Wherever you look, little is certain

As we stand, Mayo football is a deck in mid-shuffle. Club and county alike are in motion, the order not yet set, every card still in play.

For a start, Andy Moran has just been handed the biggest job in the county and nobody can say yet whether he’ll deal aces or twos. And meanwhile, out in the club scene, the first round of championship games only deepened the mystery surrounding Mayo GAA at the moment - favourites tripped over themselves, outsiders made a dash for the front, and the whole thing looked less like a form guide and more like a card table where nobody is exactly sure what game they're playing.

Mayo has always been more comfortable in that space between order and uproar. When things run too smoothly, everything feels uneasy. The county's finest days have rarely been the product of a neat blueprint - more often than not, they’ve erupted out of nowhere, the kind of surges that defy explanation but make perfect sense in the moment.

That unpredictability has, of course, a charm of its own. It keeps people coming back for more. But there’s a flipside. Living permanently on the edge means you’re just as likely to fall off it. For all the romance of the unexpected, there are days when Mayo football could do with a little less drama and a little more certainty. Even the most loyal supporters, for all their love of the rollercoaster, occasionally wish for a stretch of level track, just a few quiet Sundays where the heart rate is allowed to stay in double figures. Right now, though, certainty is in short supply. Which, depending on how you see the world, is either the problem or the whole point of it all.

And so we come to Round 2 of the club championship, the weekend when the shuffle starts to slow and the river cards are laid down. Three fixtures in particular could decide whether this championship begins to become a procession or a free-for-all right up to the final in MacHale Park later in the autumn.

Reigning champions Ballina Stephenites, the one side that looked like themselves in Round 1, meet neighbours Crossmolina Deel Rovers in a throwback to some of the great games from the early to mid-noughties. This will be more than a local skirmish; it will be a test of whether the champions are genuinely a step ahead, or were just the only team to catch the right breeze last time out.

Breaffy, meanwhile, face Castlebar Mitchels in the kind of match that can tilt an entire group. Breaffy’s ceiling is as high as anyone’s after an impressive league final win, but so is their capacity for sabotage against themselves. Castlebar, for their part, have the nous to turn a slow start into a glorious season and will see this as the day to do it. It’s the fixture equivalent of a locked room with two sticks of dynamite and only one match.

And then Westport against Knockmore is a clash of recent champions which will always be a head-turner for the neutral. Both tasted glory not long ago, both could argue their form is coming, and both know that another slip now would leave them chasing shadows for the rest of the group stage. By Sunday night, we’ll know whether the Round 1 shocks were the start of a pattern or just early cobwebs that needed to be blown out. Either way, the shape of the deck will be that little bit clearer.

All the while, Andy Moran is assuming the position of Mayo senior football manager. His appointment isn’t a headline that will fade after a month - it will instead be a quiet note humming under this whole season and through the winter months. Nobody yet knows what his Mayo will look like. Will it be an echo of the player - hard-running, relentless, built on spirit as much as system - or something altogether different?

The Ballaghaderreen man hasn’t exactly drifted into the role. Since hanging up the boots, he’s packed a managerial career into only a handful of years from Ballaghaderreen to Leitrim to a coaching stint with Monaghan just last season. Before that came a stint with the Mayo under-20s under Mike Solan, a team sprinkled with the very players now dotted throughout the senior team dressing room, alongside some he soldiered with in his own playing days. It means he takes over knowing the faces and the rhythms of Mayo football better than most. And yet, for all that familiarity, the path ahead is still a fogged-up windscreen.

But history suggests that uncertainty isn’t always the enemy here. Some of Mayo’s most dependable county servants emerged from open seasons where nothing seemed certain, the kind of summers when a young lad turns up for a club game, takes his marker for a spin and suddenly finds himself on a panel by Christmas. Unpredictability, if you catch it right, can be a talent factory.

So, right now, the uncertainty suits Moran. He can watch the club championship play out, see which players rise when the ground starts shifting under them and begin carefully plotting plans for a league campaign that means everything and nothing. And for the rest of us, there’s a neat symmetry to it all: the county’s future and the county’s flagship competition both in that same half-light, full of promise but still out of focus.

By the time spring comes, the shuffle will be over. The cards will be down, the winners known and the stories told. But right now, the deck is still moving, and that’s where the real intrigue lies. Andy Moran’s Mayo is still a hand unseen. The club championship is still a game without a scoreboard.

And in this county, that halfway place between certainty and chaos is where the heart always seems to beat loudest.