Finding a better way to utilise Cillian’s unique talent

I was reading Dean Rock’s new column in The Irish Times on Saturday morning when a thought struck me: Dean Rock started playing senior intercounty football for Dublin in 2013, two years after Cillian O’Connor made his championship debut for the Mayo seniors. Rock is now retired and enjoying life as a pundit whereas Cillian is soldiering on in the championship badlands of Salthill, The Hyde and Castlebar.

The Ballintubber man won’t thank me for pointing this out but anyone who was aged five when he made his debut in the summer of 2011 will be able to vote in the upcoming local and European elections. Those 18-year-olds cannot remember a time when a Mayo senior team did not have Cillian O’Connor as one of its star players.

We’ll only truly appreciate Cillian when he is retired, a view that was reinforced once again in a sun-drenched MacHale Park on Saturday evening as he once again proved his worth to Mayo by scoring four points from play. If any young player had come off the bench for an injured Aidan O’Shea and made the same contribution we would be raving about him. But we tend to take Cillian for granted.

It is five years now since the Ballintubber man broke Colm Cooper’s championship scoring record and he was aged only 27 at the time. During those dark days of Covid, he set another championship record by scoring 4-9 against Tipperary in an All-Ireland semi-final, the highest tally by any player in a single game in the history of the championship. His scoring stats have been off the charts since he made his senior debut for Mayo and it is impossible to see his remarkable records broken at any stage in the future. He has set standards for forward play that will forever more be the benchmark in Mayo football.

I have to admit I was a bit dubious about Cillian starting against Cavan. I shouldn’t have been. Injury may have robbed Cillian of some pace but he has a football intelligence and spatial awareness that more than compensates for any other deficits. And he is unerringly accurate. In my lifetime, Mayo has never had a more accurate or more reliable forward, and the statistics certainly back that up. Kevin McStay recently described Ryan O’Donoghue as the greatest corner-forward he has seen in a Mayo jersey. I beg to differ. Ryan is a fine player but Cillian is at a different level altogether.

There are those who say that Cillian is too old or has too many miles on the clock, but he is, in fact, only 32 this year. That is four years younger than Cork’s Patrick Horgan, who has been setting the Munster Hurling Championship alight over the past few weeks. It’s the same age as Andy Moran when he won his Footballer of the Year award in 2016. Yes, Cillian has been blighted by injury but he has always bounced back, and last Saturday was a case in point. Indeed, it is a measure of his resilience that he recovered from the Achilles injury that saw him miss the 2021 championship; that kind of injury has been career-ending for some sportsmen.

The debate will, no doubt, rage on for the rest of the summer about the merits of using Cillian and Aidan O’Shea as impact substitutes. Perhaps the defeat to Galway and the victory over Cavan gave us the answers to both of those questions. Mayo need Aidan O’Shea at the end of a game, not at the start. Had he been there against Galway in the final quarter of the Connacht Final, it is difficult to imagine us conceding three points in as many minutes. Those breathless, bruising final minutes were made for O’Shea whose undoubted ball retention ability would surely have come to the fore.

On the contrary, Cillian’s value seems to be as a starting player and it is difficult to see him on the bench against Roscommon. One of the main talking points since the start of the year has been the lack of scores from our full-forward line, so it seems counterproductive to leave a proven score-getter on the bench. Some readers will argue that there is a world of difference to playing Cavan in MacHale Park and Dublin or Kerry in Croke Park, and maybe there is, but it’s not a good enough reason to leave someone of Cillian’s ability on the bench for 50 or 55 minutes. Mickey Harte famously substituted an aging Peter Canavan in an All-Ireland Final only to re-introduce him in the second-half to devastating effect. We need to find better ways to best utilise the unique talent that is Cillian O’Connor but leaving him on the bench for most of the game is not one of them.

On the contrary, Aidan O’Shea’s impact off the bench would be enormous and he has so much to give for 40 or 50 minutes. It was Kevin McStay who memorably said that he would play Aidan at full-forward or nowhere else, but I think the past year has told us that it is not as easy as that to find a suitable role for the big Breaffy man. The simple fact is that he is not a free-scoring forward and he usually does his best work further out the field. However, he cannot be expected to patrol the middle third for 70-plus minutes, so either we get the first 50 minutes from him or the last 50. For me, the Galway game provided the answer to that conundrum.

Of course, it is easy to put theories and tactics on paper; it’s a whole other ball game to put them into action. Each game will present its own unique set of challenges and management have to plan accordingly.

I have to admit I remain somewhat unconvinced about the decisions taken by the Mayo management over the past two years. Take Fergal Boland, for instance. Apparently, he wasn’t good enough to make the panel last year; then he suddenly becomes the lynchpin of our attack for this year’s National League only to disappear into obscurity for the Cavan game. It seems to me to be a replica of the Conor Loftus situation where we tried something for last year’s League (and, in Loftus’ case, most of the championship) only to suddenly abandon it. There doesn’t seem to be any clear tactical strategy or, indeed, style of play. Yes, we beat Cavan easily, but how good were Mayo and how bad were the Ulstermen? It really looked like Division One against Division Two, and the outcome was never in any doubt after the first quarter.

But Cavan still got through for several goal chances whereas Mayo struggled to create any clearcut opportunities, although there were a couple of efforts for points that zipped over the crossbar. The number of goal chances we are conceding is a cause for concern and it will present a problem for us at some stage in the championship. However, we got the job done against Cavan and we now have an equally winnable fixture against Roscommon for a place in the knock-out stages. We’d have happily taken this scenario at the start of the championship.

As for the current state of the football championship? I think the public voted with their feet last weekend. The attendance in Castlebar was poor, barely over 9,000, and even fewer people came out in Salthill for the most eagerly-anticipated fixture of the first round, Galway against Derry. More people have turned out for League matches on bitterly cold days in January or February.

Should we be surprised? I don’t think so because the entertainment value in Gaelic football is virtually non-existent. Apart from the many mismatches, teams are playing a style of football that is too pedestrian and cautious, and the lack of interesting, entertaining fare is reflected in the periods of near silence from the crowd. It is hard to get excited when teams are just knocking the ball back and over in the middle third. There was a time when a player would nearly be substituted for hitting too many back-passes; now he’d be substituted for striking the ball forward too often.

There is no comparison now between Gaelic football and hurling, and it is just as well the GAA are keeping the latter behind a paywall because if the public got to view all the great hurling games in Munster this year there would be nobody watching football. At this juncture in the championships, if we were asked to compile a top five games in both codes, would even one football match make the grade? You’d have to think long and hard to find a football match in recent years, let alone this year, to compare with Clare’s exhilarating victory over Waterford last Sunday. As I said earlier, it’s no coincidence that much of the hurling has been put behind a paywall because nobody would build a paid-for business model around the current football championship, not even those mad folks in RTÉ who came up with Toy Show: The Musical.