Last summer an Armagh player from their 2002 All-Ireland winning team did some personal writing. His musings and observations covered a wide range of topics but, having endured a similar struggle to Mayo’s during his own career, some of his most insightful and emotive prose focussed on the Connacht champions.
“Mayo are searching,” the Armagh player wrote. “Certainly their work this season can only be book-marked by self-doubt and fear that they will ultimately come up short again.
“But if they don’t allow this to consume them – as it has their many supporters – then this fear and searching can deliver them to great places. They have to replace the natural fear and self-doubt with anger. They have to rage against the perception of them as a group. I honestly believe Mayo are now where Armagh were in 2002.”
Apart from the internal pressure, not having an All-Ireland intensifies the focus from outside the county when a team is desperately trying to win one. Armagh and Tyrone endured a similar sense of persecution before their victories in 2002 and 2003 but an All-Ireland grants that dispensation.
When Mayo came up short again last year, their pursuit of a first All-Ireland since 1951 was deemed over for the foreseeable future - and when Peter Canavan was asked in May if Mayo had missed their chance to make the All-Ireland breakthrough, he was emphatic in his response.
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“Yes,” said Canavan. “I think Mayo will find it even more difficult to get back on the All-Ireland stage with two up-and-coming teams, Galway and Roscommon, making life even harder for them in Connacht.”
Yet life wasn’t difficult in Connacht this year. Instead, Mayo strolled to a fifth successive provincial title, the first county to do so in a century, but they still fit the classic GAA stereotype of a team desperately trying to end an All-Ireland famine. A game like football, which carries so much tradition and history, makes it easier again to arrive at a preordained conclusion and stereotyping Mayo is always louder than most other counties.
Take your pick; Mayo don’t have enough marquee forwards; it’s just their misfortune that they’re around the same time as these Dublin and Kerry teams; Mayo have a psychological hang-up when it comes to winning All-Irelands; they aren’t mentally strong enough to win an All-Ireland.
That last assumption is the easiest, and by far the laziest one, to make because no other group has been more resilient, or as mentally strong as Mayo. Failure is often a full-stop, when the journey ends and the dream dies because people haven’t the confidence, or the desire, to go any further. However, this group of Mayo players have never reached that point. Big day defeats have been no more than setbacks because they’ve always had the confidence to go again. If anything, they are more comparable to the Munster rugby team of 2000-05, who lost two European finals and three semi-finals. Yet even when Munster were struggling to get over the line, they weren’t hammered for any perceived mental shortcomings in the way Mayo routinely are.
By 2006, Munster eventually got there. Mayo believe they will too because they are such a process orientated team that they focus solely on performance. They don’t get hung up on perceptions or outside opinions but, similar to those Armagh players before they won their title in 2002, they know all about longing and hurt and anger and how powerful a force that can be.
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In the meantime, Mayo will keep raging on. Despite all the harrowing disappointments, recriminations and soul-searching, there has always been an essential optimism deep in the core of Mayo’s collective football self. No matter what has happened to them in the past, they’ve always kept coming back.
This Mayo team are just better than their predecessors. Their skill levels are higher. They are more focused but the biggest difference is their reformed view of their status.
In the past, Mayo always tried to sneak an All-Ireland. Tumbling over the line would still be enough but the players and public were never focused enough to believe they could be the best team in the country. Yet part of the territory of being the best is being seen to be the best. The only reality that matters anymore in Mayo is process; performance and improvement.
If anything, they have been undone more by tactical failure than psychological weakness over the last three years. Yet the ongoing famine inflates the general perception of a weak mentality even more because Mayo’s identity continues to be framed through their history.
Within the game though, they have earned huge respect for their resilience and mental strength. In a recent column, Jim McGuinness made a comparison between the Galway hurlers and Mayo. “In both squads there seems to a collective power, a single-mindedness, a conviction and a serious intent,” McGuinness wrote. “These for me are the attributes of elite winning teams.
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“It’s a tribute to both sets of management teams for building squads to such a high level of mental readiness. The problems though arise for both Galway and Mayo in the teams they meet next, Kilkenny and Dublin. Can they do it; liberate their counties from this cycle of hurt?”
The bottom line of winning a senior All-Ireland has become merciless and that’s the brutal world Mayo inhabit. Tomorrow, it’s the Dubs in Croke Park. Dublin are favourites. They’ll be expected to win but Mayo will just keep going, keep searching, and keep trying to win that All-Ireland. And if they don’t win one, this group still won’t stop trying until they can’t try anymore.