Hoping history can help turn the tide at the Hyde

Presuming you don’t – unlike Dublin do – classify Croke Park as neutral ground, then the last time Mayo and Dublin played a senior football match on a level playing field, so to speak, was all of 43 years ago in none other than Dr Hyde Park, where the counties will again collide next Sunday in a game to determine who qualifies directly for the All-Ireland SFC quarter-finals. Mayo supporters will hope it’s an omen that the game in 1981, a National Football League quarter-final on April 5, resulted in a Green and Red victory, 1-11 to 1-10, where a goal and two points from Joe McGrath proved decisive.

But this was just football. A fire that claimed the lives of 48 young people at the Stardust nightclub in Artane, and which in recent months has been so in the news again, had occurred only six weeks earlier. Bobby Sands was a month into his deadly 66-day hunger strike at the Maze Prison. And an Aer Lingus plane was hijacked and ordered to fly to Tehran but landed in Paris. Different times in every sense.

Out of 59 meetings at senior level between Mayo and Dublin in league and championship, that game at the Hyde remains the only one where one or the other did not enjoy home advantage, presuming you discount the semi-final of the 1904 All-Ireland SFC, which was actually played in 1906 in Athlone. It was clubs who represented counties then and who competed for the Croke Cup, with the Dublin selection prevailing over Ballina Stephenites on that occasion by one point, 0-8 to 1-4.

To say Mayo’s 1981 win came as a surprise is something of an understatement; football in the county was until that day in the doldrums but spurred on by their Dublin breakthrough, Mayo that year would go on to win their first Connacht SFC title since 1969. Imagine that, the entire 1970s without Mayo hands once touching the Nestor Cup. Different times indeed.

The headline on Ivan Neill’s report of the game in the following week’s Western People read ‘Mayo surprise even their own fans’, while Terry Reilly reckoned that Mayo folk had not entertained any great hopes of an upset because of “a spate of injuries that made the training camp a good setting for Emergency Ward 10”.

Full-back Anthony Egan was one of several absentees from the Mayo team, having failed a fitness test just two days beforehand, and in a cruel ironic twist there are concerns surrounding the fitness of the Mayo full-back David McBrien in advance of this week’s game, compounding the losses of team captain Paddy Durcan and Diarmuid O’Connor, who is experiencing very little luck of late.

O’Connor, a two-time Young Footballer of the Year, didn’t feature at all in the Mayo squad for the last outing against Roscommon having only returned to the starting team (after several months out) in the previous game against Cavan, while McBrien played only the first-half against the Rossies before being withdrawn with what manager Kevin McStay later described as a tightened hamstring. A further blow is the likely absence through suspension of Fergal Boland.

But a depleted Mayo winning a league quarter-final in ’81 against a Dublin team that had lost an All-Ireland final to Kerry by 14 points only 18 months beforehand is a different thing to expecting a depleted Mayo to win a championship game against a Dublin team that last year won a ninth All-Ireland SFC title in 13 seasons. Indeed it’s no slight on this year’s beaten Connacht finalists to point out that even with a full deck from which to pick, the bookies would have them long odds to overcome the Metropolitans who have yet to break sweat this summer. And yet… what county has won three of its last four league or championship games against Dublin and what county has not conceded a goal in three of its last four league and championship games against Dublin? Mayo and Mayo.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have to reach for Ivan Neill’s headline all over again and see how a Mayo victory would be greeted, in particular by Dublin supporters who were none too impressed at seeing their side lose that last clash between the teams at Hyde Park, with a footnote to Neill’s report all those years ago detailing how referee Tommy Moran afterwards ‘had to be escorted from the pitch by Gardaí when a section of Dublin supporters threatened to assault the official at the entrance to the sideline’.

Martin McNally is the man who’ll take charge of Sunday’s clash, with the Monaghan whistler having already officiated Mayo in this year’s championship against New York in Connacht’s opening round. How busy he’ll be and what level of angst both sets of players will bring to Sunday’s match is difficult to forecast for why it’s no secret the two counties tend to draw aggression from one another, the curious underlier is that this game is not knock-out and so a layer of unpredictability is perhaps added to what might unfold.

Of course, there are some obvious draw backs to losing, chiefly the extra game required to reach an All-Ireland quarter-final and if achieving that goal, the toll of having to play high-end championship matches on three consecutive weekends, so if the scoreboard is anyway tight entering the final 10 minutes on Sunday it’s impossible to imagine any scenario other than both teams going hell for leather in pursuit of the front door entrance.

“It was the first time the new schedule and the split season were put together so nobody knew the road ahead, but you learn. The key learning is that it’s a two-week rhythm if you’re winning in your championship and if you’re not, everything gets tighter.” That was the observation of Kevin McStay earlier this year when reflecting on 2023 and his first campaign as Mayo manager, with the Ballina native bullish about how well his team had fared.

“When we ran down the tunnel at half-time against Dublin in the quarter-final, the All-Ireland was wide open. I know that, because I was in the dressing-room with the gang.

“You look at the squad of players we have, we’ve been in five grade one national finals in each of the last five years – two All-Irelands and three leagues – and we won two of them, so who’s to debate that we’re not in the mix, on a day when we’re well organised, we’re competitive, we’re on top of the game plan and we’re ready to rock?

“We can be competitive with anybody; we absolutely know that,” McStay insisted.

And speaking at the conclusion of this year’s National Football League, one that actually saw Mayo sneak a win over Dublin courtesy of Stephen Coen’s fisted second-half goal, the manager added: “This year, we have built out the panel quite dramatically, the first years and second years have got another pre-season and I think we’ll see the benefits of that later.” 

Later has arrived. The stakes are about to rise considerably over the course of the next fortnight, with the margins for error narrowing considerably. But how much development of this Mayo team has there really been? Of the 15 players that took to the field against Roscommon last Saturday week, 12 of them also started last year’s 12 points championship defeat to Dublin, with two of the three changes enforced due to injuries to Paddy Durcan and Diarmuid O’Connor.

In that duo’s absence Donnacha McHugh and Darren McHale have had positive impacts and the favouring of Cillian O’Connor over Tommy Conroy has restored some bite to an attack that has racked up some decent scores of late but is there enough to suspect that Mayo will, as Ivan Neill wrote, surprise even their own fans? We live in hope.