Kevin McStay: Change needs to happen in the Mayo dressing room and across the county

Monday morning was overcast and squally in the west of Ireland: an appropriate backdrop to the general emotion in Co Mayo. What is the prevailing feeling for us after the latest All-Ireland final failure?

I think it is probably frustration and resignation edging into anger. We have found yet another county to lose an All-Ireland final to. We might have told ourselves stories in other years when we lost to Dublin to Kerry: ‘oh Galway got Kildare when they made their breakthrough in 1998’. We were up against Kerry, against Dublin, against that oppressive tradition. Those are self-deceptions. In 2012 it was Donegal who eclipsed us. And on Saturday it was Tyrone. This time, Mayo were favourites. It made no difference. The losing sequence continued.

My sense is that the numbers are becoming so accusatory now that they are beginning to frazzle the Mayo minds. We have a generation of footballers who have played seven All-Ireland finals, including the 2016 draw, and lost six times. I feel that Lee Keegan is pound for pound the best footballer Mayo has ever produced. Is that the number that will or should be attached to him as a legacy?

My family often accuses me of being cold and clinical in my public analysis of Mayo. I think it might be because of the company I keep over a championship season: people who are informed about the game. And mixing with people like Colm O’Rourke and Seán Cavanagh and Oisín McConville, who have a deep understanding of what it takes to win an All-Ireland.

Road to Croker: Canavans keep it in the family

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Tyrone’s success gives Feargal Logan relief from the pain of 1995

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James Horan accepts that Mayo were well below par when it mattered most

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I travelled to Dublin over the weekend with high hopes founded on logical reasons why Mayo could win this. Modern finals have become real ‘events’, with a momentum and anticipation which builds up over the week. Media coverage is massive and people have as much fine detail as they want. I love that part of it. But the weekend reminded me of how transient it all is. On Friday night, we bumped into Brian Fenton, walking home in Clontarf with a takeaway under his arm. And I found it kind of amazing that he was suddenly no longer part of this: that it was Mayo and Tyrone’s show. He was gracious and wished us well.

Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing

Then, on Saturday morning I happened upon Peter Canavan at the lift in the hotel. Naturally, his focus was on the family aspect. One of the greatest players of all time was quite rightly just another nervous, proud father of a son who was playing. He was caught up in it. I wished him well. When I next saw Peter, he was standing all alone in the 76th minute caught in the absolute joy of knowing there was another Celtic Cross coming into the family home. What a beautiful moment for him. The contrasts between the Tyrone joy and the crushing realisation that yet another Mayo team were being thrust into the same purgatorial place became very clear and pronounced in those fading minutes of the contest.

The texts came thick and fast after the game from former players and people involved in the sport. The message was: tough loss. But you cannot expect a Mayo team to win when they play like that.

Brilliant fortune

I feel that many fans don’t have that same cold perspective. There is a tendency to contextualise and equivocate: we are young! We had a great run! Morgan was off his line for the penalty! Sure we will have Cillian back next year! To former All-Ireland champions, these excuses are irrelevant. To them, this is the truth. The game was beautifully poised at half time. Mayo got the brilliant fortune of a penalty at the perfect time. Young O’Donoghue had a very fine game but I am sure he wishes he could take that penalty again. It wasn’t just the miss: it was the embellished run up which drew further attention to the miss.

That moment wasn’t the winning and losing of the game. But it set Mayo off into a nightmare closing half hour. In the 50th minute Cathal McShane had a horrible wide for Tyrone from a free. Right then, the wide count was pretty even: Tyrone 7, Mayo 6. It was to be Tyrone’s last wide. But for the remaining 27 minutes of the match, Mayo missed a penalty, kicked eight further wides, two others shot into the goalkeeper’s hands, had crazy turnovers and fell into a pattern of awful decision making. It wasn’t quite a meltdown. But there was a sense that as a group, they were afraid to go and win the All-Ireland final: that they found it hard to muster up the courage to take responsibility and make the right pass and do the right thing.

You cannot keep returning to these finals and repeat the errors of yesteryear. From an analytical point of view, it is unacceptable. I think the Mayo management will be at a loss to understand how it got so bad. The substitutions, rather than add energy, actually sucked energy out of it.

The wides I am talking about aren’t just ‘wides’ as a fan would count them. They are not just missed shots or a statistic. You have to examine what kind of wide it is. And the unsightly part is that that 50 per cent of those wides were down to lack of quality and poor shot selection. I have spoken before about the ASS statistic: It’s a simple breakdown which explains so much. The ideal attacks/shots/scores rate is 40/30/20 or better. Mayo on Saturday broke down as: 46/31/15. It was yet another case of a disastrous inability to convert chances into scores. Rather than working hard to create the easy score, the Mayo players began to take snatch shots based on blind hope. I wrote here that five or six wides is where a team needs to be at the end of a game. Our twelfth wide was a simple handpass from Oisín Mullin to Darren Coen that dribbled out over the endline. It summed up the day.

Where did the composure go? And why did it leave Mayo?

After all, Tyrone had issues, too. They had many opportunities to extend a very good lead but failed to capitalise on them. However, the Tyrone attack, whether by design or otherwise, were informed by a sense of purpose and know-how: that they were all reading off the same page. Their two goals were emblematic of this. And they disguised a glaring barren spell for the Tyrone attack also. Tyrone failed to score a point from play from half time until the 67th minute of the second half, when Darragh Canavan fisted a ball over the bar. That is not a system failure but it is not the sign of a rampant team either.

Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing. We need to be cold. We need to throw off the comfort blankets and the gallows humour and the sense that they will be back next year. This time, the team needs to have a massive post mortem about their second half. Otherwise, they are fated to repeat those mistakes in future big games.

Do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years?

The management must look at their panel again. We must get the balance between athlete and footballer more accurately aligned. Conor Meyler is an incredible athlete. But look at his ball playing skills, too. We don’t quite have that. The Tyrone approach negated Mayo’s athletic profile. Their big fear, surely, was allowing Mayo to slip into their running game. How did they break it up so effectively? They went man to man high up the field and took a chance on the inside line. They gambled. Mayo had goal chances. But the Mayo running game rarely got into flow. It was a very brave call by Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher and there was risk involved in it. But that is the job of management: to make the assessment and judge the risk. So in the end, Mayo’s prime weapon - their running power - looked blunted.

There is a debate I often had in the 1990s with John Maughan. We had a dearth of forwards but endless defenders who kept Mayo in games. Kenneth Mortimer was the prototype. He was a terrific defender but he was so good that he could play forward too. And John did play him at 11 at times. But do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years? It surely has to start down at academy level where we begin to produce and coach specific types of forwards rather than just another fine all round player who often gravitates into defence and becomes these marauding attacking defenders.

Brushstroke dismissals

Look at Aidan O’Shea. Nobody but nobody can agree where Mayo should play him and what his best position is, yet he has been playing for over a decade. Maybe Mayo have done O’Shea a disservice here. Has his role ever been clarified for him? Or has he been asked to be all things for too many Mayo teams down the years? His game has suffered because of that. This was true on Saturday. Aidan had a very decent start. I felt he was one of the top three Mayo players at half time. If people are being honest about it rather than the brushstroke dismissals of him, here is a synopsis.

He wins the throw-in (both halves) and gives a lovely assist for Tommy Conroy and Mayo have a very early and very encouraging score. In the opening 20 minutes he regularly won his ball in front of Ronan McNamee. He then kicked a wide which I felt was the key moment for his day. And it was illustrative of a guy who is a bit low on confidence. He knows the chance is there and he knows he has to take it. But somewhere in his mind he is doubting himself and he just doesn’t strike it with enough conviction. Very soon after comes the golden chance: a goal opportunity. And it is the same want of confidence. If this is a league game or a game in Connacht, Aidan scores that all day long. He shows McNamee the ball and lets him skid past him and then he has Morgan at his mercy or Conor Loftus coming on his right. In my opinion, he actually tried to chip a point. And that is why McNamee got the block. Still, he created the penalty shout for Pádraig O’Hora. He had at least 10 positive plays. His second half deteriorated badly - but he was part of a failing unit. He was still on the ball a lot. He still kept showing.

So he was low on confidence. But ask yourself this: if you took the kind of shit that is thrown at Aidan O’Shea all the time, wouldn’t you be too?

He came in for some harsh treatment on social media on Saturday night. You cannot govern that. But not for the first time, he was central to the criticism of Joe Brolly’s latest dissection of Mayo in his newspaper column with the Sunday Independent. I worked with Joe for a long time on RTÉ. We were never close, as they say. He can be good company and he is affable. And Joe has had a privileged platform and influence for many years.

The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan's career. I am sure Aidan knows this

You have to be careful how you use that. He puts himself up there when he is talking about the requirement of winning All-Irelands as though he is some kind of leading authority on the subject. He played with a county that made it to an All-Ireland final once - ever - and won it: good luck to him. But he played county ball for many years: by his standard he was a failure in all bar one of those. He personalises Mayo’ defeats and puts it down to a failure of moral character. He talks of cliques and of Aidan as “a protected captain” and questions James Horan’s authority. None of that equates to what I hear of what goes on within Mayo. We have had a lot of retirements here. If those issues were prevalent, they would have come to the fore. My sense is that they run a very decent show in the Mayo camp.

Not balanced

I felt Joe stepped over the line in his treatment of Aidan and it was lousy: it was personal and not balanced. You can take issue with how a football player presents himself to the world. But it doesn’t give you carte blanche to trample all over somebody’s personality or reputation. Everyone knows the Mayo effort was not good enough. But you cannot pile it on O’Shea and James Horan. Everyone is entitled to a fair hearing and you cannot manipulate an entire career down to a few games. The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan’s career. I am sure Aidan knows this. But the manner in which Joe is going after Aidan O’Shea is just bloody wrong.

Here’s a story. O’Shea lost his fifth final on Saturday, December 19th, 2020. He didn’t score. Dublin won with no undue fuss. On Monday, January 18th 2021 a friend of mine had a meeting with a sports consultant in the Sism gym in Castlebar. It is run by a member of the Mayo backroom team. It was a wet damp old morning and as he went into the office, my friend spotted O’Shea doing a weights session. He had started back the week before. People don’t see that side of it. He has been doing this for a decade. Joe doesn’t see that. Up to recently, Aidan O’Shea hadn’t missed a game for Mayo in 10 years.

I imagine that he won’t miss many next summer either. In the meantime, Mayo have to immediately begin to rectify the failures that have repeatedly destroyed us in All-Ireland finals. Change needs to happen in the dressing room and across the county. Otherwise another 70 years will slip by and we will all be pretty old by then.