Mayo bid for first back-to-back in 17 years
Dara Neary of Mayo shoots for the posts during last year's Connacht U20 football final against Roscommon. Neary is one of a large number of players on both sides who are in contention to make appearances in consecutive U20 finals. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie
I’ve always felt it something of a faux pas in GAA journalism where too often an underage team is referred to as the defending champion when in all reality the team might contain none – or very few at least – of the players who had helped win whatever it was their club or county had won the year before. But where the bandwidth of the minor grade for example is much tighter, there is greater scope for players to feature in consecutive years at U20 level and so it’s possible that never before has there been back-to-back Connacht finals at this grade containing so many of the same players as when Mayo and Roscommon take to the field in Tuam Stadium on Wednesday evening.
Mayo ended a seven year wait to become provincial U20 champions when they beat Roscommon by three points, 2-17 to 4-08, this time 12 months ago. Remarkably, there’s the potential for 17 players who featured in that game to also have an involvement in the 2026 final also – and it would be more but for long term injuries to Mayo defenders Eoin McGreal and Daithí Butler, or had Kobe McDonald not opted out of last year’s panel.
McGreal started the 2025 Connacht U20 final at corner-back and so good was he throughout last season that Andy Moran selected McGreal for the very first round of this season’s National Football League, a senior debut against Galway in Pearse Stadium that was cut short after only 17 minutes with an injury that the Garrymore clubman has yet to recover from.
Five more of Mayo’s U20 starters from last year, goalkeeper Conor Meaney, defenders Rio Mortimer and Colm Lynch, who is also the captain, and attackers Darragh Beirne and Tom Lydon, remain integral members of the team while Yousif Coghill and Dara Neary, who both featured off the bench against the Rossies last year, have each appeared off the bench in three of Mayo’s four championship games to date this season too.
And yet Roscommon are even more reliant on players with experience of their 2025 campaign; ten involved in last week’s Connacht semi-final victory over Galway were also on the pitch for last year’s final against Mayo, eight of them from the start. Four of the survivors are in the back seven, including Keelan Kelly, Conor Grogan, Eoghan Carthy and goalkeeper Patrick Gaynor, who remains a Leaving Certificate student at St Nathy’s College. Niall Heneghan, the spectacular high-fielding midfielder, and forwards Eoin Collins, John McGuinness and John Curran are also nailed on to have started both finals while used substitutes last year Cathal McKeon and Rúairí Kilcline, both also featured last week against Galway, McKeon from the start, Kilcline again off the bench.
Not since the days that the age limit of this competition was U21 have Mayo managed to win back-to-back Connacht titles, last doing so as part of a four in-a-row from 2006 to ’09 – the ’06 team captained by current U20 boss Keith Higgins and the ’09 team containing his selector Kevin McLoughlin and current senior players Rob Hennelly and Aidan O’Shea.
It was a dominance that translated to an incredibly good decade at senior level for Mayo too, from 2011 onward – which might give Galway some food for thought given this will be their sixth successive year to go without winning the Connacht U20 championship.
The Tribesmen missed out on a place in the final as a result of last Wednesday’s 2-10 to 0-15 loss to Roscommon at Hastings Insurance MacHale Park, despite having beaten the same opposition by five points in the opening round of this year’s championship. In fact, Roscommon have qualified for Wednesday’s final despite losing two of their first three group games, the other defeat coming against Mayo.
That was an evening where Mayo made a mockery of the old adage that possession is nine tenths of the law. The statistics showed that of the game’s first 24 kickouts, Mayo lost 20 of them. 20! And yet they were at that stage only one point in arrears. Five minutes later Mayo were seven points in front, and eight ahead with as many minutes left to play. By full-time Mayo had scored four points more when playing against the wind in the second-half than they had with it in the first.
Keith Higgins’ team is about as settled as it could be with the only change in starting personnel across the last three games being when Darragh Staunton replaced Shane Cunningham at midfield for the 14 points win away to Leitrim and retained his place for the 10 points win against Galway a week later. Staunton’s callup, and Joey Holmes’ switch from full-forward to the No.9 jersey, was a response to Mayo’s difficulties at midfield, but such is their strength in other departments that after the round-robin series, the Green and Red had scored 21 points more than Roscommon, 26 points more than Galway, and had conceded less than both too.
The danger is that those stats cause an overconfidence in Mayo’s youngsters who will also be aware of how much easier they found beating Galway than Roscommon who across their two matches against the Tribesmen still had a minus 4 scoring difference. The Saffron and Blue also laboured to a 3-6 to 2-7 win at home against Leitrim.
One man who will fancy a crack at Mayo on Wednesday is Dean Casey. The Ballinameen man, along with Patrick Gaynor, was a star of the St Nathy’s side that reached this season’s All-Ireland Post Primary senior ‘B’ championship final and in the group game against Mayo, he came off the bench and struck a goal and two points and has retained his place among the forwards since.
Intriguingly, the line in Roscommon’s team that looks to have the least experience is the full-back trio of Diarmuid O’Higgins, Nikita Birzins and Michael Gillooley, none of whom played any part in last year’s Connacht final, but who will go up against undoubtedly Mayo’s strongest line and potentially, the best full-forward line in the entire All-Ireland U20 championship.
Kobe McDonald and Darragh Beirne may be the headline grabbers as integral members of Andy Moran’s senior panel but it’s worth remembering that Tom Lydon scored 2-35 in six games in this competition last year.
In their four games to date, the threesome have scored 57 points (4-45), which is only 15 points less than Roscommon’s total group stage score. Then factor in Dylan Flynn’s goals in his last two games and Oisin Deane’s brace in the original victory over Ros’, and the threat carried up top by Mayo is clear and obvious.
But so too have the Shannonsiders an ability to hit where it hurts. John McGuinness, a goal-scorer against Galway last week, scored two against Mayo in last year’s final, while John Curran in particular gave the Mayo full-back line plenty bother when they met on April 1st. Should Niall Heneghan, Cathal McKeon and Eoghan Carthy, the captain, gain a foothold around the middle so firm as when Roscommon won 20 of those 24 kickouts, it’s possible Cian Smith’s team might since have gained the knowledge of how to make that platform work better in their favour.
But whether or not you call it a title defence, it’s hard to look past Mayo going back-to-back.
