Holy Grail tantalisingly close for Mayo again

ON GAELIC GAMES:Donegal have taken a disproportionate share of the limelight this season and that may suit James Horan's side

“I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand,”

– John Cleese (from the film Clockwise)

THE ESSENTIAL poignancy of Mayo was best expressed to me by a native, who proudly (and a little tongue-in-cheek – I think) proclaimed his county as “the second biggest in Ireland – when the tide’s out”.

Nowhere is the studied dejection and Zen fatalism as evident as in the county’s football fortunes: “Mayo, God help us. Where have all the minors gone? Washte of time (I’m going home to burn this),” and all the other expressions of forebodings, all too predictably realised.

No county has beaten the defending All-Ireland champions more frequently in the past 15 years but that’s a qualified distinction. Only six times in the past 29 years has the hand that wielded the dagger lifted the crown and three of those occasions were in finals.

Even Keith Duggan’s essentially celebratory book about Mayo football bears the title House of Pain.

In this heavily nuanced world the stark statistic about the county stands out: Sunday will be Mayo’s sixth (seventh if you count the 1996 replay) All-Ireland final since lasting taking home Sam Maguire all of 61 years ago.

This series of unfortunate events is rivalled and surpassed by Cork’s footballers in the last decade of the 19th century and first of the 20th when they went from the high of registering the first football and hurling double in history in 1890 to losing seven finals (eight if you count the 1901 home final) before reacquainting themselves with success 101 years ago.

But that was a mere – if intense – 11 years in the middle of which the county hurlers won three All-Irelands in a row. Mayo folk have had no such welcome distractions.

The county’s barren spell extended across the grades to 16 elite finals (including one replay in senior and under-21) between the 1985 minor success and the under-21s’ win 21 years later.

That long-awaited championship win was vengefully followed up by the senior mauling at the hands of Kerry and further defeats for the minors in 2008 and ’09.

According to Cork’s Bob Honohan, who managed successful underage teams, the best player for senior purposes is a minor who has lost an All-Ireland final – good enough for the elite level but still hungry.

By that criterion Mayo should have been minted. So far, so dismal but the caricature of Mayo as some sort of Cold Comfort Farm, however entertaining, is misleading.

It may be the case that no county in the past quarter of a century has lost more senior football finals although their companions in misery, Cork, have also failed to win on five occasions (six counting replays) but the county has been a major presence in the game.

No serious county has been left waiting so long for an All-Ireland. Waterford’s hurlers have been in the vicinity but even their most recent victory postdates Mayo’s by eight years and their tales of woe have generally been in semi-finals rather than finals.

Arguments could be made for Kildare and Cavan as fundamentalist football counties, who’ve waited a long time but their claims haven’t been pressed nearly as relentlessly.

My first press night was 23 years ago in Mayo when the county was preparing for a first All-Ireland final in 38 years. It was giddy stuff. Unlike its more relaxed successor last week, it had Castlebar in ferment.

Flags and banners everywhere and an enthusiastic throng down at McHale Park, into whose midst strode then minister for the environment Pádraig Flynn who declared the whole business “as good as a new factory” for local morale.

The county hadn’t come from nowhere, having rattled All-Ireland champions Meath’s cage the previous year and in 1985 taken Dublin to a replay in All-Ireland semi-finals.

They weren’t far off it in ’89 either but Cork were potentially on a third successive blank final and did enough to fend off that unwelcome prospect.

The best chance of the lot came in 1996 when Mayo lost a replay to Meath by a point having led at one point on both days by six.

The most salient point about the final defeats of the past decade was the county overachieved by getting there in both 2004 and 2006; in other words Mayo were not the second-best team in the country in either year but they got there and ran into a Kerry team at the height of its powers.

In retrospect those harrowing afternoons have proved valuable even if there are likely to be just three players playing on Sunday with experience from six years ago. It’s more that there’s no carnival in town ahead of yet another All-Ireland final against hot-favourite opponents – and this time the opposition isn’t Kerry.

On top of that Donegal have taken a disproportionate share of the limelight. Their tactical revolution divided opinion last year and this summer has prompted a slightly uneasy bandwagon amongst erstwhile critics. Probably the principal novelty was the discipline drilled into what had previously been seen as a wayward football county.

In the shadow of the controversies, James Horan went about restyling Mayo every bit as radically as Jim McGuinness had in Ulster but their defeat by Kerry in last year’s semi-finals didn’t exercise people’s fascination as much as the Donegal-Dublin match. This year Mayo beat the All-Ireland champions but the world has been more impressed by Donegal’s defeats of Cork and Kerry. It won’t upset Horan that Mayo have moved along almost in their opponents’ slipstream because they’ve kept pace with them almost without too many noticing.

The more analytical might be of the view that Mayo haven’t actually done anything new in reaching a final through an unexpected semi-final victory. Their high scores in the past two matches against Dublin and Down can be ascribed to less-than-resolute defending.

Centrefielder Aidan O’Shea addressed this point to the media when asked if the team had to prove their consistency to the public at large: “Not really. If we win the next day people will say, ‘ah they were bound to win one eventually’. You’re not going to get the credit anyway so it doesn’t really make a difference to us.”

He clarified this by adding that all of their successes to date have been explained away as the failings of others. Sunday promises in that regard at least that there will be no more excuses.

smoran@irishtimes.com