Since 1989 no county has more frequently eliminated defending champions than Mayo – maybe a warning for Dublin tomorrow, writes SEAN MORAN
THIS WEEK James Horan’s two immediate predecessors as Mayo football manager, John O’Mahony and Mickey Moran, both in passing, made the point that the county “wouldn’t fear playing Dublin” in Croke Park. They were hardly going to say anything else and declarations that teams don’t fear their opponents are commonplace even if more defiant than prophetic.
The unusual thing about Mayo is that the banality has a core truth. The county may have to go back 61 years to commemorate its last Sam Maguire but in the past quarter century Mayo have consistently been the most prominent county not to win an All-Ireland.
The statistics, dismal in some ways, are nonetheless impressive. Since September 1989 Mayo have lost five All-Ireland senior finals, more than any other county and during that same period, no county has more frequently eliminated defending champions – maybe a warning for Dublin tomorrow.
More specifically in the historical context Dublin have three times since 1955 been raging favourites when going into All-Ireland semi-finals against Mayo but the outcomes have belied those odds. Six years ago the Connacht champions emerged from the chaos of disputing territorial rights to stage the pre-match warm-up into the Hill and overcame a seven-point deficit well into the third quarter. That win, Mayo’s first against Dublin in championship, is relatively fresh in the memory but similarly the two previous meetings were unexpectedly prolonged with both going to a replay.
The matches of 1955 and ’85 were also landmarks for the counties in different ways. Dublin’s indigenous project was in the middle of its teething period. The native selection policy had produced an undoubtedly talented team but one which by the mid-1950s was promising more than it had delivered.
The season of 57 years ago had its highs and lows. The All-Ireland final of that year is one of the most famous in history: the first coming together of a born-and-bred Dublin side and football’s monarchs Kerry generated a huge interest at the time and also created the modern rivalry between the counties.
Modern recall is that Dublin swept to the final, harbingers of modernity and scientific football, only to be debunked by the traditional orthodoxies of Kerry’s eternal coach Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan.
Kevin Heffernan, the embodiment of Dublin’s fresh tactical thinking at full forward, was so affected by the loss to Kerry that he told Tom Humphries in Dublin v Kerry over 50 years later that no defeat as a manager hit him as hard. “That formed a large part of what I became as a person,” he said.
Contemporary accounts describe a more patchy season. Dublin hadn’t exactly sparkled in Leinster until the final when with Heffernan dropping off the legendary Meath full back, Paddy “Hands” O’Brien, to pick up possession and running the ball back at him, the defending All-Ireland champions were routed by 20 points.
The Mayo team they would meet in the semi-final had won back-to-back All-Irelands four years previously and many of those successful players were still around although clearly in the twilight of their careers. Captain Seán Flanagan had by then been elected to the Dáil and the programme shows him at corner back with the properly-suffixed initials TD beside his name in old Irish script.
This was to be Mayo’s last hurrah for a long time. Although the county sporadically won Connacht titles it wouldn’t get as close to an All-Ireland for another three decades.
“There was a rainstorm, thunder and lightning, which didn’t suit us as much,” remembers Mick Moylan who at corner back was part of Dublin’s most impressive unit on the day. “We were hot favourites after the Leinster final although that was a fiasco because Meath collapsed. I suppose Mayo were getting on a bit as well but they had most of the famous names still playing.”
One of those names, Tom Langan, scored a goal immediately after half-time, and Dublin – changed into white shirts for the second half – struggled to bridge the gap. The match was saved by a free awarded to Dublin minutes from the end. By then free-taker Ollie Freaney had been replaced and after a confab over the sodden leather ball an unexpected volunteer came forward. “Nicky Maher went up the field,” says Moylan. “He wouldn’t have been a free-taker; he was a half back. He was wearing goggles over his spectacles – in those days players wouldn’t have worn contact lenses and he just came up and kicked the ball over bar. We would have considered ourselves lucky to get a draw.”
Although the weather was more favourable to Dublin in the replay Mayo were again hard to put away, losing by only a point, 1-7 to 1-8 in a match played on a double bill with Kerry and Cavan, who also needed a replay – the first time both semi-finals had been drawn.
By coincidence the next time this happened was 30 years later when virtually the same counties were involved. The exception was that Monaghan were Ulster champions and they drew with Kerry.
It’s hard to convey how surprising all of this was at the time. Dublin had “transitioned” into a new team and had nipped in smartly for an All-Ireland in 1983 when Kerry had failed to get out of Munster but even on its 1984-86 lap of honour, Mick O’Dwyer’s team had Dublin under its thumb.
But whereas for Dublin to lose to Kerry was bad enough, Heffernan, now manager of Dublin and with four All-Irelands under his belt, would not have even contemplated losing to counties from Connacht and Ulster. Statistically the Munster and Leinster champions had lost just one semi-final to western and northern counties since 1968 and wouldn’t again for a further six years.
Mayo though were a team in a hurry. The county hadn’t won a single Connacht title in the 1970s and when they broke that sequence in 1981 they ran straight into the barbed wire of Kerry at their best but with an All-Ireland under-21 title won and under the management of former Galway player Liam O’Neill they had high hopes.
“We spent two years trying to win Connacht in 1983 and ’84,” says former player and now RTÉ analyst Kevin McStay, who would end 1985 as an All Star, “but we couldn’t beat Galway. So we lost two stupid years when we should have been getting to grips with Croke Park in All-Ireland semi-finals.”
The match started sensationally with a goal for Mayo by Noel Durcan on his first visit to Croke Park. It had a big influence on the match in that it relaxed the Connacht champions, who had been tensed to withstand an opening blitz, and allowed Dublin establish a stranglehold in the remainder of the first half. “We’d stopped playing,” says McStay. “At half-time things were calm enough, though. Liam was saying ‘these guys aren’t as good as you think they are’ and he made a few changes.”
The big one saw the introduction of the prodigious Pádraig Brogan (cousin of Dublin’s current brothers of the same name), who turned the tide of the match at centre field. Dublin, having reasserted themselves in the first half, slackened off after the break.
“We lost our grip on it altogether,” says Tom Carr, then in his first season with the team, “and I remember us just not being able to get scores.”
An eventful second half saw 42-year-old Billy Fitzpatrick come on as a replacement and kick one of the points in Mayo’s comeback. On a darker note, the county’s wing back John Finn had his jaw badly broken in an off-the-ball incident but despite an investigation – nobody in one of the biggest All-Ireland semi-final attendances on record saw it – no one was suspended.
When it was over, the consensus was that Dublin had escaped. The aftermath didn’t go well for Mayo, torn between the giddy sense that they were back at football’s top table and the need to prepare for the replay. “There was a row outside the Ashling (the team’s hotel),” says McStay. “Some of the guys wanted to get home and others wanted to stay in Dublin. Words were exchanged. We’d missed a great chance but Liam O’Neill wanted to get everyone back and sort out training for the replay, which we’d hoped would be played quickly but it didn’t happen for three weeks.
“I did a piece with RTÉ and the bus went back to the hotel without me. PJ McGrath gave me a lift and he was thrilled. ‘We’re back in the big time, now’, he was saying. You know, back to the 1950s.
“The team were looking at the video the following week. I remember Micheál O’Hehir’s commentary as Pádraig Brogan was getting ready to come on: ‘the colleges star on the sideline . . .’ Liam O’Neill is giving him instructions, telling him where to go and who’s to switch where. But he goes on, straight to his position and tells nobody! It’s a while before all the changes eventually get made.
“Anyway at the team meeting the whole team is roaring laughing at this and Dermot Flanagan just lost the head with us. So did Liam O’Neill. “ Ye find this funny’, he was shouting. ‘Ye’ll always be losers’.”
Carr says that complacency was probably an issue for Dublin. “It was a big shock – I remember it – a case of complacency and the lack of respect for our reputation from Mayo, which probably caught us on the hop a bit. All the talk then was how poor Connacht football was and what was to be done with it! So the feeling was that these teams didn’t really have the belief they were going to beat you.”
The replay followed the script. Despite a towering display at centrefield by Willie Joe Padden and that season’s goal of the year by Brogan, Dublin played economically and won well. History repeated itself right down to the last full stop and Kerry beat Dublin in the final. The replay win over Mayo was Heffernan’s last ever victory with a Dublin team. He and his selectors stepped down suddenly the following January shortly after Heffernan’s old adversary Phil Markey had been elected county chair.
Mayo’s profile was about to change but it took four years before the county finally reached its first final since 1951, with John O’Mahony in charge. “We’ll be back next year. That was said quite a bit,” says McStay of the 1985 fall-out. “But again we didn’t push on and were beaten in 1986 and ’87, losing more opportunities, and then Liam O’Neill went. A good few of us were around for 1989 but we should have had a lot more experience by then. I suppose psychologically we weren’t the strongest outfit in the world.”
The wheel comes around once more. It’s nearly 90 years since the winners of a Dublin-Mayo semi-final went on to win the All-Ireland. For the first time, Kerry aren’t waiting in the final and hope springs eternal.
