Entertain them and the crowds will come

Anois teacht an Earraigh… 

Raifteirí’s famous line about the arrival of spring seemed entirely appropriate on a sun-drenched afternoon at MacHale Park in Castlebar as Andy Moran’s new-look Mayo delivered a vibrant, energetic performance that yielded a second successive National League victory. A year ago, I wrote in these pages that Mayo were “a hard watch”, but that certainly wasn’t the case last Sunday as Moran’s men played with a joie de vivre entirely in keeping with the day that was in it.

The most marked difference since last year is Mayo’s direct approach in possession. There is now an emphasis on creating scoring chances rather than retaining the ball for the sake of it. The foot-pass is back in vogue and even the occasional speculative high ball into the full-forward line is being utilised, something that hasn’t been seen in Mayo for a long, long time. Indeed, the first score of the game came from a high ball into James Carr who passed to Fergal Boland for the opening point after just one minute.

Of course, the new style of play inevitably leads to more chances for the opposition and Dublin’s goal in the third minute reflected that reality. The challenge for Moran will be to find the optimum balance between attack and defence, but at least he has got off to the right start in terms of the former. The chief criticism of Mayo last year was the failure to adapt to the new rules of Gaelic football, which reward attacking play and ultimately punish teams who try to engage in endless lateral hand-passing. The only way a team is going to win now is to score heavily as opposed to the old rules which had reached the stage where teams were content to score two points in a half if the opposition scored only one point.

There is also an element of reclaiming a county’s tradition. Mayo’s footballing DNA has always been about attacking football, going right back to the 1930s when Mayo earned a reputation for their attractive brand of football. If the last couple of years has taught us anything it is that Mayo’s supporters will willingly endure many emotions in pursuit of the Holy Grail, but boredom isn’t one of them. We want to be entertained, and Andy Moran certainly gave the crowd of 15,197 full value for money last Sunday.

On a day when the Mayo players were wearing vintage green and red jerseys, in a fitting tribute to the All-Ireland winning side of 1950-’51, the crowd was treated to end-to-end football, lots of goalmouth action and a high-scoring display from the home team that yielded 1-18 and almost as much in missed opportunities. We can pick holes in certain aspects of the performance, insert all sorts of caveats in our analysis and worry about what might happen in the future, but give me this version of Mayo any day of the week compared to the cautious, methodical tactics of the past few years.

There will be those who will argue that Moran has got a couple of lucky breaks in his opening two National League fixtures – and the sending off on Sunday of Dublin’s Sean McMahon certainly fell into that category. However, the old cliché about making your own luck is applicable in this case, and Moran deserves a lot of credit for sending out a team that reflects his own sunny, energetic disposition. Mayo are playing the way Moran played the game himself – full-hearted, full-blooded and always full of hope. Mayo GAA needs that after a tough few years and the huge numbers that flocked to MacHale Park last Sunday proved that supporters are buying into Moran’s brave new vision for the county senior footballers.

There are challenges ahead, of course, not least the mini-Ulster Championship that Mayo must embark upon in the coming weeks. Two tricky away trips to Donegal and Monaghan are followed by an equally tough home tie against Armagh, a team that has stolen a march on Mayo in recent years. Those games will tell us a lot about where Mayo are likely to go under Moran, but the blooding of fine young players like Darragh Beirne and Cian McHale, the improved form of other youngsters like Bob Tuohy and Sam Callinan, and the return of several of the ‘old guard’, all point to brighter days ahead for Mayo GAA.

Anois teach an Earraigh.