Awaiting the leaders to arrest Mayo’s slow drift

With Ballina Stephenites’ demise to Sligo’s Coolera-Strandhill, Mayo’s annus horribilis is complete. Oh you forgot? January started with London putting the Mayo senior team to the FBD sword. I thought ignominious at the time but those that know wrote it off, mealy mouthed, along the lines that it was an experimental Mayo outfit and if lads can’t cut it then tough on them. The bottom line here folks is simple: no Mayo fifteen should ever lose a football match to London. Ever.

I was far from surprised that Coolera-Strandhill beat Ballina Stephenites in Connacht. Club football at senior level in Mayo has been like a lead balloon for years now. The cause? Take your pick: inertia, clubs themselves not caring, a county board fixated on the county senior team, the split season, young lads travelling, few meaningful games, U17/20s now a developmental hot house for project players… whatever, it’s a steep fall for Mayo club football.

Starting 30 years ago in 1994 with Castlebar Mitchels’ inaugural Connacht title and All-Ireland final appearance, Mayo clubs would pick up eleven Connacht titles and reach seven All-Ireland finals, twice as winners. However, Mitchels were also Mayo’s last provincial winners in 2015. That’s almost a decade. The canary has sung in the mine and has been ignored. The void has been filled with Corofin winning another four All-Ireland titles since 2015, with Moycullen, St Brigid’s and Padraig Pearses as the support acts.

I’ve been reading The Captain Class by Sam Walker, a book about what makes great or poor leaders and captains, what separates winning teams from foot shooters. It’s very interesting. Captains and leaders can be the same but often they aren’t. That led me to look deeper. Captains and leaders often are defined by looking backwards, moments picked out only in retrospect. Nor are they always confined to the pitch; leaders are across the sporting spectrum, not confined to age or the sporting arena but the support acts that define that arena.

Walker picks out a Boston Celtics player, Bill Russell, an unremarkable (by American basketball standards) six feet nine inches basketballer. 23 and in his first Celtics season, the fans still had the jury out on Russell. Prior to 1957 Boston Celtics were a bang average basketball team until a history defining moment in that year which changed theirs and basketball’s history. Basketball is full of ‘plays’ but this play would become legendary. It was called the ‘Coleman Play’.

With 40 seconds left on the clock and Boston two points ahead, St Louis Hawks’ Jack Coleman received an outlet pass mid-court, a clear 47 feet from the Celtics basket and not a single Boston player to impede him. It was his to lose. Standing dead beneath the Hawks basket was Celtics’ Bill Russell, 92 feet away. Coleman needed three seconds to cover the 47 feet but Russell tapped into his inner self and as the basketball cleanly left Coleman’s hands for a slam dunk, Russell’s hand intervened and slapped it against the backboard. Boston gained possession and held out.

But they didn’t just hold out. Bill Russell’s feat of sporting balls set in train a sequence that saw the Celtics, over the next 12 seasons, win nine NBA titles including an eight in-a-row. Russell was there for them all. Sam Walker goes on in the chapter to break down how Boston Celtics broke the mould, always a nice scoring team heretofore but one that leaked easily. However, in finding Bill Russell, they found a man who never saw losing as an option. From that ‘Coleman Play’, Boston Celtics found their sporting soul. Stitched into it was ‘never say die’.

Looking at the GAA and its modern foundation given birth with the arrival of the Dublin team in 1974, if we poke into the entrails of that particular Dublin outfit we find a side with no pedigree or status. They were the underdog versus Wexford in the Leinster championship that year, a game played as the curtain-raiser for the replayed National Football League final between Kerry and Roscommon. Jimmy Keaveney sat in the stands watching that match.

Fast forward four and half months and Keaveney, slightly pudgy but with a wand for free-kicks and an eye for a goal, is back for an improbable All-Ireland final against Galway. From Jack Cosgrave, the full-back taking the kick-outs, to Liam Sammon and Jimmy Duggan, 1966 All-Ireland winners, Galway were the more recognisable team and warm favourites, yet everything was about to change utterly. Many opine that Sammon’s penalty miss was the crucial moment. I wouldn’t concur.

The decisive moments had occurred long before Liam’s miss. Kevin Heffernan, or Heffo as he became known, had fashioned a team in his own image – skillful, hard, unbending and a chip on its shoulder about the culchie crowds looking down on them. For this he needed special men. Paddy Cullen, who saved the penalty, was a first-rate soccer player and had they lost that final would have returned to it. Keaveney, who missed out on Dublin’s 1963 win against Galway, had become disenchanted but was coaxed back that May by Heffo for one more try. However, their Bill Russell was a 19-year-old then Blackrock and Leinster U19 rugby player with blond flowing locks and long limbs, Brian Mullins, who Heffo threw into the midfield mixer.

Being fed up with the then status quo in the city, Kevin Heffernan ripped to shreds the moribund trappings that held Dublin back. New ideas, new blood, indeed even new gear came in with his team. The famous dark shorts, dark socks with sky blue tops debuted that year. They looked like a soccer team, which basically they were in their professional approach to the science of the game. With their advent, out went the full-back kicking the ball out. In came the goalkeeper’s new role.

Down south no one wanted the Kerry gig as the old 1968-71 team died on the vine. Mickey Ned O’Sullivan was training to be a PE teacher back then and brought in the recently retired half-back turned half-forward Waterville hotelier and garage owner Mick O’Dwyer to help him run the Kerry team. Micky Ned soon got sick of the logistical nightmare that managing combined with playing was so Micko became the man. The rest is history. The explosion of Sky Blue a season earlier was dampened in 1975 by a young Kerry outfit, setting in train a rivalry that ran from then until 1986 in which they traded All-Irelands save for an Offaly outlier in 1982.

Since 1974 and the Sky Blue revolution 50 years ago, Dublin and Kerry have shared 30 All-Irelands between them, Kerry’s 16 and Dublin’s 14 interspersed with a four in-a-row and six-in-a-row. It wasn’t by accident or the finger of fate that the gods bestowed such largesse on those two chosen ones. As Pat Spillane once said, you can only put 15 on the pitch on any team. It’s what you place as support, demands, backups, beliefs, hunger, cussedness, badness, skill set, absence of ego, devotion to the cause around a team that defines the winners from the pack.

On any great team, in any great achievement, there is always that touch light moment that can be traced back to, that moment when winners were sifted from the losers enclosure. The 2008 All-Ireland final, as Kerry led Tyrone by a point and Gooch bore down on their goal with only McConnell to beat, a goal would have broken the back of the Red Hand. But McConnell’s size 12 blocks the ground shot and the ball is transferred up the pitch to Brian Dooher who narrowly avoids a trip to the nearest A&E as Kerry men try to nail him, and fires over a 50-yard point from the sideline. A potential four point lead at one end is now wiped out in real time and deep down Kerry know what the crowd already knows. That Tyrone’s name is etched on the cup.

Perhaps the point I’m trying to make is that we here in Mayo and those of Mayo stock further afield have somehow lost that sprinkle of wonderment and love for the aesthetics of the game. Serially since 1989 we almost yearly made final after final across some grade. That we lost them never seemed to hurt too bad because we saw another bus coming. The hurt was never allowed to fester, or the anger cleansed, expunged and forged into an unstoppable force.

The heroics of 1989 can now be boiled down to have been just happy to be there on the day, not an opportunity to finally kill a team already riddled with doubt by Meath over two successive seasons.

Our heroics of 1996, the anger, the pain, the feeling of theft, injustice and emptiness had by 1997 drifted away in a fog, so much so that the ’97 appearance bore no resemblance to the angry young men of 12 months earlier. What matter said you, sure we’ll be back soon again, if not in a senior final, then a league final, a minor final, an U21/20 final, club final or college final. And we were, generally losing them in all sorts of fashion from outright hammerings to unimaginable efforts of contriving to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We were a river that would never run dry, maybe not a gold mine but yes, a silver mine. And then the wells started to run dry. The canary’s getting hoarse.

This year saw Sligo and Leitrim beat our U20s. A county that has more U21 and U20 Connacht titles than their combined rivals together wound up playing in the ‘B’ Shield. What once was deemed a shock in losing at minor level to either Sligo or Leitrim has now morphed into senior club football. We have fallen off the cliff exponentially at inter-county senior level since that chastening 2021 loss to Tyrone. Having emotionally ‘won’ the 2021 All-Ireland final against Dublin in that year’s semi-final on a wet August night, we failed to seal the deal a few weeks later. Subsequent quarter-final hammerings by Kerry and Dublin in 2022 and ’23 were ‘eased’ by them winning Sam but not making this year’s quarter-final, losing to an already emotionally fractured Derry, was shocking. That Ballina lost to the Sligo champions shocked no one, possibly even Ballina deep down themselves.

Sam Walker, the author of The Captain Class, confesses that even after exhaustive research, the traits that make a great captain or leader are often contradictory. Using Bill Russell as an example, Walker noted his resistance to individual awards, turning down the 1975 Hall of Fame Basketball Award. In declining, Russell stated that his career should be defined not by singular personal awards but he wanted his career to be recalled as a symbol of team play. Russell said: “I never paid attention to MVP awards or how many endorsements I had lined up, only how many titles we had won.” Bluntly put, as long as the Boston Celtics won titles, Russell didn’t mind if nobody noticed his input. The word ‘I’ to Russell was replaced by ‘we’. History would confer true greatness on him. As it did.

Russell reminds me of Stephen Cluxton. Between 2001 and 2010, a decade where Cluxton was seen as a good goalkeeper but his team a flaky confection of egos and bluster, something happened, a catalyst arrived, a mindset moved. A concrete runway laid down for a team to take off. It seemed improbable back then but by September 2011, Cluxton was to become Dublin’s Bill Russell. Quiet, taciturn, devoted to the team only, the most silent highest-decorated GAA player ever. His leadership spread throughout the team, unlocking those latent streams that course through players bodies. With Cluxton as leader the likes of McCarthy and Fitzsimons joined him on the pantheon of the greats. The team was what mattered. Those men ensured that.

The question is simple. What lies behind the Bill Russells and Stephen Cluxtons? Who finds them, gives them the platform, the backup, the stage on which to perform? Crack that code and maybe we can come out of the freefall that’s starting to gather momentum in the land of the Yew Plains.