The bottomless mystery of Mayo football

Sideline Cut: It may be impolite this weekend to ask, but why have Mayo won only three All-Ireland football titles? And appositely, how come Kerry, their opponents in tomorrow's showdown, have managed to land a whopping 32? Both are west of Ireland counties, full of natural beauty and lyricism and share a mutual pride in the store they place on the game of football.

In their respective provinces, they have each enjoyed a lion's roar over the decades, with Mayo claiming 40 Connacht titles since the inception of the competition, while Kerry have gobbled up an arguably indecent 70 years' worth of Munster baubles.

But beyond the local borders, the similarities between them end. Kerry have found venturing to Dublin in pursuit of the Sam Maguire a liberating and natural experience, while it has inspired little more than a collective psychosis from Belmullet to Ballinrobe throughout the 1900s.

There is something endearing about Mayo's famous "wait" for the return of Sam Maguire, a loyal and lonely stint that has lasted over half a century now.

Ten years can justifiably be deemed a wait. Five times that is something much more poignant and also a little absurd. It is like a man who walks in to the same dance-hall all his life in the firm belief that he is one of the legendary lovers of all time and steadfastly ignores the fact his neighbours see him walking home alone, night after night, year upon year.

In a way it is a delusion, but if so, it is a magnificent one. The Mayo state of mind is that in the years since 1901, the county's first Connacht title, 1902-1935, 1937-49 and 1952-2003 have been freakish and damnable aberrations from the glorious and rightful championship years of 1936, 1950 and 1951.

A much more realistic way of examining Mayo's football history would be to study how those three teams managed to break free from the paralysis that has afflicted 100 years' worth of Mayo teams. How the hell did they ever manage swim through the tidal wave of tears and emotion that has flooded the county's lonely fields on so many winters? Because it seems as if following the (mis)fortunes of the Mayo team was always a harrowing and Catholic experience based on the fundamentals of guilt, self-doubt, envy and inadequacy.

In his memoir Healy, Reporter, the celebrated Mayo newspaperman John Healy gives an account of his days as a cub reporter with the Western People, when he managed to cadge a weekend in Dublin to see Mayo play in the 1948 All-Ireland final against the illustrious Cavan team of the era.

He got dropped off at Barry's Hotel.

"Half of Mayo was trying to push in the doors - and the other half trying to get out. Among the people trying to force a way out as I was trying to get in was Tom Lanagan, whom I had described as 'the raw-boned man from Ballycastle'. He caught sight of me going towards him and let fly with a straight right hand.

" 'Now who's raw-boned?' he shot back as he was bundled away. Someone asked me if he hurt me and I said 'no, not at all'. The Charlestowners and Swinfords were all over the place."

After spending the night sleeping in the cab of a lorry, Healy watched the game from Hill 16 and discovered what it was to love and follow Mayo. The score was Cavan 3-2 Mayo 0-0 at half-time: "Mayo wasn't even 'mapped' as we'd say."

Then came the glorious and futile and damn near insanely unlucky last stand.

"Well, there was four minutes in it yet and the Mayo team came storming back. In front of me a Franciscan priest who had started reading his office from his breviary - and he must have been praying for Mayo - had it still open, except now he'd look up when the Mayo cheers rang out. Now Mayo came charging downfield and Peter Quinn was positioned dead between the posts of the Cavan goal, solo-running the ball, the forwards moving with him.

"The whistle went. The pain which flashed across Quinn's face I can still see. He looked at the referee, as if he was asking what foul he had committed. But the ref called for the ball - it was, incredibly, all over. The Franciscan said plaintively: 'Fuck that', and slammed his breviary closed."

The premature ending of the 1948 final - it was accepted afterwards that at least four minutes of the game remained - became another in the endless stories of sufferance that Mayo men and women have endured in the cause of Gaelic football. That two of their three splendid and isolated titles came back-to-back is almost cruel, so dense and bright, a jewel at the epicentre of all those years of blankness.

Even the surrounding Connacht counties must have empathised with the Mayo plight over the years.

Mayo people could be forgiven for asking what they have to do. They hold a curious place in the Gaelic football family tree. In a real sense, Mayo are a giant of the game and they can be relied upon to produce always attractive and, fairly regularly, exceptionally talented teams. They express themselves through football in a manner that can be mesmerising. But God above! There are times when they are as tragic as the Native Americans. There are times when Mayo seems like a lost people. You want some law to be passed to stop them playing football, for their own good.

So why have Mayo not won more All-Irelands? It is one of the bottomless Irish mysteries. My theory is that it might well come down to good manners. There is an aristocratic bent to Mayo society. It is a county full of inherently decent people. It is a county that has always placed great weight on education and the result has been generations of readers, talkers and thinkers. Maybe all that reasoning and introspection is a dangerous thing when it comes to football, which can be an aggressively unreasonable sport. And maybe they are just too modest to actually go about winning as much as they are entitled.

Which is not to suggest that Kerry, who sometimes cannot but win the bloody thing, are in some way vain or boorish. At times, Kerry seemed trapped in a parallel existence to that of Mayo which has them helplessly winning, September after September.

To Kerry folk, genuinely unsure of how to deal with the grief of loss, Mayo must be a strange and exotic and dangerous land.

In Gaelic games, there is a stark division between those few teams who win remorselessly and those who almost never win. Alone, Mayo stalk the merciless hinterland in between, fated, it seems, to almost always nearly win.

But they keep turning up. They will never quit on this. That is what allows Mayo to retain their aristocratic air, their pomp. The castle may have been ransacked many times but the family was never evicted. There is a true nobility about this search that has been passed on from generation to generation. And someday it will end. Sooner or later, the prayers and curses - so often locked in the one sentence - will be answered.