It was inside the last two minutes against Sligo and now Mayo suddenly had a crisis. Or the makings of one, which in Mayo football generally amounts to the same thing. It had taken just 40 seconds for their situation to go from seven points up and cruising to three up and fretting. Back-to-back two-pointers had hauled Sligo to within a kick of a ball and Mayo desperately needed the next kickout.
Watch the tape back and it’s slightly comical to see how unequivocal their goalkeeper, Colm Reape, was about how they were going to secure it. He put the ball on the tee, took his few steps back and for the next five seconds, never once turned his gaze to the right side of the pitch.
Instead, he stared intently at the left sideline until he was happy his man was in place. Sure enough, when his launched ball fell from the sky, it was Aidan O’Shea who rose from behind Sligo’s Brian Cox to claim the mark. A monstrous, alpha fetch of the ball, ripping it out of Cox’s grasp with such force that they both landed horizontally.
The crowd in Castlebar rose as one to hail O’Shea as though he was freshly returned from a moon landing. It capped an afternoon where he scored 1-2 and laid on another half-dozen scores. Like always, he was immediately gang-rushed by an army of kids as soon as it was over.
Caveat, caveat, caveat. It was only Sligo. Sure isn’t that what he’s there for? It was a poxy Connacht quarter-final. Brian Cox is a hardy boyo but he’s no Brian Fenton. Anyone can be a hairy field hero in April – let’s see if big Aido has anything to offer on the fast grass in Croke Park come July.
All of it true, all of it fair.
But as he suits up for another Connacht final, Aidan O’Shea has played 200 games in league and championship for Mayo. He turns 35 next month and has logged more minutes in the galleys than anyone who has ever worn the green and red. He is, remarkably, as vital to them now as he ever was. And while that might not necessarily speak too well of the state Mayo are in, it says nothing bad about him.
“Since day one – and I mean since we were kids – Aidan has always been the biggest person in the dressing room,” says Rob Hennelly, his former Breaffy and Mayo teammate. “That’s not just physically. He has always carried the weight of that, in that he has always felt he had to do everything.”
Hennelly is one of O’Shea’s oldest and closest friends and would make no claims on impartiality. He was there from the start, when they were small boys running amok at birthday parties. He chipped O’Shea’s tooth at one of them and laughs now at the memory of being chased around the house, with the future Mayo record appearance-holder hellbent on revenge.
“But that was him, you know? In the early days, he tended to get far too angry and lashed out quite a lot. I remember when we were in first or second class, a GAA instructor came into the school to teach us Gaelic football skills during PE.
“Even then, Aidan was a mile ahead of everybody so he was getting frustrated by being made to do all this basic stuff. Eventually, he lost the head and kicked the ball as hard as he could and hit the guy straight in the stomach. Your man went down like a ton of bricks!
“It’s funny because the older he got, that petulance disappeared. You never see him lash out at any stage now. He worked on it a lot. He’s no good to the team if he’s going on raw emotion all the time.”
Two-hundred games. Against Leitrim a fortnight ago, he made it 93 in the championship alone. In the history of the game, only Methuselah between the sticks for Dublin beats those numbers – Stephen Cluxton played his 127th championship game last Sunday. But O’Shea passed Seán Cavanagh (89) last year as the outfield player with the most championship appearances and of the current crop, only Michael Murphy and Peter Harte (both on 80) are within range.
Seriously. Two-hundred senior intercounty games. O’Shea has played championship alongside teammates born as long ago as 1973 (James Nallen’s last game was O’Shea’s debut) and as recently as 2004 (Conal Dawson came off the bench against Sligo). He has shared dressing rooms with players who made their Mayo debut in 1995 and in 2025.
He played championship for Mayo before Lee Keegan, Chris Barrett, Jason Doherty, his brother Seamus and Cillian O’Connor. Ger Cafferkey, Donal Vaughan and Kevin McLoughlin made their championship debut on the same day as him. He’s outlasted them all. Even if O’Connor comes back for another go next year, it seems quite likely O’Shea will be there too.
If I ever go into management, I’d love to have a player like Aidan
— Rob Hennelly
So it’s been an incredible innings, by any measure. O’Shea has three All Stars – in the history of Mayo football, only Keegan and Colm Boyle have more. He’s going for his ninth Connacht medal this weekend – if he gets it, only Mattie McDonagh of the Galway teams of the 1950s and 60s will be ahead of him.
He doesn’t have an All-Ireland medal, of course. An unforgivable sin, in the eyes of some.
“If I ever go into management, I’d love to have a player like Aidan,” Hennelly says. “Because firstly, he’ll do anything he can, he’ll play any position, probably to the detriment of his own game. And then, if things go wrong, he’s probably going to take more slack than you are.
“That’s the way it’s always been with him. Because he takes on so much, because he’s an open type of person, any defeats we had got landed on him. That was the case with Breaffy growing up and it was the case later on as well with Mayo. And I think that’s probably the biggest driver for him. He feels that expectation that he needs to drive everything, on and off the field.
“Of course, when you don’t get over the line, we saw it with Joe Canning for years as well. When teams don’t win things, people simplify it. They go after the person rather than the team overall or the system they were playing. He became this lightning rod for criticism.
“But the big thing that I’ve been blown away by, apart from his longevity, is just the way he has kept bouncing back. He still won’t stop. He still thinks he’s good enough to be there. He’s still motivated and willing to do the work.”
Not all the criticism has been unjustified, of course. Despite O’Shea’s talents and durability, too many of his failures have come in the highest-profile games. There’s that deathless statistic that says he has played in seven All-Ireland finals (including a replay) and hasn’t scored in any of them. His three points in the opening half of this year’s league final were his first scores in what was his fourth NFL decider.
He hasn’t made much of a scoreboard impression in games against Galway either, for that matter. Between league and championship, O’Shea has played 21 matches in his career against Mayo’s biggest rivals. He has only scored in five of them. Since 2015, he’s played against Galway 14 times and only come out with brackets against his name once – three points in a league game during Covid.
Scoring isn’t the be-all and end-all, of course. And Mayo’s record against Galway when he’s played is nothing to be ashamed of at all – 14 wins and one draw with just six defeats. But O’Shea would say himself that he should have done more.
Still, that doesn’t quite explain the vitriol that has been sent his way over the years. It’s hard to think of a figure in the GAA that has been the subject of such an outsized level of derision and invective, particularly over the past decade. And for what? For not winning an All-Ireland? Come on.
In my lifetime, those three guys were the Mayo players who had huge talent and got far too much criticism in relation to that talent
— Ed McGreal
In some quarters, O’Shea has never been forgiven for the heave against Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly. In others, the very fact that he has a shiny Instagram page and a few endorsements grinds a few gears. But mostly, it’s just that he’s Aidan O’Shea and has been for a long time.
“I can’t remember who it was had the line,” says Ed McGreal, author, podcaster and Breaffy clubman. “Maybe it was Keith Duggan, about Liam McHale. What it comes down to is that whether it be McHale or Ciarán McDonald or Aidan O’Shea – every once in a while somebody comes along and they get blamed for everything from bad spuds to bad weather.
“In my lifetime, those three guys were the Mayo players who had huge talent and got far too much criticism in relation to that talent. Some people never forgave McHale for his tan, like. Same with McD and the hair. There’s a lack of trust there, as though middle Ireland still likes its heroes to be quiet fellas who do their talking on the pitch and who are circumspect and cautious in everything they do off it.
“I think, in fairness to Aidan, he has definitely been able to block out all that noise as he’s got older. His life now is totally built around his football. He is in incredible shape. I saw an interview recently that he did with Billy Joe Padden in 2018 or 2019 – he looks so much older in it then than he does now. You can see he’s enjoying it more now. It isn’t the burden on him that it once was.”
Maybe that comes with lower expectations. In a wide open year, nobody really has Mayo down as contenders for Sam Maguire. There has been an obvious sundering of their support since the 2021 All-Ireland final defeat to Tyrone and if they lose this weekend, it will be Galway’s first Connacht four-in-a-row since the 1960s. Mayo football is always at a low boil but maybe there isn’t quite the intense heat around the gig just at the minute.
It could also be that the new rules have given him a gee-up. He doesn’t have to go tracking every run back up the pitch anymore and his bulk and handling skills make him a good foil for Ryan O’Donoghue. Mike Finnerty has done the commentary on most of Mayo’s games in 2025 and can see the logic, even if it hasn’t quite worked out that way so far.
“I think in general, the rules can suit him,” Finnerty says. “You’d love to see Mayo moving the ball quicker and getting it into him faster though. They’re not playing anything long and high into him.
“They’re getting caught up with this slow build-up, which means that by the time they get around to sending it up to him, he has three or four around him waiting on the break. You’d love to see them get it up there faster so he can use the space one-on-one. The potential is there, definitely.”
Two-hundred games and we’re still talking about Aidan O’Shea’s potential. His blessing and his curse.
