Mayo hope to bridge gap

With the exception of two junior football titles, won last month and two years ago, Mayo football has endured a striking run of frustration at All-Ireland level going back over 10 years. Between 1989 and this year, the county has featured unsuccessfully in 10 football finals, including replays.

Already this year, Knockmore have lost the club final on St Patrick's Day and St Gerald's, Castlebar have been disappointed in the Hogan Cup. In five days time, the county's senior footballers will be attempting to bridge a gap of 46 years since the All-Ireland last came to Mayo.

John O'Mahony managed the team which won its way through to the 1989 final before going down by three points to Cork and was also in charge of the Mayo side which won the 1983 under-21 title. He is sceptical about theories that the sequence is self-perpetuating.

"I think that whereas there is a discernible pattern, the pattern used to be that teams from the county were not getting to finals. You will also find that people who ran all of those teams would see their individual finals in isolation.

"To suggest too strongly that all 10 constitute a pattern is to say there's some problem with the Mayo psyche, rather than with the particular circumstances of each final. You would also find that people's opinions on what went wrong would differ considerably.

"I don't think that there's anything of general application there. Next Sunday, if Mayo are good enough, they'll win; if not, they won't."

Mayo teams also have to carry the additional baggage of an entire province. Connacht hasn't seen the Sam Maguire since 1966 and in the meantime, seven teams have tried and failed to bring it back across the Shannon. Galway's experience in the early 1970s was the most chastening. A very good team, the county lost three finals in four years.

In the light of such an unpromising track record, there has to be a psychological pressure on Mayo teams going into finals. O'Mahony recognises the importance of psychological preparation but in a specific team - rather than a general county or regional - context. Eight years ago, he employed a psychologist to help with preparations that year.

"I took steps to make sure that any psychological pressure of breaking the mould could be eased. I would have seen it as a positive step and many other successful counties have since followed that lead. I was trying to eliminate any lack of self-belief. That team had lost a couple of semi-finals and that was the particular history I wanted to deal with.

"It can be argued that it was lack of self-belief in '89 that cost us the match in the end. Yet I would say that the hard work on our self-belief was the reason why we won two Connacht titles in a row - something which we hadn't managed for a while - and had reached the county's first final since 1951."

Martin Carney was manager of the Mayo minors who were All-Ireland finalists in 1991 and the under21s of 1994 and '95 who also reached the final. He believes that pressure relates to expectation rather than anything else.

"Initially when I went to the county board in 1991, I said at the time that I wanted to groom players for the senior panel. Getting to finals was to be a bonus. We achieved our goal in getting there and by not being heavily beaten in the final.

"In 1994, I was actually confident that we could beat Cork with a bit of luck. I blame myself for putting pressure on the team beforehand and they collapsed in the first half before making a gutsy recovery in the second.

"By '95, it wasn't a novelty anymore and the whole business of winning had become important. Players suffered from the pressure of not having won an All-Ireland by then. A lot of them had played in all the under-age finals and the more you lose, the more of a mystery winning becomes."

A number of that cohort went on to be involved in the current senior panel but Carney himself needed a break.

"I was confident the year we played Kerry (1995) that we could beat them. The first day we drew after a passionate display but the second day, we couldn't get up to that pitch again.

"When we lost, I got out of active involvement in football. I despaired and it really got to me. Possibly the lads gained more from the experience and I hope this will have rubbed off on them."