Recovery of Mayo football must be led by the clubs

The silence in the atmosphere after Mayo’s exit to Donegal in Dr Hyde Park reminded me of that horrible quiet after something dramatic or catastrophic has occurred. The seriousness of the event, shrouded in silence. A time for contemplative reflection as your ears ring from the hum of the debris and dust. A time to look around, listen and tentatively reemerge into the daylight of reality.

Monday’s papers nowadays don’t need AI to write another Mayo mishap. Much of it is Groundhog Day stuff anyway, some of it self-inflicted and some of it written in the stars. A tentative peek to rouse our wake house of mourning started with the Eamonn Sweeney in the Irish Independent. I like Sweeney, he’s a guy we all hoped to be, get a column, write a nice colour piece and poke a few bears. Lately though he’s p***** me off a bit about Mayo.

After Roscommon had beaten us seven days after our 2023 league title win, he didn’t spare the rod on us. Almost poetically he penned, ‘Joe Biden, Enoch Burke, Panti Bliss, Sally Rooney, Mary Robinson, Louis Walsh, your boys took a hell of a beating. Can you hear me. Joe Biden? Robin Williams said that cocaine is God’s way of telling you’re making too much money. Roscommon are God’s way of telling Mayo they’re getting too cocky’. Some unpacking there lads if you’ve the time but you get the drift of where we sit on most sports reporters crosshairs if we are deemed to go beyond our station.

So, when we did what we did against Donegal in The Hyde last Sunday week, this was fertile ground for Eamonn. But some of his stuff was on the money. ‘A team which suffers so many narrow defeats must be responsible for their own misfortunes’. True sir. He threw another pearl of truth out too. ‘Yesterday Mayo gave one of the most gallant displays of the 2024 championship. The problem was that they were playing in the 2025 championship’. True, again. And that’s what you have to suck up when you take too many sucker punches.. the truth.

The Sunday Game had Dublin’s Ciaran Whelan and Westmeath’s Dessie Dolan reflecting their postmortem on us. Both killed us with kindness, hands wringing, eyes looking in your eye, sorry for your troubles like, tight lips of Whelan as he told us that although Mayo were out, they were far better than many still left in.

Somehow or other I hated the saccharine svelte shite. I preferred the MK1 Whelan of 2016/17 when he viewed us as Dublin’s biggest threat and parsed us differently. Nothing worse than sympathy dolloped on you; I preferred it when Ciaran and The Sunday Game was highlighting our close to the edge tackling and Keegan’s menace. Then we were the real deal, not like today, a once big name doing the chicken and chips circuit allowing wannabees have a cut at us on a sunny day and letting their followers say ‘Son, I recall down in yon Castlebar the day we slayed mighty Mayo… it was great!’ When Dessie Dolan grimaces feeling your pain and shaking his head, you’re goosed.

On the Monday evening I listened to Ah Ref. I hadn’t listened for a while. They are good but sometimes being good might not be good for my health if you get me. Anyway, I tuned in. It’s hard to describe the podcast and that’s what makes it great. This episode was rustled together like a quick sandwich for the bog, a bit of this, a bit of that but with a common theme – What was Sunday’s loss to Donegal all about? And brilliantly, the lads didn’t try and solve it, neither can any of us. Like they say, it’s good to talk. And in talking, the lads just eased us past Monday into Tuesday and another week.

Ah Ref caught the wave. Just chew the cud. John’s computer was on mute but turned out that was deliberate, he was sorting the dog out. Enda wanted Pillar Caffrey back to manage us, him being an All-Ireland winner and all that. That focused me: I screamed at the phone ‘It’s Pat Gilroy, Enda!’ Eventually the three lads found Gilroy. John wasn’t impressed and referencing Gilroy’s appearance on The Sunday Game some years ago where he came across as media unfriendly, poor old Pat was hastily dispatched. This is where we differed.

Can I commend a book to all Mayo followers called Dublin: The Chaos Years by Neil Cotter. If you read it, you’ll see Gilroy’s fingerprints all over everything Dublin achieved from the day he took over in 2009, his 2011 All-Ireland win and the clearing out the shithouse that Dublin football was until he took over. His influence lasts to this day. That we’d get a Gilroy would be a miracle.

Anyway, the Ah Ref lads brought me back to the ‘it’s only a game’ stuff. I’ve no doubt that both them and I and indeed others will stiffen up as the weeks go by. There’s a beloved word in government circles when they confront an issue that, ahem, might have diverse outcomes. They either employ a consultancy company or engage what’s called a scoping exercise. In other words, they look at a few reports, hold a finger in the air, see who might catch a flu or a fist and if the brass are kinda okay with it, it’s published and action of a sort can take place. Scoping is a précis of how shitty things really are. But it can be sanitised.

Yours might be different but my ‘scoping’ of our current status might throw up the following. We oscillate between a team that on a given day take out a current All-Ireland champion or contender, except on final day. Since 2020 we have beaten, in championship football, Dublin, Tyrone, Kerry and Galway, all on their own home ground. We have also lost to them in championship football in that same period. Looking back prior to 2020 at this stage is merely historical and useless. Technically, we are on equal par with them. The scoping exercise then shows up a glitch. We struggle against what could be described as non-elite type outfits. Inside a four week period in 2023. Dublin and Kerry cumulatively combined a plus 52 points winning margin over Louth in their two meetings. We beat them by a single point in that four week frame.

Why and how come? We slip in theory here. In moving away from the helter-skelter style football promulgated by us from 2011 to 2017, we shifted towards a needs must mirror the opposition mode. Against strong sides who feared our aggressive press and work-rate, we benefited by them still respecting our past. So we matched them and them us. Over time, our loss of the likes of the greats of 2011 to ’21 exposed us to a few bad beatings by Dublin and Kerry. However, they still feared what’s now termed our ‘chaos driven’ mode. Conversely, as exposed by Louth and Mickey Harte in 2023, our lack of cutting blades was exposed and ground us down. Harte didn’t fear us because unlike Dublin and Kerry, we simply didn’t have the forwards to shred his Louth.

Why? Theory again. Both Dublin and Kerry managers knew and trusted their natural forwards to be let off the leash against Louth, believing each attacker was superior to the Louth defender. They made hay because they were made to believe they should make hay. We, on the other hand, were locked into a one dimensional running recycling game that eschewed natural forwards. Harte knew that, set up accordingly and gained a foothold of respectability. As time moved on and as the game changed this season, we didn’t. No two-pointers, almost using the 40 yards exclusion line like a dog does an electric fence, a point where you don’t go for a point.

The facts are brutal. From a 2023 All-Ireland quarter-final, a 2024 preliminary quarter-final and a 2025 no show in the weighing room, it’s a downward trajectory. Worse, we looked sterile, tired, we awoke for part of a league match against Armagh and a full match against Tyrone but couldn’t combine them into a run. Honest hard toil against Donegal last time out was just that, a shift in sweat. And Donegal were no great shakes themselves either. Interesting enough was the ‘battle’ between the veterans, O’Shea and Murphy, we saw what both brought to the table. Donegal’s use of Murphy was masterful..

So, a change of manager? A change of players? A change on the executive side? A trip to Knock, more candles lit? We are in a snowdrift and it’s not high summer yet. Can we fashion a winning team out of the various disparate entities that contest Mayo’s high plains? No. But that’s my opinion. What has come into focus for me recently – and it was hidden in plain sight – is the massive gap between the club and the county board. It’s an area worth revisiting down the line but simply, the disconnect has left us where we are. The club should reflect the ground level, the lifeblood and flow of the game. I don’t see that. I see, from what’s reported, is a turning up, listening, not questioning or demanding and going home muttering.

Clubs are the key to the rebuild. Starting at the top, be that the team, management or board, is akin to rebuilding on sand. It won’t work. It’s time for each club to assess what it wants from Mayo football, what it wants from Mayo football for itself, its followers. Once that debate starts and filters into a coherent response and is articulated on, then a more robust Mayo emerge. Talking big names, coaching tickets or a slimmed down version of the current management is a waste. The one thing we cannot do is keep on doing what we have done so far. It hasn’t worked.

We have become flat and predictable. Talking about Mayo bringing chaos to the game is just that, talk. Chaos begets chaos. And describing the Mayo 2011-21 outfits only as orchestrators of chaos doesn’t do those teams justice. They played with a plan, an edge and a style. Okay, we lacked maybe one more sharpshooter that might have tilted the scales our way but we were heavyweights. The first thing we need to do now is acknowledge those days are gone. And charting the route back won’t be done in the back of an empty cigarette pack. It must be club led. Without a base, all you have is a soufflé.