Tommy Martin: Is Mayo winning the All-Ireland the greatest thing that ever happened? 

There are a few competitors, like the discovery of penicillin, but not much to truly rival this week.

Mayo manager Andy Moran, left, and captain Jack Coyne during the homecoming celebrations. Pic: John Sheridan/Sportsfile

HAVING written extensively in recent years about Fifa and how those at the highest echelons of professional soccer are intent on selling off the game to the highest bidder, this column should really be about this week’s breaking news of Fifa’s attempt to, well, literally sell off the game to the highest bidder.

But Mayo just won the flipping All-Ireland, so enough of that.

Seriously, six days gone now and no Andy Moran statue built yet. Enough crying and writing newspaper columns. Get on with it lads. 

Once your blood alcohol levels have reached safe rates, of course. Handling a hammer and chisel or industrial bronze-casting machinery when your body holds the contents of enough pint bottles of Bulmers to fill in the Caspian Sea would not be wise.

Have we settled on how great Mayo winning the All-Ireland is yet? It’s been difficult to track. We’ve had to redraw and recalibrate as the hours and days have ticked by, like an inverted natural disaster, where the scale of the happiness and emotion has far surpassed early fears and those on the ground are frankly overwhelmed.

Spare a thought for the bartenders. Say a prayer for the Diageo and Heineken Ireland distribution networks. Give solemn thanks to purveyors of kebabs and curried chips from Ballyhaunis to Belmullet. 

Donate here to help the big-rig stage assemblers. Bang pots and pans for the printers and producers of Mayo 2026 All-Ireland souvenir tat. Light a candle for the selfless pub singers belting out their 7,000th version of The Green and Red of Mayo.

Best All-Ireland football final ever? Box ticked right away. Best GAA event at Croke Park? Hard to beat. Honourable mentions for the Kerry v Dublin rivalry, Séamus Darby, Clare hurlers, Limerick hurlers, various first-timer wins. But nothing like this.

Best sporting event at Croker? Hands down. Only 20,000-odd turned up to see Muhammad Ali. A well-spoken man in a blazer at the back is making an argument for Ireland v England in the 2007 Six Nations.

Smashing England and not booing God Save The Queen were great, but not a patch on last Sunday.

Best thing at Croke Park? Oasis, Garth, and Bono bow before Kobe and co.

Deep breath. The greatest thing that has ever happened in Irish sport? Like the Avengers suiting up for battle, the ghostly forms of Ronnie Delaney and Jack Charlton and the very much alive forms of Katie Taylor, Sonia O’Sullivan, and Ken Doherty begin to circle. Blazer man coughs into his brandy about Grand Slams.

I get it. It’s GAA, so it’s local and therefore somehow lesser. But how is this lesser than anything? The New York Times, Australia’s Channel 7 News, German tabloid muckrakers Bild —they all got involved. This was newsroom catnip. A quest fulfilled, a curse broken, some Paddywhackery about priests. Man bites dog, that’s a story. Mayo wins All-Ireland is man biting dog.

Great sports stories — great stories — are supposed to work on levels. You have to be able to imagine a Netflix 10-parter or it’s not even worth coming to the table.

This one has the trauma of emigration; identity expressed in the county colours; a people’s sense of themselves percolated through the tragicomic lens of a seemingly doomed football team; generations of beloved relatives cheering on from beyond the grave; the human compulsion to try and try and try again.

Seriously, slap a beard on Andy Moran, stick it on IMAX, and you could call it The Odyssey.

Let’s cut to the chase here. I’ve just seen the videos from Belmullet. We’re going to need a bigger boat. Is Mayo winning the All-Ireland the greatest thing that’s ever happened? Like, in human history?

The discovery of fire was good but some people did get burned. The invention of the printing press was great until everyone started reading The Bible themselves and then there were centuries of bloody sectarian conflict. We put a man on the moon seven years after JFK said “let’s put a man on the moon”. 

It took Mayo 75 years to win the All-Ireland again. You decide which is the better achievement.

Okay, penicillin, I’ll give you that one.

Mayo winning the All-Ireland is the greatest thing to happen that has seemingly no ill effects on anyone, other than the liver function of tens of thousands carousing on the streets of Castlebar and Westport.

Even the vanquished were happy for them. Kerry manager Jack O’Connor normally has a face like a slapped arse when his team lose but even he admitted Mayo winning was a great thing and good for football.

Most teams have bitter rivals who wish them only perpetual misery and disappointment. But in Mayo’s case, their aforementioned anthem was written by men from Tuam in Co Galway and Andy Moran is from Ballaghaderreen which, it says here, is actually in Co Roscommon!

The fact that Moran is clearly a sound man who is up for a bit of craic with the fans, open with the media, and gives off sunny, positive vibes even when manning the sideline on a windswept league Sunday at a secondary county ground, and not a sour-faced, Machiavellian win-at-all-costs merchant, can only be good.

If the GAA is a copycat industry, county boards will be scouring their borders for their smiliest men in tracksuits as we speak.

There’s a video doing the rounds of Moran bellowing at the attendees at a coaching course on a winter’s night about letting forward players express themselves and try things and not be afraid to make mistakes. It’s amazing.

If the way his team plays catches on, then we are in for a treat. When Jim Gavin and his merry men rewrote the rules of Gaelic football I thought they were designed for Kerry: More space for forwards to do their thing. But now I think they might have been designed for Mayo: Wild swings of momentum and general unmitigated chaos.

IT WILL take us a while to figure out how big this is but how about taking a moment to think about the Mayo people in your life.

There’s been a lot this week about how what happened last Sunday has changed their sense of themselves. We’ll leave them to that. But how about how it has changed your sense of them?

I never met a Mayo person I didn’t find myself instinctively well disposed to. Even the greatest Mayo rotter I would come across would be agreeable to me in some way. Partly, this is because of a general amiability born of the prevailing circumstances in that part of the West of Ireland.

But I wonder if the agonies of their football team informed this view. And not in any patronising way, as in “ah look at the poor craturs, they lost again”.

It was more the subconscious sense that here was a people who understood that life was about the journey and not the destination, that it’s about the friends you make along the way, that there was the absence of that bedrock of bastardry that winners have, that gave them a sort of elfin innocence, like flower people spilling out of a green-and- red-painted VW van under a cloud of weed smoke.

Now it turns out they’re bastards like the rest of us. They’ll live with that.

It’s been a great thing, maybe the greatest of things.

Now get on with building that statue already will you?