Reasons for Mayo to take heart from Armagh’s success

The excitement and colour of Armagh’s first victory in 22 years saved the 2024 All-Ireland Football Final from itself.

The widespread consensus in the build-up to this novel decider was that Galway would win because they had the better forwards. Unfortunately, the modern game doesn’t put much value on attacking, creative forwards who have so little room in which to work that sometimes they struggle to release a handpass let alone get off a decent kick at the posts.

No team is better at the defensive shield than Armagh who in successive games have suffocated the lives out of some of the best forwards in the modern game: David Clifford, Paul Geaney, Shane Walsh and Damien Comer. It’s not pleasant to watch but it’s very effective and Armagh won’t care what the purists think: they are All-Ireland champions for only the second time in their history.

It's a remarkable achievement and the team epitomised everything that was great about their manager Kieran McGeeney in his own playing days – steely resolve, endless reserves of energy and immense heart. Their never-say-die attitude was needed on more than one occasion over the past few years as they dealt with one heartbreak after another – both on and off the field – before eventually landing the biggest prize of all.

Armagh may look like a fairly young team but they have been a long time knocking on the door. Five years ago, they came to MacHale Park for an All-Ireland qualifier against Mayo and played some great football before eventually losing by a single point in a game that could – and possibly should – have gone to extra-time. Armagh used 18 players that day and 11 of them either started or came off the bench in last Sunday’s All-Ireland Final with another two featuring as unused substitutes.

Interestingly, just two members of Mayo’s starting 15 – Aidan O’Shea and Conor Loftus – featured in this year’s championship, along with three substitutes from that day (Cillian O’Connor, Stephen Coen and Fergal Boland). The entire Mayo defence – with the exception of the injured Paddy Durcan – are now retired.

In summary, Armagh have 13 survivors from that day; Mayo have just five. Those statistics speak loudly to the journey both teams have been on during the past half-decade. Mayo have been a team in transition as the great players of the 2010s reached the end of the line; Armagh have been the team on an upward trajectory, gaining valuable (and sometimes bitter) experience year after year. All those learnings came to the fore in last Sunday’s tense, cagey affair as they gradually smothered the life out of Galway’s challenge, albeit a fairly anemic one.

The two sets of players were always going to struggle to match the peerless excellence of their hurling counterparts from a week earlier but a few statistical comparisons illustrate the stark differences between the state of both games at the end of the 2024 championships. Clare and Cork both scored more (1-12 apiece) in the first-half of hurling’s decider than either Armagh or Galway managed in the whole game; in fact, the two hurling teams had each scored more by the 18th minute than the football teams managed in the first-half.

There is no escaping the fact that Gaelic football is a hard watch these days. That’s not to take anything away from Armagh’s magnificent victory but it was pretty depressing to watch a team like Galway – traditionally known for their vibrant, attractive style of football – stringing together endless, meaningless handpasses as they tried in vain to breach the Armagh rearguard. For much of the first-half, the most interesting feature was the fate of the injured seagull who wisely sought refuge in the Galway half of the field, having concluded that even he couldn’t get beyond the Orange wall.

Like Mayo in 2021, Galway will have a lot of regrets about this final and, in particular, the many chances they missed in the second-half. The loss of Robert Finnerty early in the first-half was a huge blow and it was sad to see as the Finnerty family are great GAA people here in Mayo. He has been Galway’s top scorer this year and he also has done a lot of unheralded work, linking up play and creating space for the likes of Dylan McHugh to get into scoring positions.

The early departure of Finnerty was compounded by the indifferent form of both Comer and Walsh who struggled to get on the ball, even when Galway turned over Armagh early in the second-half. Comer didn’t look fully fit while Walsh had the appearance of a man who played the occasion rather than the game. Perhaps he too was injured, but if he was then he should have left some of the free-taking duties to goalkeeper Conor Gleeson who can certainly kick them from distance, as we in Mayo know only too well.

In the final against Kerry in 2022, Walsh played brilliantly and Galway went down in a blaze of glory. This time around it was very different and that’s what will make the defeat so much harder to take. It’s not often a team doesn’t have to meet either Kerry or Dublin in the final; in fact, last Sunday was only the fifth time it has happened in the past 25 years. Pádraic Joyce will know that Galway will be extremely fortunate to get a similar chance in the next few years to bring Sam across the Shannon, but equally he will know too that Galway did not deserve to bring this game to extra-time, let alone win it. Even in this ultra-defensive era, the Tribesmen were going to struggle to win an All-Ireland Final with their entire full-forward line malfunctioning and that’s exactly what happened. It will be a long winter of soul-searching for guys like Walsh and Comer.

Mayo’s senior footballers will surely take heart from Armagh’s success, not least because it was achieved against the backdrop of a series of near-misses in recent championships. At the start of the year, this writer was of the opinion that Mayo were not among the leading contenders for Sam, but it is obvious that standards have fallen from where they were a decade ago when Dublin were at the peak of their considerable powers and only Mayo could offer them a serious challenge.

There are now over a half-dozen teams who can seriously consider a tilt at All-Ireland honours in 2025 – Kerry and Dublin will be there as usual, Galway and Mayo are the leading Connacht contenders while Ulster has a host of pretenders to Armagh’s throne, including Donegal, Derry and Tyrone. There is every chance that last Sunday’s victory could usher in a new period of Ulster dominance, especially as their underage teams are comfortably winning All-Ireland championships too. Ulster’s clean sweep of national honours in 2024 is unprecedented and we don’t need reminding of that in Mayo, having recently witnessed the gulf in class between our minors and Armagh in the All-Ireland semi-final. However, minor football tends to be an unreliable barometer of a county’s senior prospects. Just ask Kerry who won five All-Ireland titles in a row between 2014 and 2018 but have managed just one senior title (2022) since then.

From a Mayo perspective, one of the more concerning aspects of 2024 was that our best player Aidan O’Shea will turn 35 next year. Galway’s Paul Conroy, who is nailed on for an All-Star, has shown that age is no barrier to intercounty success but O’Shea cannot be expected to carry the team in 2025 like he did in the past six months. New leaders need to step up at the critical moments in games if Mayo are to have any prospect of challenging for All-Ireland honours.

Revised rules will come into force for next year’s football season and they could have a significant bearing on the outcome of the senior championship, especially if they put the balance of power back in the hands of the forwards. The overhaul of the game cannot come quickly enough. A century ago, the two aristocrats of the game, Kerry and Dublin, contested an All-Ireland final that ended in a 0-4 to 0-3 victory for the Munster men. If football continues on its current trajectory, we could soon be back to scorelines like that, and a century of developing an exciting, entertaining, skills-based game will have been lost, possibly forever.