Perhaps the timing of Mayo’s improvement in form will end talk of them being “out on their feet” — having had to play more than four football matches this summer.
The idea that fit men, most of them in their 20s, find it tough to play games on consecutive weekends is strange.
There is something of a paradox here — one that has been present for quite some time. One the one hand, GAA players will revel in the culture displayed recently in the television show GAA Nua — centres of excellence, GPS monitoring, dietary precision, occlusion goggles, cryotherapy — immersing themselves in the latest that science has to offer.
GAA people will also take pride in anecdotal nods from other sports; Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler were blown away by the pace of the All-Ireland hurling final, or even one from years ago, like when Tony Adams said that Graham Geraghty was the fittest man he had trained with. Oddly, it is often tricky to track down the quote to back up the claims of the Gael’s superior athleticism.
Nevertheless, the overall impression is that this is elite sport; professionalism in everything but morally corrupting salaries. Yet as soon as somebody is judged by something approaching the standards of professional sports, there is an intake of breath. “You can’t say Sean played badly — he has to go to work tomorrow. His mother reads the paper. His sister sees those tweets you know . . .”
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The same goes for player welfare. It is OK to spend three quarters of your life training in centres of excellence with high walls and rolling cameras, yet suggest they put all the “learnings” into practice for more than 70 minutes a fortnight and it is as if you’re asking somebody to go to war with North Korea.
It’s an absurd situation. Many people in their 60s spend their holidays cycling more than 100km a day, plenty of them uphill, day after day, but young men conditioned to within an inch of their lives are supposed to be swaddled in bubble wrap, taken out only for another strength and conditioning class where they might work on explosiveness — for that big game they are playing in four weeks’ time after 16 more sessions and as many meetings. If Mayo are to win the All-Ireland from here they will have played nine games — if they don’t have any more draws, that is.
Shouldn’t that be what all young athletes aspire to? To actually play the game they love week after week? Perhaps I’ve missed something obvious, but isn’t this what happens in the league — that competition which happens from February to April and is far more compelling than the slow summer slog?
There doesn’t seem to be any logic behind the idea that players need at least three weeks between games during the championship. There have been many genuine stories of burnout over the years, where young players have been asked to serve managers at senior and under-21 and minor level in both codes, while also playing for a college team. It was right that this practice was addressed, but a game a week hardly seems excessive.
Mayo certainly won’t stagger on to the field when they play Kerry on Sunday week. If anything, they should be the leaner, more battle-hardened side. As the well-known Gaelic games enthusiast, Ernest Hemingway, said of his pen, he’d rather it was blunt and dull than “have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused”.
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Every year Mayo’s mileage is mentioned as if it were a dead weight. Five of their players have made 40 or more championship appearances since 2011. Is that an excessive number, even when you add in a similar amount of league matches? This has taken place over almost seven seasons. In the actual world of professional sport, where athletes train to play rather than for its own sake, 40 games would represent a quiet year.
The balance is ludicrously out of whack in inter-county GAA and Mayo now have a chance to prove that. Kerry’s smooth and well-oiled machine will be rolled out of the garage and might struggle to get to the pace of the Mayo side who have long since gone through the gears. I’ll give myself a get-out here by stating that Kerry might win anyway just because they have better players — which, ultimately, matters the most.
Mayo might not provide conclusive proof that more games are a benefit and not a burden but they have, in a different way, provided some evidence in recent seasons. Mayo did Kerry a great favour by taking them to a replay and extra time in the 2014 semi-final ahead of the decider against Donegal. In 2015, Kerry looked flat in the final against Dublin who needed two games to get the better of Mayo in the semi-final.
On both of these occasions, the losing teams found out that if you want to be good at football, it helps to have played more — not fewer — football games.