Season of surprises opens up for Moran’s spirited crew

Sometimes you really should be careful about what you wish for.

In the wake of his side’s one point defeat away to Tyrone last Sunday week, Andy Moran didn’t disguise the disappointment he felt for his Mayo players.

“I thought they fought brilliantly but I think sometimes a team just needs a victory and today would really have pushed that team on a bit.” But pushed them to where?

Look at Tyrone now, their reward for beating Mayo is to now walk into Croke Park next Saturday and play the 4/7 favourites to win this year’s All-Ireland SFC. A couple of hours before them, Mayo will walk into Croke Park to play a Cork team who are 18/1 shots to lift Sam Maguire and who the bookmakers narrowly fancy Mayo to beat.

There’s truth in that old adage about being thankful for small mercies. Kerry can wait for some other day.

Or maybe there will be no other day. Perhaps next Saturday is far as we’ll get in 2026. But whatever the future brings, we’ll always have Meath and a quite memorable evening at a bouncing MacHale Park, which never would have happened had Mayo managed to get across the line in Omagh. Both the occasion and the manner in which the result was achieved might, just might, in time to come, be held up as the day everything began to change for Andy’s boys.

A bit like the day in 2011 when James Horan’s Mayo fell 1-4 to 0-1 behind to Cork in an All-Ireland quarter-final at Croke Park but held the defending All-Ireland champions to one point in the second-half to kickstart an incredible decade of high achievement in which Andy Moran was front and centre. He’s back to where it all began. The same opponent. The same stage of championship.

Laughed out of the room after a collapsing defeat at home to Roscommon, Mayo suddenly are the rebels with a cause.

In fact, they are the only one of the four teams who were beaten in Round 2B (think Donegal against Cork, Armagh against Louth, Westmeath against Galway) who managed to bounce back from both the disappointment and the energy exerted, to win last weekend and secure their place in the last eight. It hints strongly at a very united dressing room.

Readers will recall us highlighting here a couple of weeks back some of the second-half woes experienced by Mayo this season, beaten on the scoreboard after half-time by Galway, Donegal, Armagh and Kerry in the league, and by Roscommon and Monaghan in championship. Level at half-time in Tyrone, we lost that second-half too, by one point. Of course, not all of those games ended in defeat – on account of good first-half displays – but last Saturday against Meath was the first instance in all 12 of this season’s league and championship outings of the Green and Red actually winning having come from behind at half-time.

The deficit was as much as 10 points in the first-half. Against a side fresh from a victory in Derry. Against a side who won this year’s Division 2 title. Against a side who had beaten Kerry and Galway in last year’s championship.

Mayo took the lead for the first – and last – time when Jack Carney fired over a two pointer on the hour mark. It was a sign of courage by the Kilmeena man who had failed with two previous attempts and it has actually levelled him with Cork’s Steven Sherlock as the scorers of the most two-pointers (5) from open play in this year’s championship. (As a team only Monaghan have scored more than Mayo’s 24 two-pointers in this year’s championship.) Indeed it’s remarkable that Mayo managed to come from so far behind without the need to score a goal. But if there was a concern ahead of Saturday’s visit to headquarters it may well be that of the sixteen teams who have been competing for Sam Maguire this summer, including those who have already exited the race, only Kildare have scored fewer than Mayo’s three championship goals.

Part of the reason it hasn’t cost them fully yet is that Jack Livingstone has been so good at keeping them out at the other end. It’s barely a month since the 24-year-old from Breaffy made his senior championship debut and already after a string of excellent saves in games against Monaghan, Tyrone and Meath, he is surely in the conversation for All-Star goalkeeper.

It would have been a real sucker punch to Mayo and a potential fatal blow, having just drawn level at 0-18 to 2-12, had Ciaran Caufield blasted home his second goal – and a third for Meath – in the 59th minute on Saturday, but Livingstone flung himself right and managed to turn the ball past the post. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s the most significant scalp Mayo have had in MacHale Park since knocking Donegal out of the 2019 championship and if they can bottle the confidence derived from that and uncork it against Cork, their season might just have another couple of weeks to run yet.

I’ve no problem wishing for that.