My New Year wish is probably just wishful thinking

As abiding memories go, mine is probably not what you’d expect given the alternatives that Mayo’s 2023 senior football campaign offered.

As good as James Carr’s thunderous goal against Galway on the opening night of the National League was last January, it had a rival as the GAA’s Goal of the Season within a matter of weeks when Enda Hession sold Tyrone ‘keeper Niall Morgan the silkiest of dummies after his equally devastating defence-splitting give-and-go with Ryan O’Donoghue. Both goals were things of immense beauty.

Then there was the utter satisfaction of league and championship wins over All-Ireland champions Kerry (by a combined margin of twelve points) and of beating Galway in the National League final and again, thanks largely to a superlative David McBrien strike, in championship, to also knock the 2022 finalists out of the All-Ireland race. Sweet.

And another thing worth noting from last season, something that was perhaps overlooked amidst the disappointment of defeat, was that the first-half performance of O’Donoghue in the All-Ireland SFC quarter-final against Dublin, in my opinion, stands right up there as one of the best ever by a Mayo attacker in Croke Park.

Some of the lows, of course, were very low too, like being outscored by eleven points in the second-half of that clash with Dublin having trailed by only one at the break. Like posting your lowest championship score in living memory to lose at home to Roscommon. Like only managing to fall over the line by one point against a Louth team that would lose to Dublin and Kerry by a combined 49 points. And like losing a championship match that you had led by six points inside the final quarter, when even a draw would have been sufficient to guarantee safe passage through to the last eight. It was a quite remarkable collapse against Cork, one that saw Mayo fail to score for practically the final 20 minutes.

And it was that day which provided my abiding memory of the 2023 campaign, though not for the game itself or indeed the result, but for something that had occurred before ever the ball was thrown in at Limerick’s TUS Gaelic Grounds. And to be honest, my abiding memory could easily have been something that occurred after that game too, to which we’ll also get to. But for now we’ll stick with the beginning.

There was still over an hour to go before the start of the match against the Rebels when the Mayo team and management emerged from the City End tunnel and proceeded to walk along the sideline in front of the Mackey Stand towards where their dressing-room actually was, down at the Clare End. Why the team bus did not – or was unable to – drop the Mayo players at the opposite end of the stadium to begin with, I am unsure. It’s possible there was a very practical match-day operational sort of explanation. But it’s what followed which is something I have wrestled with ever since.

At an estimate, at least a couple of thousand Green and Red supporters were already in situ in the stand and for the length of time it took the Mayo squad and entourage to walk that entire length of the pitch, the majority of those supporters afforded the Mayo team a standing round of applause. I ask simply, is that the behaviour of any other county? And for what such adulation?

Before I go any further, nothing I have or might be about to express is, in any way, shape or form, a criticism of the players, only to question whether the adulation of supporters impacts or infects their psyche in some way. Because if the bar for having your fans provide an ovation such as happened in Limerick is to simply turn up, then is it any wonder we have for so long been chided for losing the run of ourselves in victory?

Mayo entered that game against Cork, as already referenced, having hung on for dear life at home to Louth, a county that for sixty-odd years on the pitch has, by and large, lived up to its ‘Wee County’ moniker but who came within one kick of achieving a result in Castlebar. And yet the Mayo players a fortnight later in Limerick arrived to the sort of welcome not much short of what a Kerry team might expect when returning to Tralee with Sam Maguire in tow. Okay, a slight exaggeration, but you get my drift.

A couple of hours later the Mayo players had blown a golden opportunity to advance directly to the next round of the championship as group winners and gain an easier quarter-final opponent, usurped by a Cork side that swung the game by nine points down the stretch but which has otherwise failed to make a serious dent on the championship in well over a decade. To have visited Kerry four weeks earlier and served the All-Ireland champions a right fine thumping and a first championship loss on home soil since 1995, only to surrender so meekly to a Rebel side that hasn’t set foot in Division 1 of the National Football League in seven years bordered on sinful.

And yet.

The game long over, by now I had filed my online report of the match and together with a few other journalists we departed the press box and headed for the ‘Mayo’ tunnel in search of an interview with Kevin McStay. Add on the time we waited for Kevin to first fulfil some other media duties and then the length of our own interview with the manager, the match was now finished by at least 40 minutes and yet several of the Mayo team – and I’m talking about those who played, not the extra panellists being put through a mini training session in front of the North Stand – were still on the pitch, standing for selfies, signing autographs, chatting with fans, chatting with family. That’s my other abiding memory.

I’m conscious about not sounding too Grinch-like after the season of goodwill we’ve just enjoyed but it annoyed me that day, to not see the anger, the frustration, the annoyance in the faces of players who to be blunt, just had their backsides handed to them by a rank average team who Clare had knocked out of the Munster SFC at the very first hurdle.

I get the great pride that people take in the ambassadorial style of a Mayo footballer, forever dutiful and courteous and generous with his time, never turning his back on a fan, but on a human level, after an occasion and outcome as at the Gaelic Grounds that Saturday in June, would you not expect that that same Mayo footballer who pours body and soul, sweat and blood, months and years of his life in pursuit of one elusive prize, might rather take a door off its hinge than take a pat on the back. Or at least seek the sanctuary of his dressing-room to vent his true feelings than to smile for the camera and for the hordes.

Or is it the rest of us who just take it far too serious?

I do wonder if on some level, when the going is at its toughest, like when Cork found a rhythm that day, or the wave of pressure that Dublin applied after half-time in the quarter-final and have done on so many other occasions, or like Kerry did to us in 2022 and Tyrone the year before, that all the adulation, adoration, idolisation, glorification – call it what you will – that is bestowed upon the Mayo players impacts negatively in a game scenario. Not for one moment am I suggesting that not with every fibre of their being do they not want to win, just that when the scorching heat of the battle comes upon them, has the almost unconditional love of supporters provided the players an inner security of knowing that come what may, they’ll be welcomed back into the bosom of their own like kings anyway; that Mayo supporters will never be like, as Páidi Ó Sé referred to Kerry supporters, “the roughest type of f***ing animals you could ever deal with.” 

And nor would we wish to be. But if I did have one New Year wish for Mayo football it might (apart from the obvious of All-Ireland Final Day on July 28) be that supporters would just cool the jets a little regards how support for the team is displayed. Turn up in bigger numbers than ever by all means, and roar yourself into a state of hoarseness during a game, but take a look at the two photographs included with this article and consider how our fans reacted to their team losing at home to Roscommon in last year’s championship and the scene in Killarney after Kerry fans had watched their team lose to Mayo.

It will be interesting to see if the pitch invasions that have become so commonplace at MacHale Park dissipate somewhat now that Mayo County Board is to charge under-16s for entry to National Football League games. It’s a tough decision but who knows, maybe some greater good will come of it.