Galway v Mayo: The unchanging but variable rivalry that keeps the West awake

To Salthill on Sunday for the first non-Covid Connacht final between Galway and Mayo for 10 years. The sun was out on the prom and with it the crowds on a public holiday weekend and there wasn’t the same sense of dissonance at the season’s calendar shift.

After all, it’s no novelty for the counties to meet in championship during May. Eleven years ago, Galway were subjected to a groundbreaking Connacht defeat by Mayo in Pearse Stadium and afterwards manager Alan Mulholland was doing his best to explain.

Courteous as ever, he was nonetheless beginning to exhibit signs of concern at the drift of the press conference as if beginning to realise that the task now was to handle the fallout rather than try to rationalise what had happened.

It was pointed out that his team had suffered a beating, 0-11 to 4-16, unprecedented since 1907: 106 years in the ground, waiting for you to step on it!

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The only hint of asperity entered proceedings when he deployed gallows humour to thank the questioner for bringing the statistic to his attention.

What is equally notable about that day is that it kick-started 12 successive years during which Galway and Mayo have played each other in every single championship, whether at provincial or All-Ireland stage.

It’s characteristic of the relationship that the dozen meetings break relatively evenly, Mayo seven, Galway five.

I’m not sure there’s a relationship like it – maybe in older, halcyon days Dublin-Meath or for a while and to a more limited extent Cork-Kerry but even those rivalries tended to be built on alternating hegemony rather than the guarantee of competitiveness.

Of course, that dynamic has had an effect on Galway and Mayo: the 2013 thrashing was peak Mayo and by the time of the county’s arguably best shots at the All-Ireland in 2016 and 2017, they had lost their provincial stranglehold on Galway. But overall, in the words of Saturday’s preview in these pages:

“Over the years this has generally been a fixture in which no favourites are so far ahead that they could survive playing badly if the opposition play well.”

Sunday was a variation on that in that Mayo, the team with the greater empirical evidence on their side, failed to close out a match they should have won whereas Galway, on subsistence rations, eked out enough to take advantage.

There was of course the faintly surreal business of the All-Ireland draws last week and the unseemly speculation on whether it would be better to win or lose the Connacht final – there was an equally unseemly dismissal of the Munster final by the absence of such speculation. Everyone knew Kerry couldn’t lose.

The discourse irritated three of the managers – Pádraic Joyce didn’t have room in his grievance portfolio – because of how commentary on the All-Ireland draw had undermined the provincial finals.

“I can’t get my head around why they make the draw before,” said Kerry’s Jack O’Connor on Sunday. “What’s wrong with making the draw this evening? You still have two weeks to promote the thing. I can’t see the benefit of it, it’s a distraction.”

Clare’s Mark Fitzgerald was unhappy with the suggestion that they would replace a “better” team in the Sam Maguire by virtue of reaching the Munster final.

“I think the commentary was that Down beat us by 11 points [in Division Three], which they did but equally, we could say we missed out on promotion from a referee’s decision [against Westmeath]. So, I just think from that point of view, it was slightly disrespectful.”

In the course of his restrained reaction to a traumatic setback, Mayo manager Kevin McStay was asked had the Connacht final been cheapened.

“No, I just felt sorry for John [Prenty, provincial CEO]. We love the championship. We’re big fans of it and I’m sure Pádraic is the same. We saw it as the best route into the round robin. It’s not to be now so we’ll take the next best route available to us.”

The core of the issue was succinctly stated by Ciarán Murphy’s column here last week dismissing suggestions that it could even conceivably be better to lose in Salthill.

“But neither team can really feel like they’ve a body of work behind them this year. What they need is a statement win. What they need, quite frankly, is something to make them feel alive. And that’s where the Connacht final comes in.”

[ Ciarán Murphy: Of course the Connacht final is worth winning - just to beat the other shower ]

[ Five things we learned from the GAA weekend: Omens looking good for Galway ]

In a nutshell because the irony of the situation is that as soon as the match was over, attention turned to what was next.

What is next for Galway is a hugely promising championship. They have won a third successive provincial title for the first time in 40 years and their best players are filing back into action.

A significant prematch announcement was that Cillian McDaid, outstanding in the run to the 2022 All-Ireland final but feared a potential absentee this season, was back on the bench – not ready for Sunday but an optimistic statement that he might be all right for Derry.

Captain Seán Kelly was subdued as was Liam Silke but both are known to have much better in them. Damien Comer was back to his wrecking-ball best and that had such an impact on the attack. Rob Finnerty thrived in the anarchy created and at long last, there were signs that Shane Walsh was returning to recognisable form.

When all of those moving parts are in sync, very few will fancy playing them.

Mayo looked on course to win with a fair bit of upside. Instead, they face the dejection of an avoidable defeat. Their slow-moving possession-based attacks took too much time to get to the point and they were undone by inaccuracies and a tendency to find the wrong player on the end of moves.

If you set up to press forward, allowing more or less the entire opposition to squat between you and the goal, it’s necessary to identify the vulnerable one-on-ones and shoot as soon as daylight appears.

The disparity in wides was in a way the story of the match and yet this is so arbitrary.

Galway won and Mayo lost because of a faintly controversial free, banged over in the dying seconds by Connor Gleeson, who in different circumstances might have coping with a different fallout after getting caught out of goal a couple of times.

Joyce was genuinely pleased for his goalkeeper, who he believes has been unfairly pilloried in the past.

Yet for such a featherweight discrepancy on the tripwire, both teams are catapulted in entirely different trajectories.