Beware the Ides of March

George Orwell stated in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘Everything faded onto the mist. The past was erased, the erasure forgotten, the lie became truth’. Perhaps this is relevant in these Trumpian times where inside a week history is written, distorted and dismissed with a whim.

My mind gives back a mere two seasons and one month to Ballybofey on March 19, 2023, but it seems more like a decade. Mayo hammered the home team 1-17 to 0-9 on a grey doom-laden day. The fallout was costly as the then-Donegal manager Paddy Carr stepped away only weeks after masterminding a win against Kerry in that league.

Something about that game that day stayed in mind since. The gloom and grey swirling around Ballybofey, Carr’s grey curls under a woolly hat, Mayo giving a masterclass in stretching Donegal all over their home pitch, TG4 cameras picking up angles behind the goals highlighting Mayo’s master plan being executed with deadly precision. The same cameras panning and picking out the figure of Carr and his shocked backroom team as they knew everything would change after this match.

Mayo were impressive. Bullying Donegal all over the pitch, a moment picked out where the Donegal goalkeeper Patten took possession from a short restart only to be hunted down mercilessly by a rampant Aidan O’Shea and punished severely. Boys v men might have summed up that match. Mayo’s grand experiment of Conor Loftus orchestrating every move akin to the days of Ajax of old and Total Football. It was a glowing light in the gloom filled Donegal home ground.

At the end of the match, one knew Paddy Carr’s tenure was near over. His players couldn’t have been that supine. Or were they? The interviewer was kind but the pain on Carr’s face was evident. He knew. The Mayo manager, another decent man, McStay, was kind and humble in his interview, kind of ‘look it, it’s the league, early days, work in progress, Donegal will be back, we have work to do’ stuff. And yet part of me saw both managers conjoined in a surreal way, almost a premonition. We couldn’t be that good, they couldn’t be that bad. Where was the centre?

This week looking back, I can now say with certainty that March 19, 2023, match was Donegal’s nadir and Mayo’s high point. Apart from hammering New York in the 2024 championship, that eleven-point win was our highest winning margin in every league and championship game since then. Whilst Carr suffered the humiliation of him being the only person removed from the managerial ticket; the players asked his selectors to remain on but him to go. That had to cut deep. We moved on, won the league, cursed it a week later when Roscommon bullied us in Castlebar and have since then lived in a state akin to smoke and mirrors; the good Mayo, the not good Mayo.

So how come then a team, Donegal, bereft and leaderless on the March 2023 were, within a year, installed as dark horses to win the All-Ireland, and are warm favourites to win it two seasons later this summer? I mean, if you look at both teams from March ’23, Donegal had twelve of those underachievers on board against Monaghan last week, throw in McBrearty who was injured for that league match and the return of Ryan McHugh, nothing else changed. Unless of course you add the Big Two ticket of Jim McGuinness as manager and Micheal Murphy, now thirty-four but firing on all cylinders. Surely it cannot be as simple as that? Or maybe it is.

After losing to us in March ’23, Donegal were relegated, gave an OK account in Ulster and then the following September, McGuinness came back. The 2024 season saw them win Division 2, beat Derry, the Division One champions in the Ulster championship, take out Tyrone and Armagh to seal that title, before exiting the All-Ireland semi-final stage versus Galway. Like Ange Postecoglou’s famous quote that he wins his trophies in season two, will Jim do likewise this year? The experts think he might. So back to the question, how come Jim, with the addition of three players, can get a tune out of a team that couldn’t raise a trot and saw off a manager two years earlier?

To answer that we might have to look at ourselves. That March ’23 match being our high point, if we look at our team versus Donegal that day we find twelve saw action versus Leitrim a few weeks ago, that’s not counting injured duo Paddy Durkan and Tommy Conroy, and Conor Loftus unavailable. James Carr and Fionn McDonagh are the two players missing from the match two seasons ago with Bob Tuohy and Padraig O’Hora from the subs. So, both teams more or less travel with the same personnel. We ask then does the addition of McGuinness as manager tilt the scales that much? The return of Murphy at thirty-four, Ryan McHugh near thirty, again, can it be that simple?

It would be fair to say that both teams’ trajectory has differed since our Ballybofey victory. In 2023 despite Donegal’s annus horribilis, they exited the championship at the Preliminary Quarter-Final stage, an eight-point loss to Tyrone, we exited a week later with a twelve-point loss to Dublin. Last year, as stated, Donegal got to an All-Ireland semi-final and we tamely exited to a broken Derry on penalties in a Preliminary Quarter-Final, a game less than a year previous. The fall off was steep. This year’s league, in retrospection, might have seen us relegated had we lost to Donegal. An interesting side dish amongst those that are the GAA experts is the addition of the name Tyrone to the Donegal menu. Despite being also relegated, the experts see something in Tyrone that they don’t see in us. What is it?

I’m not sure but of this I’m certain. That March ’23 win versus Donegal for Mayo was the apex of this iteration. If we trace back to it, from it we see a side that went from confident, almost arrogant football, into a side that seems cooked from too many different cooks recipes. They Ballybofey recipe was pure Mayo, my Mayo, a joy to watch. A clear plan, an orchestrator on the pitch, bullying forwards, dogs for backs, towers for midfield. What happened? What was added to the menu, what was taken from the recipe since that day? We the followers don’t know which Mayo will turn up. Ironically the league gone by sums us up. The tight margins; one other loss and we were relegated, but it was a win, so we were elevated.

And that’s the worry. Personally, I couldn’t describe to a non-Mayo friend what our style is, how we play, why we are inconsistent. We may beat Galway, equally we may lose to them, it’s not unreasonable to suggest we could thrash them, or they could thrash us. That’s where we are now. After that? The lap of the gods. Capable of beating Kerry away and a week later scraping a lucky one-point win against Louth at home. But that’s not the future, nor is it consistent.

If we go back two seasons to that match, what was the collateral that Donegal had in the hills that they felt assured once taken would change their fortune? Was it their players taking charge of their own careers and being selfish in order to maximise their potential? Seeing Paddy Carr as the vehicle that wouldn’t get them home but another, McGuinness, as the vehicle to do that and Micheal Murphy the driver to do that? It cannot be that simple, surely?