Championship unmasks firepower myth about Mayo footballers

While Napoleon was conquering half of Europe, he wasn’t fussy about finding genius within his ranks. He famously stated that he wanted lucky generals. Plans could be drawn and maps could be studied, but when the smoke cleared it was often fortune that decided matters.

Mayo, on the other hand, have had their fair share of good forwards. Plenty of them, in fact. But Lady Luck has often deserted them. The catalogue of misfortune is as long as the N17. Promising scorers blighted by injury just as they were ready to bloom. Systems that prized structure over spontaneity and left natural finishers muzzled. Players who waited years for their chance, only to be handed ten panicked minutes when the summer arrived. Then, there were, of course, those whose talents took managers too long to decode, by which time another season was already in the grave. And when all else failed, a refereeing whistle usually made sure the coin landed the wrong way up.

The curse, if that word must be dragged out again, has never really been superstition. It has been circumstance, a conspiracy of mistiming and misfortune. And for all the good forwards Mayo have produced, they have rarely found the lucky ones Napoleon would have trusted to win his wars.

And so the refrain has droned on, summer after summer, winter after winter: Mayo don’t have the forwards. It has become less an argument than a habit, repeated with the same casual certainty and melancholy as a weather forecast in November. Managers have muttered it, pundits have dined on it and supporters have sighed it ad nauseam. After a while it stopped being a diagnosis and became an identity.

But what if it was never quite true? Or what if it doesn't have to be true? Because while the Mayo faithful have been busy lamenting a lack of firepower once again following Mayo's premature exit from this summer's inter-county championship, the club championship this autumn has been quietly setting fire to that old story.

Take Group 1, for instance. Crossmolina Deel Rovers didn’t just nibble at the scoreboard – they devoured it, posting a phenomenal 8-54 across their three group games. That haul was enough to shove last year’s champions, Ballina Stephenites, into second place. But the back-to-back champions were far from shy in front of the uprights themselves; they still rattled up 7-43 during the group stage.

Over in Group 3, Ballaghaderreen played their part in the feast, topping their group with 8-45 to their name. Knockmore, meanwhile, thundered into the quarter-final with 4-51 across their group games. Everywhere you looked, the numbers piled up quicker than the autumn leaves on the ground.

These are not the figures of a county in crisis. These are banquet numbers. Eight goals here, half a hundred points there – it’s the kind of scoring that makes you blink at the table just to be sure it isn’t a misprint.

Of course, the cynics will point to the new two-pointer, designed to reward ambition from distance. And it has, without doubt, inflated the totals, and given matches a new sheen. But dismissing the tallies as a result misses the more important point: Mayo footballers have been casually dropping shots from the kinds of ranges we had assumed they had no business even attempting.

Because it was only a couple of months ago that a consensus took hold during the inter-county season and it was agreed that Mayo simply didn’t have the shooters, that they couldn’t reliably punish from 40 yards. It was accepted with a shrug, while other counties embraced the new facet of the game. And yet, here were Mayo players in late August and early September, pinging balls over from every postcode in the county, and doing it with a nonchalance that bordered on cheek.

It puts paid to the myth. Mayo’s problem has never been a lack of forwards. The evidence from across the county over these past few weeks suggests the cupboard is not bare at all – it’s overflowing.

And if all that wasn’t enough to stir optimism for a change, consider who will be orchestrating Mayo’s forward line next spring. Andy Moran – one of the sharpest shooters Mayo has ever produced and the man who could famously turn half a chance into a headline – is no longer prowling the inside line but sketching the blueprints.

Moran knows the loneliness of the forward better than anyone. He spent years carrying that burden for Mayo, watching possession after possession die on the breeze, learning the craft the hard way, with markers glued to his ribs and entire defences plotting his every movement. He survived by precision, by invention, by the kind of nerve that trusts reflexes.

He clearly has forwards at his disposal. Mayo doesn’t need to conjure points from prayers. And there’s a certain poetry to it – the man who often dined on scraps could now find himself running a buffet.

Of course, a little caution is required. It’s one thing to post these numbers in early autumn when the ground is still forgiving and defenders are half a step looser. It is quite another to do it when the space disappears, the pitches slow and the stakes sharpen to a knife’s edge.

Mayo county finals, for example, have rarely been feasts. They are usually cagey affairs and as tight as a clenched jaw, where points are earned through attrition rather than artistry. The champagne football of the group stage could very well curdle into trench warfare when silverware is at stake.

The pressure cooker changes everything. Still, what has been shown over these few weeks is that Mayo doesn't have a dearth of talented forwards, as so often is suggested. The situation may not be as dire as first feared. It’s just a question of whether it can be refined under Moran's tutelage.

Even at that, Napoleon was still right. Ability might win you a battle, but luck wins you the war. Yet wars aren’t decided in a single day. Stack enough battles together, and fortune has a way of bending, however reluctantly, in your direction.

And maybe that’s the task now for Moran's Mayo – to keep winning the small fights until even luck has no choice but to fall in line.