Mayo are a team beyond rational explanation

Jekyll and Hyde they may be, but Mayo have somehow managed to make it through to the last eight in the All-Ireland series for the first time in three summers, and we can only hope they will bring the best version of their capricious selves to Croke Park next weekend.

At the start of the year, most people agreed that an All-Ireland quarter-final berth would have represented progress for Mayo under new manager Andy Moran, and on the face of it that’s the inevitable conclusion to be reached. Mayo are back in Croke Park and face a negotiable path to a first semi-final since 2021. And yet there are so many questions that remain unanswered about a team that can quite literally oscillate between the ridiculous and the sublime within a matter of minutes. They are simply perplexing to the point where every Mayo game now seems to involve a rollercoaster of emotions that leave supporters utterly drained when the hooter sounds.

Last Saturday evening’s winner-takes-all clash against Meath at MacHale Park in Castlebar was a microcosm of the mystery that is Mayo under Andy Moran as they showed the very worst and then the very best in a game that was greatly influenced – though not decided – by the home side’s numerical advantage in the final quarter. There is no doubt that the early departure of Meath substitute Ronan Jones benefitted Mayo, but Meath were already on the ropes at that stage, their seven-point interval lead whittled down to four, and there is every chance Mayo would have still triumphed had Jones remained on the field.

Mayo are irresistible when they get on a roll and it was hard to square the majestic sight of Moran’s men in full flight in that final quarter with the ragged band who took the field an hour earlier. For the first 25 minutes, Mayo looked like the team that had endured a cross-country coach ride to get to the venue as the Meath forwards embarked on one mesmerising move after another in front of a stunned home support.

In fact, it could be said that Mayo picked up where they had left off against Roscommon at the same venue two months earlier when they were utterly overwhelmed in a dismal second-half showing. Last Saturday, it looked as if it would be a very long evening – and an even longer summer, autumn and winter of discontent – when Sean Coffey got on the end of a brilliant team move to score Meath’s second goal in the 25th minute, which put the Royals into a barely believable 10-point lead.

Ciaran Caulfield's earlier goal reminded this writer of a famous Meath goal from many moons ago, scored by Kevin Foley in that epic three-game series against Dublin in the summer of 1991. Like Caulfield, Foley walked the ball into the net after a series of defence-splitting passes, but in fairness to Dublin, that goal was scored when their defenders were out on their feet after a breathless game.

Mayo had no such excuses and the ease with which Meath scored that goal raises many questions about a defence that is now routinely conceding a couple of goals per game. To be honest, this writer can hardly recall a more dismal 25 minutes of football from Mayo in recent years. Meath were first to every breaking ball and seemed to be able to effortlessly breach the Mayo rearguard, brushing aside opponents as if they weren’t there.

The truth is that Mayo couldn’t lay a glove on Meath in those opening exchanges and the visitors were more than worth their ten-point lead. Mayo managed just two points in the opening quarter, and the only real resistance came from Kobe McDonald, who kicked two of Mayo’s paltry tally of three points in the first half hour, including a superb ‘45’ in the 23rd minute after his goal-bound effort was saved by Meath keeper Sean Brennan.

For this writer, a big turning point came in the 28th minute when the much-maligned Jack Coyne put his Meath opponent out over the end line on the MacHale Road side of the ground. He got a yellow card for his troubles, but Meath captain Eoghan Frayne dropped the resulting free into the hands of Mayo goalkeeper Jack Livingstone, and Mayo went up the field before eventually working the ball to Enda Hession who kicked the first of his two back-to-back points. Meath responded with another slick passing move that ended with a point from Ciaran Caulfield, but Mayo finished the half the stronger with scores from Jordan Flynn and Kobe McDonald, the latter scoring one of the points of the game after Conor Loftus had sent a tame effort across the face of the Meath goal.

Mayo outscored Meath by 0-4 to 0-1 in the seven minutes after Coyne’s cameo, and while the rash challenge might have been ill-advised, it certainly had the effect of telling the rest of the team that it was time to quit the nonsense and start getting stuck in. Having scored just three points in 30 minutes, Mayo managed four in the last five minutes to at least give themselves a fighting chance with the wind at their backs in the second-half.

It is easy to frame this encounter as a game of two halves with Mayo dominating the second 35 minutes in much the same way as Meath had done before the half-time break, but it is not as simple as that. Far from emerging from their dressing room with a flea in their ears after some home-truths from Andy Moran, the Mayo team were second best in most of the opening exchanges after half-time, conceding two points on the bounce while also kicking a couple of demoralising wides. It took Jordan Flynn to stop the rot in the 43rd minute with a magnificent two-pointer, followed a minute later by a point from substitute Bob Tuohy.

The margin was down to four points by the time Jones got his marching orders and Mayo pressed home their advantage with a couple of quick-fire scores, a two-pointer from Flynn and singles by Ryan O’Donoghue and Tommy Conroy before Jack Carney’s two-pointer put them ahead for the first time in the game in the 60th minute.

It is virtually impossible to hold out with 14 men in the modern game and Meath were run ragged in those final 15 minutes. They would certainly have put up a sterner resistance with the full complement, but Mayo had all the momentum by the mid-point of the half and were doing what they enjoy more than anything else – chasing down a lead. My hunch is they would have turned Meath over anyway, but the sending-off made it inevitable.

And so, here we are heading for Croke Park next weekend where Mayo must do something they haven’t been able to do so far this year: win back-to-back championship ties. Good luck to any opposition team that tries to analyse them because, like Donald Trump, they are beyond rational explanation. We have no idea what Mayo team will turn up in Croke Park next weekend – and I suspect Andy Moran doesn’t either. However, commonsense suggests that Mayo’s open-door policy in defence is going to prove fatal at some point in the coming weeks, even for a team that revels in Houdini acts.

Mayo will take confidence from last Saturday’s victory, and it certainly exorcises some of the demons from the Roscommon defeat, which at one stage threatened to define Moran’s first year in charge. Those memories will become very distant indeed if Mayo manage to navigate their way into an All-Ireland semi-final, which would be a massive achievement in the context of where this team was after that Connacht semi-final humiliation at the hands of the noisy neighbours, who have since been rendered very quiet indeed.

There haven’t been too many championship trips to Croke Park for Mayo supporters since the start of this decade, with the 2020 and 2021 competitions impacted by Covid restrictions before we played Kildare (qualifier) and Kerry (quarter-final) at headquarters in 2022 followed by Dublin at the quarter-final stage in 2023. We’ll travel more in hope than expectation, but it will be wonderful to see the truly unique talent that is Kobe McDonald get the opportunity to display his remarkable array of skills on a pitch that has surely been part of his dreams since childhood. We are blessed to have him – if only for this year – and hopefully we can delay his departure for Australia that little bit longer by extending our championship season into July for the first time in five years.