Kerry defeat exposed our lack of depth and settled team

The most surprising statistic to emerge from Tralee was not Kerry’s 16-point winning margin, nor was it Mayo’s atrocious scoring rate that saw them convert just once from play in a 46-minute period either side of half-time. No, the most remarkable aspect of last Saturday night’s mauling in the Kingdom was that the All-Ireland champions were without four of their eight players who won All-Stars in 2025.

Goalkeeper Shane Ryan, half-backs Gavin White and Brían Ó Beaglaoich and half-forward Paudie Clifford were all absent, as was Paul Geaney, who was named on the AIB Club All-Ireland Team of the Year the previous evening for leading An Daingean to a first senior championship in January. That’s some array of talent to have waiting in the wings and it shows the strength of this Kerry group who have used the National League to blood several new players – Armin Heinrich, Keith Evans, Tomás Kennedy and Cillian Trant spring to mind – while managing to stay within touching distance of the top of the table.

The gulf in class between the sides could hardly have been more pronounced. Yes, there are aberrations in the National League, and it is unwise to read too much into the form of any team, but Kerry now looks further ahead of Mayo than at any point since 2011.

Kerry looked and played like a team at the peak of its powers. Much is made of the eye-catching attacking flair of David Clifford at full-forward and Sean O’Shea at centre-forward, but everything Kerry do is rooted in a defensive spine that is as flinty as the Blaskets – Foley at full-back, Morley at centre-back, and O’Connor at midfield. They are a formidable trio who are as good in their respective positions as anybody else in the country right now. And they hadn’t a bad supporting cast last Saturday night in Paul Murphy, Dylan Casey, Tom O’Sullivan, Armin Heinrich and Sean O’Brien.

Kerry are in one of those golden periods in their rich footballing history and it is surely no coincidence that they laid claim to a historic treble of All-Ireland club titles just over a month ago. Yet it is not even 12 months ago that the obituaries were being written for this group after a defeat to Meath in the All-Ireland round robin series. Indeed, until that remarkable second-half blitz against Armagh in the All-Ireland quarter-final, this group of Kerry players looked as ordinary as any the Kingdom has produced. In that sense, there is some truth in what Andy Moran said after watching his Mayo side suffer its worst ever defeat in the National League – we’re neither as good nor as a bad as any individual result.

For Moran and his selector Colm Boyle, Tralee must have been a tough night. They are among a rarefied group of Mayo players who have managed to defeat Kerry in championship football, so this sort of humiliation in the home of the All-Ireland champions won’t have been easy to take, not least because of the dismal display of their own charges. Kerry were outstanding – as exemplified by Clifford’s mesmerising scores and O’Shea’s brilliantly improvised two-pointer – but Mayo were as bad as we have seen in quite some time. Fourteen wides – many of them from scorable positions – was just one of the many grim statistics that Moran and Boyle had to take back up the N17 on a wintry Saturday night in spring. The most damning indictment of all was that a Mayo forward didn’t score from play between the 17th and 63rd minutes, an extraordinary statistic that reflects Kerry’s dominance but also Mayo’s wastefulness. Indeed, the only Mayo score from play in this period came from Sam Callinan in the 34th minute and that came about after Kerry carelessly turned over the ball.

Yet for all the negativity that will inevitably accompany this defeat, Mayo still find themselves in the hunt for a place in the National League Final ahead of the last round of games next Sunday. If the objective for Andy Moran at the start of this campaign was to avoid relegation, then he has done that with two games to spare, and that would have been an acceptable outcome for most supporters at the start of the year.

The problem, however, is that Mayo don’t seem to have either a settled team or sufficient depth in their panel. Several teams – either by accident or design – have used the National League to give a runout to their reserve goalkeepers but Mayo has given Jack Livingstone one game (the FBD Final) out of eight so far. That seems like a missed opportunity, although to be fair to Moran, it is understandable that he would want to utilise the more experienced Robbie Hennelly in the early games when relegation was a real and present danger. Perhaps we will see Livingstone against Roscommon next Sunday. He could do with some more big game experience if he is required later in the summer.

The most troubling aspect for Mayo at the end of another National League campaign is that the key positions in the team are as undecided as they were last January. Despite being the county’s most natural full-back, David McBrien remains at midfield while the centre-back role was given to Diarmuid O’Connor on Saturday night, but it is hard to see him occupying that position come championship.

Bob Tuohy has had a promising league campaign at midfield, and the return of Mattie Ruane should help in this area too, but there is still a suspicion that Mayo lacks the sort of dominant, high-fielding midfielders that are back in vogue because of the new rules. As for the spine of our forward sextet, Ryan O’Donoghue and Aidan O’Shea seem the most likely combination, but the jury is out on whether either man is best suited to centre-forward and full-forward respectively.

The return of Cillian O’Connor has inevitably prompted comments from some quarters about the wisdom of giving game time to a player who is in the autumn of his career, but O’Connor is not even 34 years old, and if he can come on against Roscommon or Galway in the Connacht Championship and kick a decisive score then what more do we want? It will also benefit some of the younger players to learn from O’Connor who has been such an outstanding player for Mayo for the past 15 years and doesn’t get nearly as much credit as he deserves.

The emergence of young forwards like Darragh Beirne, Cian McHale and Kobe McDonald is very encouraging, but the lack of experienced scoring forwards for Mayo is perhaps best exemplified in the rush to get Fergal Boland back onto the football field after his exploits with Tooreen in the All-Ireland Intermediate Hurling Championship. Boland was playing FBD football for Mayo a week after losing an All-Ireland Final in extra-time, yet the footballers from St Brigid’s and An Daingean are only now seeing intercounty action, nearly two months after their All-Ireland Senior Final also went to extra-time. In the case of St Brigid’s, the players didn’t even return to training until a month after the final, so the haste with which Boland was brought back for Mayo seems surprising and, hopefully, it won’t prove unwise later in the year.

And what of the summer ahead?

Victories over Monaghan and Armagh on successive weekends, and the explosive arrival onto the senior intercounty scene of the precocious Kobe McDonald, had created some giddy expectation in Mayo that a tilt Sam Maguire might be on the cards in 2026. However, the All-Ireland champions provided a sobering reminder last Saturday night about what is required to get to their level, and it is virtually impossible to see that gap being bridged in a matter of months, whatever about a few years.

Consequently, the focus for the Mayo faithful needs to return to more parochial matters, namely the rather important issue of preventing Galway from completing their first five-in-a-row in Connacht since 1960. To do so, Mayo must first travel to London where presumably they will overcome the home side to set up a mouth-watering semi-final against Roscommon in MacHale Park. As a Ballaghaderreen man, Andy Moran knows only too well that defeat to the noisy neighbours is not something he can countenance but having been part of a Mayo team taken to extra-time by London in 2011, he won’t be getting ahead of himself either.

It will be interesting to see what the Mayo manager does for next Sunday’s league clash with Roscommon. Had the game against Kerry gone differently, Moran might have been inclined to field a more experimental Mayo team, but the manner of last weekend’s defeat means that these players need to get that awful performance out of their system as quickly as possible.

Roscommon, on a high after a fantastic win over Donegal in Dr Hyde Park, will present a formidable challenge and it will be interesting to see what reaction Moran gets from his players, who will surely know how much this fixture means to their manager. There’s been a lot of focus on management in Mayo over the past year or two but next Sunday is one of those occasions when the players – like Kerry against Armagh last summer – need to stand up, take responsibility and deliver a statement victory.