Mayo are travelling the Waterloo Road

Hands up, I got it completely wrong, utterly and totally. Looking back on my notes early June, I had Tyrone, Armagh, Donegal and Galway to triumph against Mayo, Louth, Cork and Westmeath respectively. Next round I put the metaphorical money on Armagh, Meath, Donegal and Monaghan. One out of four correct was an improvement. Some championship, some results, major shocks.

It resembles more a game of snakes and ladders than football. Donegal literally hosed Kerry three times this season, twice in the league and once in the championship, leaving them hot favourites for Sam. Big Jim McGuinness had the hex on the Kingdom, Murphy was flattening Kerry lads like tenpin bowling. And yet Donegal didn’t make the last eight of this year’s championship. Dublin put them to the sword but only after Dublin themselves had hammered Louth in Leinster and then had the form book ripped asunder by Louth comfortably beating them in the qualifiers. And they could face them a third time yet! Is that cutthroat championship football?

Armagh deposed of Down, shock conquerors of Donegal in Ulster, the latter result causing us back then to wonder was it a case of McGuinness being clever and looking beyond the Ulster bearpit, charting an alternative route towards the All-Ireland. Then in the space of one week, Armagh, newly minted Ulster champions, firstly lost with a last second goal to Louth and then went down to Kerry to be sent home, they too not even making the quarter-finals. Like a pile of ashes with smoke spewing in the air, two of the three hot favourites for Sam Maguire hadn’t even made the last eight.

McGuiness blamed a heavy schedule, stating he hadn’t time to train his team during this year’s championship. Really Jim? The stats show Donegal played and lost to Down at home on April 26. Their next match was almost four weeks later against Kerry with a three week gap until Cork came to Ballybofey and shocked them. Yes, they were out a week later against Dublin but losing three times in the championship meant they weren’t good enough and blaming a loaded schedule didn’t add up. And yet, Donegal walloped Kerry in Kerry, Westmeath won a second ever Leinster Championship, defeating the great Dubs, Roscommon trounced Mayo and Galway on the way to a Connacht title. Armagh added a first Ulster title in sixteen years to go with their All-Ireland of two seasons ago, but only one provincial winner made the quarter-finals of the championship proper. Throw in favourites and league champions Donegal and that’s a cul-de-sac to drive into. A dead end. Terminal for the red hot favourites.

Continuing the snakes and ladders theme, we saw Roscommon wipe Mayo, Tyrone knockout Roscommon and slip past Mayo, but Mayo then escape through the net by beating Meath who imploded this year. Kerry hammered Cork in the Munster final, Donegal came to Kerry and scotched the Kingdom, Cork then went north and fatally wounded Donegal. Nothing made sense but madness. A single costly last minute slip, a ball through the keeper’s hands, sent Armagh to Kerry and Louth onwards to Croke Park. Tyrone had a fortunate win over Mayo, unfortunately for them the reward was a match against Kerry whilst Mayo avoided that straw.

Which brings us to Lady Luck. Napoleon and his sparring partner the Duke of Wellington shared a belief in luck. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, an alliance of British and German (Prussian) troops under Wellington fought the French under Napoleon. The French emperor stated during his long career that ‘I’d rather have a lucky general than a smart general. They win battles.’ Arthur Wellesley, aka as The Iron Duke, called the epic Waterloo battle as ‘a damned close thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ The statistics of the battle bear Wellington out. His side lost 24,000 men. Napoleon the same. The winners? Believe it not, the banks who rolled the war, mainly the Rothschild family whose fortune grew from their investment in Wellington’s exploits. A hundred years later, the British teamed up with France but this time the Prussian/Germans were the ‘enemy’. Working class men die, opponents and enemies change and banks get rich.

What has that history lesson to do with this year’s championship? Andy and Mayo maybe? Is Andy a lucky general and are Mayo going to win their first personal Waterloo since 1951? Make no mistake, the three other counties left, Kerry, Dublin and Louth, are in this for one thing only. A win. Andy started with a flourish, typical Mayo league performance, football for fun, unstructured but pleasing. Andy also started with the goodwill of the supporters, county board, media and the county panel rooting for him. Standing counts against Donegal and Kerry in the league gave the county a dose of reality. A non-existent (to me at least) defensive structure raised alarm. A serious looking Andy reminded the media that he was on a three-year project, the future.

We like that in Mayo, ‘the future’ , a place of comfort and ease, cloudy and misty, a post-dated cheque we can never cash. In Kerry, Peter Keane found that ‘the future’ revolved around how Kerry fared in that year’s championship, not uneaten cake down the line. Expectation dear chap. Our sobering battering against Roscommon brought up the building for the future once more. But Andy got lucky. Napoleon would have approved. Facing a Monaghan team straight from an attritional battle with Ulster champions Armagh, Mayo did well by shading a home side at variance with Monaghan’s dismal league form. No wins at all for the Farney Army in the league but a streak of defiance come the championship.

A trip to Omagh looked foreboding even though Mayo, apart from 2021, have a good record against Tyrone. They aren’t a team I fear. And in fairness we looked to have shaded the match coming down the home straight until the management made a change that hadn’t the desired effect. I don’t blame Aidan O’Shea. He answered a call from the management team when it was speed we needed. As luck would have it, Tyrone the winners were ultimately the losers. They had an extra week’s rest but came out the Kerry side of the draw while we got a softer side, Meath. Once more Napoleon would have approved. Our general’s luck held and in fairness the team, especially up front, found a fine vein of form.

Having started the season with the recalling of the old brigade and a continued reliance on O’Shea, the omens weren’t great. Strip out Kobe, Livingstone and Darragh Beirne and realistically, where would we be? Again the lucky general theme played its hand as Meath lost Ronan Jones to a soft red card, thus enabling Mayo to stretch the Royals and book their place in the quarter-finals that didn’t contain the champions of Ulster, Leinster or Connacht champions and yet Mayo slipped in there comfortably enough. Almost unnoticed.

What next? Let’s be honest here, I don’t care how much Louth have improved, they were dire against Dublin in Leinster, recovered their mojo against them in the qualifiers but Dublin had major managerial issues that day. Gallant but extremely lucky in putting Armagh to the sword, nothing less than a comfortable Mayo win has to be the outcome in the semi-final. Teams like Louth have scaled a peak, like Tipperary did twice before we put them out in the semi-finals of 2016 and 2020. A semi-final for some teams can be a dizzying experience but for us in Mayo it’s morphed into a norm. Since 2011 this will be our tenth, not counting two replays. We have the experience. Louth don’t.

This is where it gets tricky. Will we hold the lucky general Napoleon line and its inevitable outcome or will we become the Iron Duke, winner takes all? Make no mistake, Kerry will see Sam Maguire as almost in their grasp assuming they take Dublin out. The Dubs will see Sam this year as an unexpected welcome from what was looking like a Kilkenny hurling fall from grace. Dublin also know that its medalled midfielder Howard and forward six of Scully, Kilkenny, Costello, Con, Small and Basqulle, all 36 or however many Celtic Crosses they have, offer no guarantees for next season. Louth, meanwhile, will see this as a crack in a door to an exclusive club. They will see us as not an impossible barrier; indeed if not this year, then when?

Louth’s past is sepia tinted and includes a narrow two points loss to us in the 1950 All-Ireland Final. Speaking to the late great Mick Mulderrig about that match years ago, he was almost the Duke of Wellington in his summation: a lucky goal for us and a damn close call was how he saw it. In 1957, two ex-Mayo players, poorly treated by their own county, won improbable All-Ireland medals with Louth. Both serving Gardaí in the Wee County, Seamus O’Donnell and Dan O’Neill added Celtic Crosses to their National League winning medals of 1954 with Mayo. I am open to correction here but are they the last two Mayo-born men to win senior All-Irelands since our own county in 1951? Perhaps Jimmy Duggan with Galway in 1966 qualifies? Either way it has been too damn long. We aren’t interested in projects or building at this stage. We are hungry for the win. Wellington or Napoleon?