Can Mayo search deep into their soul and tear up the script?

Oh to be a fly in the Mayo dressing-room whenever and wherever the team met to train last week.

His first team-talk since the Connacht final should have been the easiest of Kevin McStay’s three years in charge of the senior footballers. All the material was there for it to be his most inspirational. Whether he’d have inserted the occasional expletive for some Páidí Ó Sé style impact, I’ll leave to your own imagination. Here's what he might have said.

Lads, the world and its mother has half anointed Galway as All-Ireland champions when the truth is, they were poxed lucky ye didn’t beat them out the gate. Six or eight points would have been kind on them.

We lost McBrien, O’Connor, the ref awarded the softest penalty the Connacht championship has ever seen, he took another point off us, and still after 53 minutes, despite playing 35 of those against the wind, ye were level with these supposed heirs to the throne.

No Walsh, no Comer they say. So what. They had them last year and it took the referee to admit it was his mistake that handed Galway the game. And look where they ended up – in the All-Ireland final!

If Galway are All-Ireland contenders, what are we? 20/1 shots says Paddy Power. Did Paddy ever kick a ball? Galway are 7/2. Where’s the respect?

20/1? Newcastle United are shorter priced to win the Premier League next year and they haven’t won the title since 1909. Where’s the respect?

People laugh at us and tell us we were just a kick of the ball from being relegated from Division One this year. I look at the league table and see that every other team finished below us. The next best were a point behind us. Where’s the respect?

The All-Ireland champions beat Dublin by eight points, they beat Tyrone by eight points and they beat Derry by fifteen points when all those teams visited Armagh this year – but on their home patch the All-Ireland champions couldn’t beat us. Yet they rate us 20/1 to win the All-Ireland and Dublin and Tyrone 8/1! Dublin? Beaten by Meath. Tyrone? Relegated to Division Two. I’ll ask you again: where’s the respect?

Do you think your captain has dedicated his entire year to come back into a team that is happy to just be the supporting actor? Paddy Durcan is our Ciaran Fitzgerald. Ciaran was born on Lord Edward Street in Ballina and 40 years ago, as captain of Ireland, trailing England at Lansdowne Road, he asked his teammates, “Where’s your f*****g pride?” 10 minutes later Ireland were Triple Crown and Five Nations champions. They hadn’t won a single game the season before.

Where’s our f*****g pride? Find it now and everything is possible. Armagh won their All-Ireland without an Ulster title in 16 years. Galway won their last All-Ireland when they couldn’t win that year’s Connacht championship. The next 11 weeks are yours to script.

That’s what Kevin McStay might have said. Exactly what he did say we’ll probably never know. But what is almost certain is that Kevin nor Stephen Rochford nor the rest of the backroom will have addressed in front of the players what remain the management's quite baffling decisions to substitute Darren McHale and Davitt Neary during the closing 10 minutes of the Connacht final which along with the litany of misses and errors, almost certainly reduced Mayo’s chances of beating Galway. But you’d hope that as a management they at least revisited their choices in conclave last week because they seemed just about the only Mayo people to think it wise to replace a pair who aside from being the only Mayo players outside of Ryan O’Donoghue to have scored from play, were easily among Mayo’s best players on the day. McHale, with 1-2 from play, was a definite contender for Man of the Match.

But whatever about the players removed from the action, it’s also difficult to understand the logic, when in desperate need of a score, behind the Mayo management not giving a twist to Frank Irwin. What purpose had they investing an entire National Football League Division One campaign in the Ballina Stephenites man – he started all eight matches this year and with 1-13 to his name, was next only to Ryan O’Donoghue as Mayo’s top scorer – only to leave him warming the bench in their hour of greatest need? Irwin’s championship to date has amounted to a handful of minutes as the final substitute introduced in the Connacht semi-final against Leitrim. It's not a criticism of the individual, just a fact that the defender they instead chose to introduce with five minutes remaining has scored one point in seven senior appearances.

And then there was the decision to include, for the first time this season, Paddy Durcan in the match-day squad yet not spring the captain down the home stretch, just when Mayo desperately sought an ounce of inspiration to claw back their one which became two point deficit.

“He is the team captain obviously, we wanted him to lead us through the weekend,” Kevin McStay told the media from the top floor of the stand afterwards. As the manager spoke, I watched out the back window of the press box as Paddy Durcan, greyhound like, sprinted lengths of the adjoining Castlebar Mitchels pitch in the company of the Mayo trainer.

“He’s in great physical shape but he hasn't played much football,” was McStay’s reason for not calling upon the 2019 All-Star defender. Rory Brickenden hadn’t played since February 2 but came from leftfield to play the entire match until his 61st minute black card. The moment had seemed primed for Paddy Durcan’s arrival, just like how Padraic Joyce sprung the experienced Peter Cooke on the hour mark for his very first minutes for Galway since the 2023 championship preliminary quarter-final against Mayo. He did so with massive impact.

The other issue that Durcan’s non-inclusion poses, of course, is what the manager’s apparent message does for the confidence of others in the squad who were not included in the match-day panel; that I’d rather pick an unfit player who I have no intention of using than you?

Paddy Durcan doesn’t need to be named in a 26 to lead his team through any weekend so long as he’s present. But if truly “in great physical shape”, then there was only one place for him at the finish and that was on the pitch.

Sometimes “f*****g pride” will only get the players so far.