’t yet ready,” says Varley. “From an S&C point of view, skills point of view, from a mental point of view. We went about four points up early on but in the second half they put a squeeze on us and we had no answer.
“Cillian [O’Connor] got a goal to bring us back to within five, they took over again. I remember when we went back the following year one of the management ripped into us for letting Kerry reel off four points in injury time and beat us by nine in the end. The point was that in 2012 we’d have all the blocks in place – skills, S&C, mindset – and that when a Kerry would come at us we’d stand up firmly instead of giving way.”
Such a test came a few months later in the league. After hammering Dublin in their sixth match of the campaign to avoid relegation, Mayo travelled down to Tralee for what was essentially a dead rubber. But it wasn’t a dead rubber to them. With 25 minutes to go Lee Keegan was shown a second yellow card yet his teammates eked out a draw.
The following week the sides met again in the league semi-final in Croke Park. Like their championship encounter the previous August, Mayo got out of the gates early, only to be reeled in after halftime and were four down entering the closing minutes. But this time they did not relent. Their pillars stood firm. A Pat Harte penalty and a pressure Cillian O’Connor free forced extra-time. When Kerry again went three up with just minutes to go, Colm Boyle pronounced himself to the nation by charging through the Kerry defence to somehow get a shot off and goal. Then Richie Feeney kicked the winning point. For the first time since Horan himself lobbed Declan O’Keeffe back in ’96, Mayo had beaten Kerry in Croke Park.
Mayo did not win that league final. Neither did they win that All Ireland or any other after that. But almost every other barrier you could imagine they jumped. A team they said couldn’t win in Croke Park came to love Croke Park. A team they said had no steel became steely. Although they only beat Dublin twice over all those championship epics that defined a decade, it was still once more than anybody else managed.
They’d overcome the Kerry hoodoo as well. In 2014 they weren’t beaten in Croke Park: it took Limerick and extra-time for them to be seen off. In 2017 they beat them in another replay in another semi-final, this time in Croke Park. In 2019 then they beat them there to win a national title. Significant milestones to the supporters but for the team itself and the men involved the watershed was that league semi-final of 2012 – and the work done away from the lights preceding it.
“There was no magic wand to it,” says Varley. “It was just good preparation. That’s what Kerry had over us for years and years. But if prepare as well as them, what’s the difference between Mayo and Kerry? You should be at their level.”
There might still be no Sam Maguire but there’s no Kerry complex now.
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