Malachy Clerkin: Mayo have seen it all before but where do they go from here?

The good news for Mayo is that the graph is still pointing upwards. It won’t have felt like it wading through the ankle-deep mud of another All-Ireland defeat but it bears pointing out all the same. They have been - and will continue to be - derided for falling short on Saturday night. But if nothing else, they have enough experience of these things to know how to separate the noise from the reality.

In each of the three seasons since James Horan returned, it has taken the All-Ireland champions to beat them in Croke Park. Along the way, Horan has completely reconfigured the playing staff. Seven of their starting team on Saturday have made their championship debut since 2019. Ditto four of the five subs. All of them have played in at least one All-Ireland final now and the majority of them have played in two.

Seen in that light, plenty of counties would love to be as badly off as Mayo. Whatever format the championship takes next year, they will still be among the top four teams. Counties striving to compete with them - your Donegals, your Monaghans, your Galways, your Armaghs, your Kildares - have nothing like their base of experience and development put together. If any of them could start 2022 where Mayo are, they’d be delighted.

But like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball, when you lose the last game of the season, nobody gives a shit. Mayo started an All-Ireland final as favourites and finished it as flops. Quite why their failures seem to get so far up the noses of so many people is a mystery best left between the righteous and their therapists. For Mayo, there are far more important matters to interrogate now.

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The consensus on Saturday night seemed to be that this was their worst final performance since the bad old days of 2006. Certainly, the fact that so many Mayo players left no real imprint on the biggest game of the year would put anyone in mind of those torchings from Kerry in the mid-2000s. It’s one thing to have the experience of playing in a couple of finals. It’s another to be on the pitch as they pass you by.

But where this final differs from back then is the fundamental truth that it wouldn’t have taken very much for it to turn Mayo’s way. For all that Tyrone were the better side with the more pointed gameplan and the smoother execution, the two teams created more or less the same amount of scoring chances. Tyrone made more of theirs. So Tyrone are champions.

Shotmap

Mayo took 31 shots across the game and scored 0-15. Tyrone took 28 shots and scored 2-14. None of Mayo’s shots were from outlandish positions - the Armagh-based analyst Colin Trainor posted their shotmap online on Sunday morning and showed that no Mayo player tried a shot from play from outside the 45 or anywhere near the sidelines. They shot, in the main, from the places you’re supposed to shoot from. They just shot really badly.

Conor Loftus missed 1-3 and had a nightmare all around. Tommy Conroy was busy and willing and always seemed to have the beating of Pádraig Hampsey but he also missed a brilliant goal chance when Mayo were rampant. Bryan Walsh got hassled out of one goal chance and tried to burst the net with another but blazed wide when a handy fisted point was the obvious option.

Even Ryan O’Donoghue, who was the one Mayo attacker who was clearly loving the stage all day, made a mess of his penalty by trying to be too clever with it. Granted, Niall Morgan definitely came off his line but that’s a cop-out. A penalty in an All-Ireland final should be scored - you’re too close to the goal to be forgiven a miss, especially when you’re trying to pick out the top corner with it. Low and inside the post does it every time.

Is there a common thread to these misses? Possibly. It’s no new insight to point out that Mayo’s greatest strength can also be their most debilitating weakness. They thrive when the game is taken to that place where only they can live with the intensity. Turnovers, tackles, pouring forward like the 13th Infantry coming over the hill with bayonets drawn.

But too often on Saturday night, they looked to be trying too hard to force that emotional weight onto the game. All three misses listed above needed a more professional execution. Conroy had skinned Hampsey and looked to send Croker into orbit with his shot, so much so that he lashed at it and pulled it wide and didn’t for a second consider Aidan O’Shea standing unmarked in the middle of the goal.

Walsh had been anonymous for much of the game and was like a boxer trying to get back into the fight by landing one massive haymaker, rather than jabbing away with a fisted point - or again, slipping to O’Shea in the centre of the goal. And as for O’Donoghue, it wasn’t enough to score his penalty, he wanted to score one that people would purr over, a reminder to everyone that he had been a schoolboy soccer international once upon a time.

Cooler heads

Horan was quoted in the build-up as wanting to take the bullshit out of Mayo football. His job now is to define for his players exactly what constitutes bullshit. He most likely means all the extraneous stuff - the hype, the nonsense of the curse, all that jazz. But when he watches this final back, he will have to reckon with the fact that with cooler heads, Mayo would have scored more of the ample chances they created.

Horan also needs to either find a role in which O’Shea can prosper or end his torment once and for all. Along with Lee Keegan and Kevin McLoughlin, he has now played in seven All-Ireland final matches and never won and never scored. Worse, he has begun to look like a bad footballer, which he is not. His miss on 21 minutes was unforgivable, especially since McLoughlin had created a screen to give him the yard of space on his good foot on the edge of the D to swing over a regulation point.

At 31, it has long been obvious that he isn’t an inside forward. But it can’t be beyond the wit of the Mayo management to find a job for someone with his physical gifts, his handling, his passing and his fielding ability.

There must be personal responsibility on O’Shea’s side too - not for the first time, he has played badly in the biggest game of the year. He has to properly and honestly face up to why this happens.

That can be said of Mayo in general too, of course.

Nothing new there.