I lost a couple of provincial finals before I won one, and it is debilitating for a team. In those days it was, if anything, worse because it meant you had an extra game to play whereas now it’s more like two separate championships. Province is over and move on to All-Ireland. It makes no difference whether you’ve won or lost in practical terms.
Sunday was a bit different in that it won’t be as easy for Mayo to recover from losing. Galway already had three Connacht titles. If they hadn’t won, they’d still have the likes of John Maher as well as Shane Walsh and Damien Comer to come back in the coming weeks.
They could build themselves up nicely going into the All-Ireland series, whereas Mayo probably needed that bit of a springboard going into the rest of the season.
Galway deserved to win and even if they would have been in a better position to process defeat this fourth provincial title is a huge achievement for them. It’s an uncomfortable truth for Mayo that when it came to clutch moments in the contest, they were found wanting.
It has to be all the more devastating for them that they had worked so hard to rescue the situation after half-time. Eight points down at half-time, but with a strong breeze to come, and Ryan O‘Donoghue gets a two-pointer nearly straight away. Everyone watching is thinking, “We have a game here.”
They level at 1-13 each and there’s probably a quarter of the match to go. At that point you could really see only one winner.
That’s what makes it all the more impressive from a Galway point of view. They were fit to grind that out and close the match.
In those circumstance, teams need leaders whether in Mayo‘s case to drive it on and refuse to fall away after levelling the match or in Galway’s to find somehow a way of disrupting and turning momentum.
That wasn’t really there for Mayo and they shot those wides when chances arose to take the lead. This was like oxygen for Galway, who also did have leaders. Cillian McDaid stepped up for them big time with that unbelievable run in the second half up along the stand side, which ended in him being fouled.
That relieved the pressure by giving his team time to set up, regroup and just take an easy score. Connor Gleeson, last year’s Connacht final hero, also stood up by stopping Enda Hession’s point-blank goal shot. Then there was Dylan McHugh and his block on Paul Towey.
There was also the disastrous kick-out that Rob Finnerty intercepted, forcing Rory Brickenden to bring him down at the cost of a black card, reducing his team to 14 for the last 10 minutes.
You could sense the anxiety in Mayo. Having scored an equaliser by the end of the third quarter and with the wind to back them, they had gone in search of a winner, but scores dried up for them as they failed to take chances.
I know O‘Donoghue had bad luck from the free from outside the arc that Gleeson did or didn’t touch, but he also had another chance that was dropped short. To be honest, I’d be more interested in stopping two-pointers being awarded for frees, full stop, rather than fiddling with the rest of the rule.
I’d have loved to be playing under these rules, which have created a very forward-oriented game that suits kickers, but long-range frees shouldn’t be worth two points any more than 45s are. It’s too routine a skill.
That anxiety was all too evident at the end when Mayo were chasing the two-pointer needed to equalise. They could still be there for all the interest most of them showed in taking on the kick. Matthew Ruane deserved credit for taking that responsibility, but was that how they had war-gamed a situation like that?
Contrast that with Galway. When they had the wind, they worked their attack and you could just see Paul Conroy waiting for somebody to get the ball over to him. As soon as he got it, it was kicked. Conroy’s an excellent long-range kicker, one of the best in the country.
With the wind at your back, it’s just about getting the ball in the air and letting it float over the bar from there. It wasn’t a difficult kick for him and you could see that quality kickers are the people who are just good at that.
Instead, Mayo anxiously flung the ball around and if the plan was that Ruane should pull the trigger – to be fair, he had already scored a two-pointer – the shot selection wasn’t great and it didn’t work from a difficult enough angle on the right.
Manager Kevin McStay acknowledged the problems after the game, more or less saying that if we can’t find a way of closing these games out and closing out positions like that then we ain’t going anywhere.
He’s right.
My view on the split season has always been that the inter-county calendar needs another couple of weeks, particularly when you look at all of the speculation about All-Ireland groups and how it cut across counties’ preparation last week.
Those draws shouldn’t have happened. They’re a distraction and disrespect the provincial finals. It’s not fair on those teams to have that hanging over their heads when their full focus should be on the provincial final. A couple of weeks extra in the season would sort out that.
Counties would still get the fixtures in time and we could give the provincial series the due respect that it deserves, because a lot of the talk this week was about who‘s going to want to be in this group and who‘s not going to want to be in that group.
The teams were preparing for a big challenge. Galway obviously set a lot of store by winning it and made no secret of that choice. Mayo were going all out to win it because they hadn’t been champions for four years.
I don’t buy suggestions that teams were focusing on their All-Ireland groups instead of winning their province.
