Once unpredictable, now unreliable? Erratic Tyrone and Mayo meet once more
Darragh Canavan of Tyrone shoots under pressure from Mayo players Lee Keegan and goalkeeper Rob Hennelly in 2921. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
Before the watershed that was the 2021 All-Ireland final, predicting Tyrone-Mayo encounters was a fool’s game because you could never underestimate the other.
Now they’re impossible to call because you can’t rely on either. Models of consistency have become the definition of mercurial, erratic, flaky even. Back to pretty much what they were before Harte and Horan started their respective revolutions.
There are grounds for optimism given that past, especially in Tyrone’s case. The origins and core of both counties’ finest teams were formed from exceptional U21 sides that recorded landmark wins over the other.
Harte has often said that if the county hadn’t followed up their 2000 All-Ireland win in that grade with another, the momentum that would ultimately lead to their senior breakthrough would have been lost. But it was maintained after he fought in the face of the foot-and-mouth crisis for his team to be reinstated into the All-Ireland series, climaxing with a win over a Kevin McStay-led Mayo in a cagey final. Within two years, 10 of Tyrone’s starters that day got game-time in the seniors’ historic final win over Armagh.
In 2006 then Mayo won the U21 All-Ireland; just last month the players and some of the management from that group had a reunion in Westport to mark its 20th anniversary. And over more than one beer in the Castlecourt Hotel that night it was mentioned that their most testing hour of that campaign had been the semi-final against Tyrone in Breffni Park; so testing it required an additional 20 minutes before a late Mickey Conroy free won it. Eight of Mayo’s starters that day went on to feature when the seniors in their pomp rolled over Tyrone in 2013 to qualify for a second consecutive All-Ireland final.
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With Tyrone so having played in four of the last five U20 All-Ireland finals, winning three of them, the omens are good that their future will be bright.
But right now? You wouldn’t know with them. The same as the crowd that will be visiting Omagh this weekend.
Take their championship encounter last year at the same venue. Tyrone were coming off a brilliant away win over Donegal, the country’s most in-form team. Mayo were coming off a dismal home defeat to Cavan. So of course Mayo won and Tyrone lost, heavily, by eight points.
To be fair, even when both counties were consistent in the best sense of the term, there was an unpredictability about any game between the pair of them. From 2010 – a year when Mayo reached a league final and Tyrone won the Ulster final – to 2020 – when both counties were coming off All-Ireland semi-final appearances, the counties met eight times in the league and all but once the home team were beaten. Mayo would invariably win in Omagh and Tyrone would always win in Castlebar.
As for championship in Croke Park, again that was anyone’s guess – with anybody’s guess usually being wrong.
“I remember being on the panel in 2004 when Tyrone were coming off winning the All-Ireland,” says the aforementioned Conroy. “They had Mugsy [Owen Mulligan] and Stephen O’Neill in flying form with Peter [Canavan] then coming off the bench. But we quietly fancied our chances [ahead of the All-Ireland quarter-final]. We had this big mantra of everyone lifting it at least five per cent more when Canavan came on and we did.”
In 2013 all right Mayo would ultimately justify their favourites tag, but only after they and Tyrone had frightened the lives out of their supporters; three minutes before half-time a misfiring Mayo were trailing 0-7 to 0-3 before Chris Barrett and Lee Keegan both came up the field to kick points that steadied them.
“They had already beaten us in the league that year up in Castlebar,” recalls Conroy, “putting 15 men behind the ball. We had beaten Kerry well the previous week so they kept it really tight. But up in Croke Park with all the space there we were confident that we’d eventually break them down.”
By 2016 though Tyrone were the side in the country most fancied to properly challenge Dublin while Mayo entering that year’s All-Ireland quarter-final were viewed as a team past their best. Including by Tyrone’s own Cathal McCarron.
“Our defence will be vastly different to anything Mayo have faced yet this year,” he’d write in a diary he kept for his book Out Of Control that was published later that year. “We don’t play in straight lines. We are set up in diamonds. Every single man knows exactly what he is doing.
“We owe Mayo for 2013. Peter Harte was buried that day by a perfectly-timed shoulder from Tom Cunniffe after only eight minutes. It ended his match. But Peter was only a club back then. Peter and the team are much stronger now. Mayo are a good side. They have huge experience. But I just believe we are a better team.”
His teammate Seán Cavanagh would be harsher – and subsequently more contrite – in his assessment of Mayo. “We perceived them as being soft. We would be the more aggressive side. How disastrously wrong we were.”
By half-time McCarron was in a rage. “I took the floor and vented my anger. ‘Boys, what the fuck is going on here? Lads are playing with fear. There’s something not right when me and Colm Cavanagh are going up the field trying to get attacks going. Are boys hiding here or what?”
By full-time Cavanagh was in a daze, one which he would dangerously remain in as vividly recounted in the opening chapter of his own book. “Not for a second did we think Mayo would come up with such a defence-laden style not unalike the one for we ourselves have long been criticised for. They caught us on the hop, disrupting us by deploying a cagey game plan.”
By 2021 though, the roles had reversed again. Tyrone, even after ambushing Kerry in their semi-final, were coming in under the radar. Mayo, meanwhile, after derailing Dublin’s seven-in-a-row bid, were touted as a team and county whose time had finally had come. Even the team seemed to succumb to it. After previous All-Ireland semi-final wins, like the one over Tyrone in 2013 or even the previous year’s over reigning champions Dublin, they had made a point beforehand of not over-celebrating the win, as if the accompanying soundtrack should be Another One Bites the Dust. In 2021 it was more like We Are The Champions. At least one player weepily proclaimed it as the best day of his life.
“We were possibly still basking in the glow of the Dublin victory,” Lee Keegan has admitted and lamented in recent days in his RTÉ Sport column, “and weren’t properly primed psychologically for Tyrone in the final. We were shipwrecked in that game.”
Just like 2016 had played right into Mayo’s hands, 2021 was set up for Tyrone. Everyone had seemed to forget that there was a second team playing that day with a world of so-near so-far experiences. Three of Tyrone’s starters, including Tom Cunnifffe’s old friend, Peter Harte, had been around since the 2013 semi-final defeat to Mayo, while the core of the team had been involved in a further three semi-final defeats, the 2018 final loss to Dublin, not to mention that 2016 quarter-final shock to Mayo.
In his column, Keegan would observe Mayo – and their supporters – “haven’t been the same since” but it could also be said of Tyrone. From 2011 to 2021, Mayo contested 10 All-Ireland semi-finals out of a possible 11 while Tyrone featured in six. Since then the counties between them out of a possible eight attempts have made it back that far just once – Tyrone last year, when they were ultimately well beaten by Kerry. As Keegan put it in that column, two heavyweights are now mere super middleweights.
Whoever’s hand is raised this weekend though has won a ticket back to Croke Park and an All-Ireland quarter-final. And as they each know, anything can happen – and anyone can be beaten– up there.
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