Ballina banish some ghosts but sub-standard final deserves discussion

Won’t somebody please think of the children.

As advertisements for Gaelic football go, Sunday’s Mayo senior football final sympathised with the Halloween weekend upon which it was played: scary, frightful and grim. It did about as much to entice a new generation of players as RTÉ has done to attract its tv licence fees this year, but will Ballina Stephenites care this week? Not one bit. It’s a results game, apparently, and when your club has been without the county’s biggest prize since 2007 (a famine in Ballina terms), the need to win usurps the need to win pretty. In other words, the end justifies the means. Or does it?

Viewers, young and old alike, love drama. It’s why the Mayo team became the most heavily supported this past decade. It’s why Coronation Street has been running for 63 years. But even that soap is but a pup compared to the length of time a final of the Mayo senior football championship had ended in so few scores.

The 1935 decider, like last Sunday’s, ended 0-6 to 0-4, with Ballina Stephenites the champions then too, seeing off a Castlebar Mitchels team that had beaten Ballina in the previous year’s final. In fact, those two clubs contested six county finals in-a-row, but someone sat not too far from me here in this office – someone who quite literally, has written the book on Mayo football – has since pointed out that it was the year after that ’35 final in which Mayo won their first All-Ireland SFC title. An omen? James Laffey hopes so. I doubt so.

If Kevin McStay is able to construct an All-Ireland winning team inside the next nine months based upon what anyone who has closely observed this year’s county senior championship has witnessed, he’ll do Lourdes out of business.

The Mayo manager has agreed to host a ‘A Systems of Play Workshop’ at MacHale Park in December for coaches of Mayo’s underage and adult club teams alike. You’d love to know if he will be endorsing and promoting and coaching the type of play that was inflicted upon the thousands who descended on Castlebar for what is supposed to be the showpiece of the Mayo club football calendar.

Before we go any further though, we should congratulate Ballina Stephenites, sincerely and heartily, on their Moclair Cup triumph, because for all that the win against Breaffy was a hard watch for the football purist, it did take hard work and guts for the Moysiders to bounce back from last year’s disappointment of losing to first-time winners Westport in the county final and go one step better twelve months later. Plus, it’s possible but also doubtful that ever before has any team won the Mayo SFC on the back of conceding just 0-15 in quarter-final (0-4 v Belmullet), semi-final (0-7 v Knockmore) and final (0-4 v Breaffy) combined – of which only a scarcely believable four points was conceded from play.

But could it be that having also only scored 1-6 in last year’s final, that rather than decide they would need to score more this year to become champions, Ballina Stephenites instead decided they would only need to concede less? You’d sincerely hope that wasn’t the theory because while defending as tightly as the Stephenites have done is most certainly an artform and to be respected, the thing about the majority of Gaelic football supporters is that they come to be entertained by the positive notion that whatever you score we’ll score more, not drained by the negative notion that whatever you concede we’ll concede less.

Ballina Stephenites, now the standard bearers of Mayo club football, managed to score two points from play, one in the 8th minute, the other in the 64th minute on Sunday. That was one point more than managed by Breaffy who had to rely upon a substitute for their only score from play.

Ballina were only marginally more prolific in their semi-final, taking until the 44th minute to score their first of four points from play against Knockmore for whom Darren McHale, with the grand total of one point, was their only forward to score from play. And them the champions of 2020 and ’21 remember.

Belmullet, the beaten finalists in 2021, didn’t score at all from play when losing to Ballina at the quarter-final stage while that 0-4 from play that Ballina struck against Knockmore was as much as Breaffy scored from play against Westport in their quarter-final, yet worryingly, in a bigger context, that was still good enough to see them oust the defending county champions – the bigger context being the Mayo senior football team.

Lest anyone forget, the last half of football played by Mayo this year saw them manage to score just three points against Dublin, one of which was a ’45 kicked by goalkeeper Colm Reape and another scored by defender Paddy Durcan. Dessie Farrell selected a full-forward line that scored 2-6 from play compared to Mayo’s 0-5 while the Dublin substitutes on their own equalled what the entire Mayo team scored in the second-half.

And remember Mayo’s long scoreless spells against Galway the week before? Or the 20-minute collapse at the tail-end of the Cork game where we were outscored 1-6 to nil, the resultant defeat thus increasing the difficulty of our championship route? And when before this year did Mayo only score ten points against Roscommon – or against anyone for that matter – in a game of senior championship football, particularly while on the home soil of Castlebar?

Anyone who sees no correlation between all that and the dour and dull fare that was served up far too often in this year’s Mayo senior club championship is, quite simply, oblivious to the reality.

Does it say something that the top scorer in this year’s Mayo SFC, Evan Regan, played his last game for the county back in 2019? Or that of the eleven top scorers in this year’s intermediate championship (which, in contrast to the senior, was a thoroughly entertaining and high-scoring competition), only one of them has ever played a game of senior championship football for Mayo? Nor have any of the ten most prolific scorers in this year’s junior championship ever laced a boot for the county at senior grade.

It does, however, seem almost impossible not to construct much of the narrative around Breaffy’s latest defeat around anything other than the baffling deployment of Aidan O’Shea, especially given the fine margins and narrow scoreline upon which the game was ultimately decided.

So often maligned and the butt of people’s potshots at Mayo football, you’d forget sometimes all the success and everything Aido has achieved in his more than fifteen years in the limelight, like owning eight Connacht SFC winners’ medals, winning two National Football League titles, captaining the Connacht team that won a first interprovincial senior championship in 45 years, captaining Ireland in the 2017 International Rules series and, of course, being named an All-Star on not one, not two but three occasions.

And I don’t know about before, but certainly not in the last forty years has any other player scored a hat-trick of goals from play in a Connacht final like when O’Shea did so against Sligo in 2015 (Cillian O’Connor struck three but one from the penalty spot against London in ’13).

All of which made his almost allergic reaction to entering inside Ballina Stephenites’ 45-metre line during the entire second-half of Sunday’s final (and for long stretches of the first too, if truth be told) all the more bewildering.

O’Shea had entered the game as many people’s ‘Player of the Championship’, exactly because of how he had carried some impressive inter-county form at the edge of the square this year into the club competition also. In fact, one more big game in last Sunday’s final and he could have seriously challenged Evan Regan for that ‘top scorers’ prize. But from the moment he helped win the free that resulted in his brother Conor scoring the opening point of the second-half, and then ventured outfield to soar high and win David Clarke’s subsequent kick-out, from which Breaffy scored a second point in quick succession, in midfield is practically where Aidan O’Shea stayed, while inside the Breaffy attack floundered… for the rest of the match. This was on the back of O’Shea totally dominating county teammate Donnacha McHugh who, at full-back, tried but failed miserably to halt his gallop during Breaffy’s semi-final victory over the more fancied Castlebar Mitchels.

Granted, his supply was less plentiful on Sunday which, presumably, led to his wandering, but what use were Breaffy able to make of whatever extra bit of possession O’Shea was able to generate, when had he remained close to the posts there was always the chance something might break his or Breaffy’s way.

Instead, it’s just the latest addition to a long list of defeats and near misses that have always dogged the reputation of one of Mayo's most ‘capped’ and hardworking footballers in history and who, quite frankly, has been one of our best of the past twenty years. A fiercely unlucky defeat after a replay to Tyrone in the 2008 All-Ireland MFC final was the beginning of Aidan O’Shea’s so-near-yet-so-far inter-county career that has included not a single All-Ireland win but senior defeats in 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2021. And his experiences at club level have been equally as bitter, with this a fifth senior final lost in a decade.

Breaffy may have hoped the stars were aligning in this their 70th anniversary year but Halloween delivered a nasty trick and no treat.