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Post by blacksheep21 on Sept 11, 2021 22:58:16 GMT
Sunday Game team of the year, 2 Kerry Players; P. Clifford and D. Clifford. I get Paudie being included, had a great first season but David? 8 Tyrone, 4 Mayo, 2 Kerry, 1 Dublin overall The entire team was picked on the semi finals and final. Far too many non competitive games in the early parts of the championship. Team looked reasonable enough to me |
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Post by gaelicden on Sept 11, 2021 23:00:35 GMT
Sunday Game team of the year, 2 Kerry Players; P. Clifford and D. Clifford. I get Paudie being included, had a great first season but David? 8 Tyrone, 4 Mayo, 2 Kerry, 1 Dublin overall Regarding David , just to mention two of his games, did you see him against Dublin in the NFL and against Tyrone in the semifinal? I agree these selections are a farce. Revolves around the final and to a lesser extent the semifinals. Yeah, I saw both of those performances but I felt he was inconsistent in other games (League and championship) with moments of greatness mixed with moments of not being great. I thought the Munster Final performance mightn't have helped his cause either. I suppose leaning on the final and semi final helped his cause alright. |
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Post by Ballyfireside on Sept 11, 2021 23:34:27 GMT
I didn't even read Umbrollys article but here's my guess - loads of valid points, but all out of context. E.g. Like saying machinery kills us so we should stop driving, but motor vehicles save lives and serve the community - emergency services, the auld Massey is handy for the farmer who feeds us, an auld fridge is handy to keep the mould off the hamwich, and yes, no trucks = no pint of ordinary, etc.
Still Joe was there and has the T shirt, not a bad bone is his body, just a phenomenon known as 'occupational hazard' of being a lawyer, and v decent wan I believe, and now while some of them are scum of the earth, even wans of our own, as they go I believe Joe is more salt of the earth. Thing is he 'nit picks' 5 days a week, and so he is moulded to do likewise as a pundit - simple as that.
Hey, we all have our flaws, Joe is the GAAs best man to blow a kiss, and let nobody take that away from him, the honour, not the kiss!
He brings a bit of humour too - basically there could be shag all wrong with anyone who gives of their best!
Re D Clifford - if he wasn't on TSG Team of The Year there would be outrage, so strange wans of our own disputing it. Still everyone is entitled to their say. Derry soccer players knew about him before we did - they told me after a few ordinary pints!
Congrats to Tyrone, well done, well deserved. Mayo, well done too, I'd challenge any fellow planetarian, fellow planetarianess, to recall one game where Mayo were involved that wasn't a proper game of proper football - they will always play football and football will always win - eventually, eternally? Hands up anyone who ever witnessed 'em not entertaining us with the traditional ethos skill.
So congrats to Maigh Eo too.
Leo 'torn between two lovers' Keegan a fav of mine, I feel for him - many do, as a defender scored 7 goals in the Championship I believe, AO'6 big score v Oz but never in a goial?/score? in an AI final, Connolly respected Leeroy and it wasn't that he thought he was good looking or anything u'd be thinking.
Chin up Lee, and Aidan, and the gang - we owe ye!
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Post by blacksheep21 on Sept 12, 2021 6:35:01 GMT
Plenty of nasty personal digs in the Brolly article. Brolly also yesterday going on about true gaels and the spirit of the association and then comes up with that bile,
I don’t see any issue with a guy doing a promo shoot three weeks before a game. O Shea really gets on peoples nerves for some reason. A bit overrated maybe but a decent player who has played in more all Ireland finals than nearly all players over the past decade.
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Post by southward on Sept 12, 2021 8:09:24 GMT
Plenty of nasty personal digs in the Brolly article. Brolly also yesterday going on about true gaels and the spirit of the association and then comes up with that bile, I don’t see any issue with a guy doing a promo shoot three weeks before a game. O Shea really gets on peoples nerves for some reason. A bit overrated maybe but a decent player who has played in more all Ireland finals than nearly all players over the past decade.Yes, six, and went missing in most of them, not scoring even once. Let's be honest - if that was a Kerry player, particularly a supposed talisman, he'd be slaughtered here. Yet O'Shea seems to be revered by Mayo fans and management; I just don't get it. Decent player against Sligo alright. |
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 12, 2021 8:30:52 GMT
Premium
Tyrone's class forwards the reason Sam Maguire is not heading west
Colm O'Rourke
Tyrone have grown into a proper team of talented footballers with a bright future
September 12 2021 02:30 AM
Tyrone were not bothered about sentiment in Croke Park yesterday evening. They acted with the calm efficiency of a German car as they throttled Mayo in much the same way as they had filleted Kerry in the semi-final. In doing so they completed the most remarkable year for any team in the history of this great game.
They did their talking on the pitch when they were getting plenty of stick off it. They don’t need to say anything more. A team who were committed to each other and a great cause were just too good for Mayo. Same old story for Mayo, who put in every ounce of their being, but came up short again.
It wasn’t as if Mayo did not get chances and Ryan O’Donoghue’s penalty miss was a major turning point. Yet Tyrone were so calm in their execution that it was hard to see them getting beaten. Setbacks are there to be overcome as they play like a team who are comfortable within themselves and really believe in their management group.
Apart from a marked difference in handling skills, Tyrone had a kicking game. They were not afraid to let it in and Cathal McShane’s goal was route one, even if well directed. Conn Kilpatrick had a magnificent catch for the second goal and then the passes ended up with Darren McCurry for a simple tap-in. It showed Tyrone at their ruthless best, when a goal chance presented itself they went for the kill.
By contrast, Mayo had no kicking game. They soloed through the middle and were turned over or had to turn back repeatedly. In the first half alone Tyrone scored five points from turnovers, the lesson of the Kerry game was not learned by Mayo. They had only one real forward in Tommy Conroy, who spent far too much time away from goal in the second half, while Tyrone had a variety of men who could both score and set them up. Aidan O’Shea made no impact, a few short hand-passes and then getting the returns, but nothing to bother Tyrone in the slightest.
Mayo relied on defenders like Paddy Durcan, Lee Keegan and Stephen Coen to drive through the middle and set up scores, it is no substitute for class forwards. Tyrone had those, Darren McCurry was too hot to handle for Pádraig O’Hora and Niall Sludden was a constant menace. When it came to subs Tyrone won the contest hands down as well. When Cathal McShane comes on you could put up a sign to say there is a goal coming.
His flick was delightful off another high ball but it summed up Rob Hennelly as a goalkeeper. He does a lot of things well, but high balls are not his forté. If it was at the other end, Niall Morgan would have taken a forward out of it and got the ball too. Darragh Canavan came on to add a little bit of sublety. He is a lovely player and ‘Peter the Great’ is not the only hero in the Canavan house now.
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This win must also make Conor McKenna very contented with life. He made the decision to leave Aussie rules, with a nice lifestyle and a big wage packet, because he wanted to play and win an All-Ireland with Tyrone. He can sleep easily now. He was a proper star in Melbourne but there is no debate now on whether he made the right decision to give it all up for the red hand.
This is also an immediate endorsement of Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan. It is no insult to Mickey Harte to say that Tyrone had gone stale and predictable on his watch, but it would be stretching it to think he would have won another All-Ireland. Tyrone now play a more attractive and winning style. The long ball is a powerful weapon when it is used properly and Tyrone have so much skill in catching and kicking that once unleashed it was hard to stop.
An even greater accomplishment for Tyrone is to come back from the hiding in the League in Killarney to claim this title. That showed remarkable courage and individual responsibility.
It is also noticeable that the new management have encouraged a more independent thinking group and they can think and talk without worrying about the whole world being against them. That sort of paranoia only works for a while and Tyrone are much better now without a complete siege mentality, even if that is no harm occasionally.
In terms of heroes they were sprinkled all over the pitch, starting with Niall Morgan, Pádraig Hampsey, Frank Burns, Kieran McGeary, Peter Harte, Conn Kilpatrick, Conor Meyler, Niall Sludden and of course McCurry, who is hard to keep down for any length of time. And this without Mattie Donnelly firing.
The road home for Mayo is, as always, long and sad. They know it well now. A few weeks to mull it over and then they will start from scratch again. That is what they are good at. At least this time there wasn’t just a point in it or some hard luck story. Tyrone were a good bit better both individually and as a team. Mayo overwhelmed Dublin with sheer passion, but this was not a tactic that was going to work against a team with a surplus in that area, but who also have far more class players than Mayo. The cream always rises to the top.
The concerns about Mayo’s ability to score were also shown to be real. Kevin McLoughlin and Diarmuid O’Connor battered away with real heart, but they needed a few others who could calmly take scores. They were seriously deficient in that department.
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Tyrone are now kings of the world with a relatively young and exciting team. They are likely to get better and a lot of their good players are in the right part of the field — attack. It is almost impossible to win an All-Ireland with good backs and lesser forwards. Mayo have found that out repeatedly.
Once Tyrone got in front of Mayo in the second half and were able to counter-attack they looked a very composed, skillful outfit who could have won by more. Tyrone may have left Europe but they have also left everyone else in Ireland behind them. A proper team of talented footballers with a very bright future.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 12, 2021 8:38:20 GMT
Good to read an article saying just how good a team Tyrone are.
They are better to watch that Dublin were in the past few years.
Dublin had nearly stopped kicking the ball.
Tyrone have a big keeper who can kick points from miles out.
They have an excellent defense set up.
Defenders can kick scores for fun.
Their attacking approach mixes the long and the short. They can play it through the hands to create a scoring shot for the man in the best position.Their forwards can kick long range points.
They have a strong panel with plenty of impact from the subs.
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Post by dc84 on Sept 12, 2021 10:17:37 GMT
Sunday Game team of the year, 2 Kerry Players; P. Clifford and D. Clifford. I get Paudie being included, had a great first season but David? 8 Tyrone, 4 Mayo, 2 Kerry, 1 Dublin overall Regarding David , just to mention two of his games, did you see him against Dublin in the NFL and against Tyrone in the semifinal? I agree these selections are a farce. Revolves around the final and to a lesser extent the semifinals. David gave a tour de force in the semi best individual performance by anyone all year imo we only played 2 games that mattered really and he was immense in both. He carried us on his back scoring wise vs tyrone if he hadn't got injured we might have won that game. 8 Tyrone seems a bit high in my book I think Tom sull deserves a place he beat mccurry hands down something mayo couldn't replicate |
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Sept 12, 2021 10:21:00 GMT
David Moran might have been worth a mention too. Had a fine year and also Tom O'Sullivan.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 12, 2021 10:39:32 GMT
Sean Moran
Although Mayo started in a bustle of energy, scored two early points and demonstrated intent in Ryan O’Donoghue’s hustling of Michael McKernan over the end-line for a 45 in the second minute, Tyrone absorbed the pressure and slowly asserted control of the All-Ireland final.
It was a methodical, unflustered performance by the Ulster champions. Darren McCurry’s free in the 10th minute edged them ahead, 0-3 to 0-2, and they never trailed again - and led for all but seven minutes of the remainder of the match.
For a match that was by consensus seen as very evenly balanced the trend told a different story. Tyrone stretched their lead in every quarter. They had greater composure on the ball and without it.
Mayo had possession and won the battle of the restarts - as did Kerry in the semi-final - but they struggled to execute what chances they created. In fact they did at times what former captain Andy Moran had warned about, running the ball at the Tyrone defence and into trouble.
Aidan O’Shea saw a good bit of ball but often didn’t have the option of support attackers running off him and was fairly quickly shut down and rendered ineffective. The great Mayo conundrum of how best to deploy him isn’t getting any easier to solve.
Defence was one of the obvious advantages that Tyrone had. Their deep defending made Mayo’s runs treacherous undertakings and they had the calm judgement to play out from the back.
Mayo had nearly the same number of turnovers and some smart tackling and dispossessions - Pádraig O’Hora’s hand in on Mattie Donnelly 10 minutes into the second half for instance - but they had nothing like the same intensity on the ball.
Tyrone’s tackle count dwarfed their opponent’s - by more than two to one or according to Sky Sports statistics three to one.
Once again Mayo lost a final by an amount measurable in goals conceded
There was also an advantage in the forwards. It emerged in a number of ways. For a start Tyrone were more inclined to vary their game with early, medium- or long-range ball to catch Mayo on the turn.
Peter Harte took a brilliant mark in the 64th minute for a simple score, as did Conor McKenna earlier but for someone uniquely built to catch high deliveries, after his sojourn in the AFL, he was at odds with his shooting this time, sending three wide, including the mark.
As expected they also had serious reinforcements off the bench, scoring 1-1, compared to Mayo’s nothing from their subs. Cathal McShane is probably an artificial replacement in that he has been making his way back from long-term injury but like in the semi-final when he took Kerry for 1-3, he struck again for the second goal.
It was a brilliant delivery from Conor Meyler on the left. McShane shuffled around expertly in the 46th minute to lose Oisín Mullin momentarily and guide the ball to the net with a deft touch.
The goal was invaluable. Up until that point Tyrone hadn’t scored in the second half and had seen their two-point interval lead halved. The goal sent the margin to four and ratcheted up the pressure on Mayo to respond, presumably also reviving bad memories of the concession of goals in finals past.
Response
To their credit, Mayo did respond with points from O’Donoghue and Kevin McLoughlin but how many times have we seen the county stung into responses to things that have gone badly in finals - as opposed to getting their retaliation in first and forcing the opposition to chase them.
Old failings in front of goal also haunted them with four clear chances coming to nothing, including O’Donoghue’s penalty, which hit the side of the right-hand post. Aidan O’Shea was blocked down by Ronan McNamee to end another and earlier Niall Sludden got back to take Conor Loftus’s shot off the line.
Tyrone also missed chances but crucially they scored two and once again Mayo lost a final by an amount measurable in goals conceded - even the final score was exactly the same as that by which Dublin beat them last December.
On paper, the Connacht champions had a decent edge at centrefield. Matthew Ruane had been having a fine year whereas the Tyrone pair of Brian Kennedy and Conn Kilpatrick had struggled in the semi-final against Kerry and especially, David Moran.
This time around they out-performed expectations, evidenced in one glorious catch by Kilpatrick to start the clock on Darren McCurry’s goal.
Once again, Mayo kicked two points in response but we were by now in the last 10 minutes and the match was drifting.
Tyrone’s response was impressive. They tightened the focus and began to manage the scoreboard more deliberately. Possession near goal was fisted over the bar to push out the margin and they comfortably out-scored the chasing opposition, 0-4 to 0-2 in the last 10 minutes.
Finally, a word for goalkeeper Niall Morgan, who had an uneasy start to the match, getting pinged for fouling a restart. He quickly regained composure and played a constructive role as a seventh defender, taking charge of movement from the back. He also had a flawless day off the tee, converting two frees and a 45.
It was a vindication for a player who has had his ups and downs but delivered on the biggest day of all.
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Post by blacksheep21 on Sept 12, 2021 10:40:41 GMT
Regarding David , just to mention two of his games, did you see him against Dublin in the NFL and against Tyrone in the semifinal? I agree these selections are a farce. Revolves around the final and to a lesser extent the semifinals. David gave a tour de force in the semi best individual performance by anyone all year imo we only played 2 games that mattered really and he was immense in both. He carried us on his back scoring wise vs tyrone if he hadn't got injured we might have won that game. 8 Tyrone seems a bit high in my book I think Tom sull deserves a place he beat mccurry hands down something mayo couldn't replicate 8 Tyrone seemed high to me also but I think the fact that Tyrone had 4 proper championship matches helps their case. The lack of a back door and non competitive matches also skews the representation |
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 12, 2021 19:07:46 GMT
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Malachy Clerkin at Croke Park
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about 5 hours ago
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The good news for Mayo is that the graph is still pointing upwards. It won’t have felt like it wading through the ankle-deep mud of another All-Ireland defeat but it bears pointing out all the same. They have been - and will continue to be - derided for falling short on Saturday night. But if nothing else, they have enough experience of these things to know how to separate the noise from the reality.
In each of the three seasons since James Horan returned, it has taken the All-Ireland champions to beat them in Croke Park. Along the way, Horan has completely reconfigured the playing staff. Seven of their starting team on Saturday have made their championship debut since 2019. Ditto four of the five subs. All of them have played in at least one All-Ireland final now and the majority of them have played in two.
Seen in that light, plenty of counties would love to be as badly off as Mayo. Whatever format the championship takes next year, they will still be among the top four teams. Counties striving to compete with them - your Donegals, your Monaghans, your Galways, your Armaghs, your Kildares - have nothing like their base of experience and development put together. If any of them could start 2022 where Mayo are, they’d be delighted.
But like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball, when you lose the last game of the season, nobody gives a *. Mayo started an All-Ireland final as favourites and finished it as flops. Quite why their failures seem to get so far up the noses of so many people is a mystery best left between the righteous and their therapists. For Mayo, there are far more important matters to interrogate now.
The consensus on Saturday night seemed to be that this was their worst final performance since the bad old days of 2006. Certainly, the fact that so many Mayo players left no real imprint on the biggest game of the year would put anyone in mind of those torchings from Kerry in the mid-2000s. It’s one thing to have the experience of playing in a couple of finals. It’s another to be on the pitch as they pass you by.
But where this final differs from back then is the fundamental truth that it wouldn’t have taken very much for it to turn Mayo’s way. For all that Tyrone were the better side with the more pointed gameplan and the smoother execution, the two teams created more or less the same amount of scoring chances. Tyrone made more of theirs. So Tyrone are champions.
Shotmap
Mayo took 31 shots across the game and scored 0-15. Tyrone took 28 shots and scored 2-14. None of Mayo’s shots were from outlandish positions - the Armagh-based analyst Colin Trainor posted their shotmap online on Sunday morning and showed that no Mayo player tried a shot from play from outside the 45 or anywhere near the sidelines. They shot, in the main, from the places you’re supposed to shoot from. They just shot really badly.
Conor Loftus missed 1-3 and had a nightmare all around. Tommy Conroy was busy and willing and always seemed to have the beating of Pádraig Hampsey but he also missed a brilliant goal chance when Mayo were rampant. Bryan Walsh got hassled out of one goal chance and tried to burst the net with another but blazed wide when a handy fisted point was the obvious option.
Even Ryan O’Donoghue, who was the one Mayo attacker who was clearly loving the stage all day, made a mess of his penalty by trying to be too clever with it. Granted, Niall Morgan definitely came off his line but that’s a cop-out. A penalty in an All-Ireland final should be scored - you’re too close to the goal to be forgiven a miss, especially when you’re trying to pick out the top corner with it. Low and inside the post does it every time.
Is there a common thread to these misses? Possibly. It’s no new insight to point out that Mayo’s greatest strength can also be their most debilitating weakness. They thrive when the game is taken to that place where only they can live with the intensity. Turnovers, tackles, pouring forward like the 13th Infantry coming over the hill with bayonets drawn.
But too often on Saturday night, they looked to be trying too hard to force that emotional weight onto the game. All three misses listed above needed a more professional execution. Conroy had skinned Hampsey and looked to send Croker into orbit with his shot, so much so that he lashed at it and pulled it wide and didn’t for a second consider Aidan O’Shea standing unmarked in the middle of the goal.
Walsh had been anonymous for much of the game and was like a boxer trying to get back into the fight by landing one massive haymaker, rather than jabbing away with a fisted point - or again, slipping to O’Shea in the centre of the goal. And as for O’Donoghue, it wasn’t enough to score his penalty, he wanted to score one that people would purr over, a reminder to everyone that he had been a schoolboy soccer international once upon a time.
Cooler heads
Horan was quoted in the build-up as wanting to take the bull* out of Mayo football. His job now is to define for his players exactly what constitutes bull*. He most likely means all the extraneous stuff - the hype, the nonsense of the curse, all that jazz. But when he watches this final back, he will have to reckon with the fact that with cooler heads, Mayo would have scored more of the ample chances they created.
Horan also needs to either find a role in which O’Shea can prosper or end his torment once and for all. Along with Lee Keegan and Kevin McLoughlin, he has now played in seven All-Ireland final matches and never won and never scored. Worse, he has begun to look like a bad footballer, which he is not. His miss on 21 minutes was unforgivable, especially since McLoughlin had created a screen to give him the yard of space on his good foot on the edge of the D to swing over a regulation point.
At 31, it has long been obvious that he isn’t an inside forward. But it can’t be beyond the wit of the Mayo management to find a job for someone with his physical gifts, his handling, his passing and his fielding ability.
There must be personal responsibility on O’Shea’s side too - not for the first time, he has played badly in the biggest game of the year. He has to properly and honestly face up to why this happens.
That can be said of Mayo in general too, of course.
Nothing new there.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 13, 2021 7:34:47 GMT
Éamonn Fitzmaurice: This could be the start of something big for Tyrone
The age profile of their squad would suggest they are at the start of something rather than at the end and they will grow further for this win
MON, 13 SEP, 2021 - 07:00
Eamonn Fitzmaurice
Éamonn Fitzmaurice
“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre; c’est de la folie.”
- General Pierre Bosquet
Winning All-Irelands as part of a group is special and an immediate and everlasting bond is formed with your team-mates. However, at the final whistle on Saturday I was reminded just how personal everything is and how it always comes back to family when all is said and done.
Having finished my duties with RTÉ, I was walking down the sideline towards Hill 16 when I met a visibly moved Peter Canavan trying to compose himself before he went on camera again. I congratulated him and kept going. The pride he was feeling for his son Darragh was bursting out through him. He has obviously been there done that himself but the fact his own flesh and blood had just reached the pinnacle of the game clearly meant the world to him.
There were so many reasons Tyrone deservedly won Saturday’s All-Ireland final with excellent individual displays all over the pitch but for me, the most significant one was their help defence. It was outstanding and significantly shaped many other aspects of their game.
Having moved away from permanent sweepers as favoured by Mickey Harte, Brian Dooher and Fergal Logan deserve huge credit for this. To get this right takes a huge amount of work on the training pitch. It is systematic but there are plenty of moving parts and decision making involved in it. They are excellent at identifying and getting to danger to ‘put out the fires’ as Kieran McGeary said last week. They sprint there and double and treble up at times forcing turnovers.
This generates serious intensity, is hard to play against but requires enormous energy and concentration. This was particularly important against Mayo who love running hard through the middle of the pitch. When Tyrone turned over the Connacht champions they counter-attacked at pace and sucked them out of shape. Aidan O’Shea et al spent plenty of the game chasing Ronan McNamee and Pádraig Hampsey (who again scored a great outside of the boot point) back the pitch in these counter attacks. That saps energy that could be better spent attacking the other end. That is the cost of turnovers though, and it is why it is so important to minimise them against Tyrone as they again profited handsomely from them, scoring 1-7 from Mayo turnovers on Saturday.
Goals were always going to be huge in a contest where both sets of forwards were guilty of poor shooting and decision-making close to goal. Ryan O’Donoghue’s penalty miss will stay with him for a long time. He had just missed a very scoreable free albeit from a tricky angle that led to the penalty. It may have rattled his confidence as he had kicked magnificently and was Mayo’s best forward prior to that. It was a huge moment in the game. Mayo are a momentum team and a goal would have energised them and their supporters. Instead three minutes later Cathal McShane, having just been introduced, got a goal at the other end when only a point separated the teams and put the Ulster champions on the road to victory.
McShane’s movement for the goal was good as he checked back inside Oisín Mullen but Conor Meyler’s over the top delivery from the wing was accuracy personified and made the goal. The second goal came from a Niall Morgan (superb again) booming kickout that almost landed on the Mayo 45 metre line. They have been trying this all season with mixed results. They bravely stuck with it on Saturday and flipped the normal bias of short versus long kickouts by going long with 16 of their 25 kickouts, winning 12 of them. Critically, they scored a further 1-7 from this.
Mayo had been living dangerously on the Morgan boomer all day and Stephen Coen had intervened on more than one occasion when they were wide open. However once Conn Kilpatrick caught the ball and transferred it swiftly to an onrushing Conor McKenna, Mayo were completely exposed. McKenna delayed his pass until the perfect moment, slipping it to Darren McCurry to allow him to palm it into an empty net. Their decision-making and skill execution in the game deciding moments was in stark contrast to Mayo when they were presented with goal chances.
When the ball fell to Conor Loftus in the first half he tried to side step it in, when it would have made sense to pick it and finish. Aidan O’Shea had a great chance and chose to do the one thing he shouldn’t have which was shoot early. He could have dropped the shoulder and rounded the already committed Ronan McNamee or he could also have slipped in Loftus who was supporting him off the shoulder and would have surely scored. Tommy Conroy failed to test Morgan with his chance early in the second half and then we had the penalty. For Mayo to win they needed goals, and despite decent opportunities ended up with none. It is hard to know what to say about Mayo. On one side the question “where do they go from here?” could be posed but part of the identity of this team is that they will go away, dust themselves down and come back next season and will be in the conversation again.
In most of the finals that they have lost, they have died with their boots on but this one will hurt them the most because of their lack of performance. They will have Cillian O’Connor back and he will add to their forward options. Tommy Conroy and Ryan O’Donoghue will develop further but they still need a few more finishers upfront, even if they are being held to impact late on. Think of the significance of McShane and Canavan’s contributions after being introduced. They are not going to win an All-Ireland until they improve their play in the final third. When they can’t overrun teams with their athleticism and hard running game, they struggle to score enough. They lack variety upfront. They converted 15 of 31 scoring chances on Saturday. A total of 15 points with a shot accuracy of 48% won’t get the job done. Their style of play when going well is exciting and lifts the crowd but against the top teams that can block up the middle, turn them over and counter it becomes a hindrance. They are attacking in numbers, not scoring and then are out of shape.
When thinking about the way they play the charge of the light brigade comes to mind. The charge was tactically a disaster, but in the eyes of the Russians, the British cavalry appeared to know no fear. The action was summed up by the French commander General Pierre Bosquet who remarked, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre; c’est de la folie’ It’s magnificent, but it’s not war; it’s madness’.
Mayo will need to add variation to their forward play for the 2022 season.
Brian Dooher and Fergal Logan deserve huge credit for what their team has achieved this year. In a normal season the rate of improvement would have been impressive but factoring in the condensed nature of the season and the Covid complications their development has been remarkable.
They have good players and are hanging around in the latter stages of the championship most years but perceiving them as champions pre season would have been fanciful, when they would have been ranked outside of the top five in most people’s eyes.
The order can be debated but Kerry, Dublin, Mayo, Donegal and Monaghan would all have been ahead of them. They beat four of that five on the way to Sam Maguire. The age profile of their squad would suggest they are at the start of something rather than at the end and they will grow further for this win.
That is all in the future though, for now it’s Tyrone’s world and we are all living in it.
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Post by glengael on Sept 13, 2021 8:56:35 GMT
As a matter of interest what credentials did Dooher & Logan have in management when they got the Tyrone gig?
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Post by gaelicden on Sept 13, 2021 9:08:27 GMT
As a matter of interest what credentials did Dooher & Logan have in management when they got the Tyrone gig? Definitely 1 U21 All Ireland in 2015. Tyrone beat Tipperary by 1 point. Think there was a bit of controversy in that game also. |
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Sept 13, 2021 9:13:22 GMT
I have seen little or no comment on how calm and composed Tyrone for.
Coming out for the second half it was like they were out for a Saturday morning stroll
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Post by Ballyfireside on Sept 13, 2021 16:59:05 GMT
As a matter of interest what credentials did Dooher & Logan have in management when they got the Tyrone gig? What I can say from meeting plenty of 'em up here was that they were split re Mickey - some said he'd stay 'till he decided to go himself while younger lads wanted him gone from a few years back. I think this shaped/framed the transfer and Brian/Feargal had an extended run-in to the formal coronation, there was talk Canavan might be interested but maybe between media commitment and two sons involved was probably a factor, St Pater maintains his independence rather well on Sky and that anchor lady is also noteworthy wherever she came out of. |
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 13, 2021 20:34:23 GMT
'I find all the ‘Mayo bottled it’ analysis to be shallow'
"Mayo got the details wrong. A lot of it was their execution more than anything."
'I find all the ‘Mayo bottled it’ analysis to be shallow'
MON, 13 SEP, 2021 - 16:48
LARRY RYAN
There was unanimous admiration for Tyrone’s verve and skill and gameplan on the Irish Examiner GAA Podcast, but appetite for another Mayo inquest was limited. Particularly another trek down well-worn paths.
“I’m really struggling to get the tone right on Mayo, because I think some of the things that have been written about one particular Mayo player and indeed about the general integrity or culture of the team, I find it deplorable,” said Paul Rouse.
“I find all the ‘Mayo bottled it’ analysis to be shallow. If I’m really honest, it’s because I'm disappointed for them, I’m disappointed for the people, for the players, for James Horan. But the simple truth is, Mayo were not good enough on the day.”
Former Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice was of a similar mind.
“I’m the same. I’ve been there. I felt very sorry for him (Horan) on Saturday evening. They didn’t perform. When you win an All-Ireland we’re talking about the small details. Tyrone got all those right and they deserve huge credit for that. Mayo got the details wrong. A lot of it was their execution more than anything.
“The one thought I did have about Mayo... in one way they’d be better off if they had been beaten by Dublin. Because repeatedly getting to finals and not seeing it out is killer stuff.”
Fitzmaurice sees a winter of introspection ahead of the Mayo manager.
“When Horan took over in his first stint he transformed them from a team with a soft underbelly into a beast, a hard physical group that were hard to get the better of.
“He realised what was needed to take them from where they were. But there’s a missing link, a chink. He’s a bright guy. He’s going to have to try and figure that out. Because if they keep doing what they are doing they are not going to get there.
“You can talk about the technical side, the lack of variety in attack, the lack of a half-forward line because they are up and down the field all the time. But there is something else missing and James Horan needs to figure that out this winter.
"What is that missing chink? I think he can figure it out but until they do they are not going to win the All-Ireland."
Oisín McConville does detect a leadership vacuum on the field.
“I didn’t see anyone in particular standing up. It’s ok having leaders defensively, Lee Keegan, Stephen Coen. Oisín Mullen is that ilk. O’Hora, the way he does things, there’s a heroic element.
“But I think the leaders need to be in different areas of the field. I think when you are rudderless from the middle up, it takes someone to stop the play, to have a word, to do whatever. Cillian O’Connor was a huge miss. Organisation pure and simple. Kickouts — how good he is at clamping that down, how much he leads.
“But I think it runs deeper than that. You have to look within, stop looking at the sideline. What was going on on the pitch wasn’t good enough and there was nobody there to call a halt and say let's reset and go again.
“Tyrone have that stuff off to a tee. Small things. I think Mayo are always working on the bigger things and some of the smaller things that incorporate game management are being missed or not being worked on as much.”
In association with Renault Ireland.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 14, 2021 7:50:28 GMT
Kevin McStay
Monday morning was overcast and squally in the west of Ireland: an appropriate backdrop to the general emotion in Co Mayo. What is the prevailing feeling for us after the latest All-Ireland final failure?
I think it is probably frustration and resignation edging into anger. We have found yet another county to lose an All-Ireland final to. We might have told ourselves stories in other years when we lost to Dublin to Kerry: ‘oh Galway got Kildare when they made their breakthrough in 1998’. We were up against Kerry, against Dublin, against that oppressive tradition. Those are self-deceptions. In 2012 it was Donegal who eclipsed us. And on Saturday it was Tyrone. This time, Mayo were favourites. It made no difference. The losing sequence continued.
My sense is that the numbers are becoming so accusatory now that they are beginning to frazzle the Mayo minds. We have a generation of footballers who have played seven All-Ireland finals, including the 2016 draw, and lost six times. I feel that Lee Keegan is pound for pound the best footballer Mayo has ever produced. Is that the number that will or should be attached to him as a legacy?
My family often accuses me of being cold and clinical in my public analysis of Mayo. I think it might be because of the company I keep over a championship season: people who are informed about the game. And mixing with people like Colm O’Rourke and Seán Cavanagh and Oisín McConville, who have a deep understanding of what it takes to win an All-Ireland.
I travelled to Dublin over the weekend with high hopes founded on logical reasons why Mayo could win this. Modern finals have become real ‘events’, with a momentum and anticipation which builds up over the week. Media coverage is massive and people have as much fine detail as they want. I love that part of it. But the weekend reminded me of how transient it all is. On Friday night, we bumped into Brian Fenton, walking home in Clontarf with a takeaway under his arm. And I found it kind of amazing that he was suddenly no longer part of this: that it was Mayo and Tyrone’s show. He was gracious and wished us well.
Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing
Then, on Saturday morning I happened upon Peter Canavan at the lift in the hotel. Naturally, his focus was on the family aspect. One of the greatest players of all time was quite rightly just another nervous, proud father of a son who was playing. He was caught up in it. I wished him well. When I next saw Peter, he was standing all alone in the 76th minute caught in the absolute joy of knowing there was another Celtic Cross coming into the family home. What a beautiful moment for him. The contrasts between the Tyrone joy and the crushing realisation that yet another Mayo team were being thrust into the same purgatorial place became very clear and pronounced in those fading minutes of the contest.
The texts came thick and fast after the game from former players and people involved in the sport. The message was: tough loss. But you cannot expect a Mayo team to win when they play like that.
Brilliant fortune
I feel that many fans don’t have that same cold perspective. There is a tendency to contextualise and equivocate: we are young! We had a great run! Morgan was off his line for the penalty! Sure we will have Cillian back next year! To former All-Ireland champions, these excuses are irrelevant. To them, this is the truth. The game was beautifully poised at half time. Mayo got the brilliant fortune of a penalty at the perfect time. Young O’Donoghue had a very fine game but I am sure he wishes he could take that penalty again. It wasn’t just the miss: it was the embellished run up which drew further attention to the miss.
That moment wasn’t the winning and losing of the game. But it set Mayo off into a nightmare closing half hour. In the 50th minute Cathal McShane had a horrible wide for Tyrone from a free. Right then, the wide count was pretty even: Tyrone 7, Mayo 6. It was to be Tyrone’s last wide. But for the remaining 27 minutes of the match, Mayo missed a penalty, kicked eight further wides, two others shot into the goalkeeper’s hands, had crazy turnovers and fell into a pattern of awful decision making. It wasn’t quite a meltdown. But there was a sense that as a group, they were afraid to go and win the All-Ireland final: that they found it hard to muster up the courage to take responsibility and make the right pass and do the right thing.
You cannot keep returning to these finals and repeat the errors of yesteryear. From an analytical point of view, it is unacceptable. I think the Mayo management will be at a loss to understand how it got so bad. The substitutions, rather than add energy, actually sucked energy out of it.
The wides I am talking about aren’t just ‘wides’ as a fan would count them. They are not just missed shots or a statistic. You have to examine what kind of wide it is. And the unsightly part is that that 50 per cent of those wides were down to lack of quality and poor shot selection. I have spoken before about the ASS statistic: It’s a simple breakdown which explains so much. The ideal attacks/shots/scores rate is 40/30/20 or better. Mayo on Saturday broke down as: 46/31/15. It was yet another case of a disastrous inability to convert chances into scores. Rather than working hard to create the easy score, the Mayo players began to take snatch shots based on blind hope. I wrote here that five or six wides is where a team needs to be at the end of a game. Our twelfth wide was a simple handpass from Oisín Mullin to Darren Coen that dribbled out over the endline. It summed up the day.
Where did the composure go? And why did it leave Mayo?
After all, Tyrone had issues, too. They had many opportunities to extend a very good lead but failed to capitalise on them. However, the Tyrone attack, whether by design or otherwise, were informed by a sense of purpose and know-how: that they were all reading off the same page. Their two goals were emblematic of this. And they disguised a glaring barren spell for the Tyrone attack also. Tyrone failed to score a point from play from half time until the 67th minute of the second half, when Darragh Canavan fisted a ball over the bar. That is not a system failure but it is not the sign of a rampant team either.
Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing. We need to be cold. We need to throw off the comfort blankets and the gallows humour and the sense that they will be back next year. This time, the team needs to have a massive post mortem about their second half. Otherwise, they are fated to repeat those mistakes in future big games.
Do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years?
The management must look at their panel again. We must get the balance between athlete and footballer more accurately aligned. Conor Meyler is an incredible athlete. But look at his ball playing skills, too. We don’t quite have that. The Tyrone approach negated Mayo’s athletic profile. Their big fear, surely, was allowing Mayo to slip into their running game. How did they break it up so effectively? They went man to man high up the field and took a chance on the inside line. They gambled. Mayo had goal chances. But the Mayo running game rarely got into flow. It was a very brave call by Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher and there was risk involved in it. But that is the job of management: to make the assessment and judge the risk. So in the end, Mayo’s prime weapon - their running power - looked blunted.
There is a debate I often had in the 1990s with John Maughan. We had a dearth of forwards but endless defenders who kept Mayo in games. Kenneth Mortimer was the prototype. He was a terrific defender but he was so good that he could play forward too. And John did play him at 11 at times. But do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years? It surely has to start down at academy level where we begin to produce and coach specific types of forwards rather than just another fine all round player who often gravitates into defence and becomes these marauding attacking defenders.
Brushstroke dismissals
Look at Aidan O’Shea. Nobody but nobody can agree where Mayo should play him and what his best position is, yet he has been playing for over a decade. Maybe Mayo have done O’Shea a disservice here. Has his role ever been clarified for him? Or has he been asked to be all things for too many Mayo teams down the years? His game has suffered because of that. This was true on Saturday. Aidan had a very decent start. I felt he was one of the top three Mayo players at half time. If people are being honest about it rather than the brushstroke dismissals of him, here is a synopsis.
He wins the throw-in (both halves) and gives a lovely assist for Tommy Conroy and Mayo have a very early and very encouraging score. In the opening 20 minutes he regularly won his ball in front of Ronan McNamee. He then kicked a wide which I felt was the key moment for his day. And it was illustrative of a guy who is a bit low on confidence. He knows the chance is there and he knows he has to take it. But somewhere in his mind he is doubting himself and he just doesn’t strike it with enough conviction. Very soon after comes the golden chance: a goal opportunity. And it is the same want of confidence. If this is a league game or a game in Connacht, Aidan scores that all day long. He shows McNamee the ball and lets him skid past him and then he has Morgan at his mercy or Conor Loftus coming on his right. In my opinion, he actually tried to chip a point. And that is why McNamee got the block. Still, he created the penalty shout for Pádraig O’Hora. He had at least 10 positive plays. His second half deteriorated badly - but he was part of a failing unit. He was still on the ball a lot. He still kept showing.
So he was low on confidence. But ask yourself this: if you took the kind of * that is thrown at Aidan O’Shea all the time, wouldn’t you be too?
He came in for some harsh treatment on social media on Saturday night. You cannot govern that. But not for the first time, he was central to the criticism of Joe Brolly’s latest dissection of Mayo in his newspaper column with the Sunday Independent. I worked with Joe for a long time on RTÉ. We were never close, as they say. He can be good company and he is affable. And Joe has had a privileged platform and influence for many years.
The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan’s career. I am sure Aidan knows this
You have to be careful how you use that. He puts himself up there when he is talking about the requirement of winning All-Irelands as though he is some kind of leading authority on the subject. He played with a county that made it to an All-Ireland final once - ever - and won it: good luck to him. But he played county ball for many years: by his standard he was a failure in all bar one of those. He personalises Mayo’ defeats and puts it down to a failure of moral character. He talks of cliques and of Aidan as “a protected captain” and questions James Horan’s authority. None of that equates to what I hear of what goes on within Mayo. We have had a lot of retirements here. If those issues were prevalent, they would have come to the fore. My sense is that they run a very decent show in the Mayo camp.
Not balanced
I felt Joe stepped over the line in his treatment of Aidan and it was lousy: it was personal and not balanced. You can take issue with how a football player presents himself to the world. But it doesn’t give you carte blanche to trample all over somebody’s personality or reputation. Everyone knows the Mayo effort was not good enough. But you cannot pile it on O’Shea and James Horan. Everyone is entitled to a fair hearing and you cannot manipulate an entire career down to a few games. The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan’s career. I am sure Aidan knows this. But the manner in which Joe is going after Aidan O’Shea is just bloody wrong.
Here’s a story. O’Shea lost his fifth final on Saturday, December 19th, 2020. He didn’t score. Dublin won with no undue fuss. On Monday, January 18th 2021 a friend of mine had a meeting with a sports consultant in the Sism gym in Castlebar. It is run by a member of the Mayo backroom team. It was a wet damp old morning and as he went into the office, my friend spotted O’Shea doing a weights session. He had started back the week before. People don’t see that side of it. He has been doing this for a decade. Joe doesn’t see that. Up to recently, Aidan O’Shea hadn’t missed a game for Mayo in 10 years.
I imagine that he won’t miss many next summer either. In the meantime, Mayo have to immediately begin to rectify the failures that have repeatedly destroyed us in All-Ireland finals. Change needs to happen in the dressing room and across the county. Otherwise another 70 years will slip by and we will all be pretty old by then.
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Post by veteran on Sept 14, 2021 9:53:39 GMT
That Kevin McStay article is one of the more thoughtful and incisive written about the match. A cold analysis devoid of hyperbole and cliches .
Of course for me the highlight of the article was his slicing and dicing of the arch grave dancer, Comical Joe.. There is something deeply pathological about a person who garners so much happiness from the misery and misfortune of others , glorying in personalised attacks. One small mercy is that RTÉ gave him a kick up the transom.
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peanuts
Fanatical Member
Posts: 1,828
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Post by peanuts on Sept 14, 2021 10:00:16 GMT
That Kevin McStay article is one of the more thoughtful and incisive written about the match. A cold analysis devoid of hyperbole and cliches . Of course for me the highlight of the article was his slicing and dicing of the arch grave dancer, Comical Joe.. There is something deeply pathological about a person who garners so much happiness from the misery and misfortune of others , glorying in personalised attacks. One small mercy is that RTÉ gave him a kick up the transom. Agree on both counts |
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Post by markisback on Sept 14, 2021 11:41:25 GMT
As a matter of interest what credentials did Dooher & Logan have in management when they got the Tyrone gig? They won an All Ireland with the under 21s A few years ago. To be completely accurate, Logan was the manager and Dooher was on his back room team. |
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Post by markisback on Sept 14, 2021 11:48:17 GMT
David gave a tour de force in the semi best individual performance by anyone all year imo we only played 2 games that mattered really and he was immense in both. He carried us on his back scoring wise vs tyrone if he hadn't got injured we might have won that game. 8 Tyrone seems a bit high in my book I think Tom sull deserves a place he beat mccurry hands down something mayo couldn't replicate 8 Tyrone seemed high to me also but I think the fact that Tyrone had 4 proper championship matches helps their case. The lack of a back door and non competitive matches also skews the representation I would agree with you that 8 is too high. I think the Sunday Game Team of the Year and All-Stars is not reflective of who the best players in the country are in any year. They are always massively weighted toward the winners and the losing finalists. There have been many other years I thought a few Tyrone boys should be getting positions, but the vast majority of the spaces are reserved for the finalists. God help your chances of being recognised if you were a massively talented footballer from Wicklow or Carlow. |
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Post by Ballyfireside on Sept 14, 2021 12:18:16 GMT
Kevin McStay Monday morning was overcast and squally in the west of Ireland: an appropriate backdrop to the general emotion in Co Mayo. What is the prevailing feeling for us after the latest All-Ireland final failure? I think it is probably frustration and resignation edging into anger. We have found yet another county to lose an All-Ireland final to. We might have told ourselves stories in other years when we lost to Dublin to Kerry: ‘oh Galway got Kildare when they made their breakthrough in 1998’. We were up against Kerry, against Dublin, against that oppressive tradition. Those are self-deceptions. In 2012 it was Donegal who eclipsed us. And on Saturday it was Tyrone. This time, Mayo were favourites. It made no difference. The losing sequence continued. My sense is that the numbers are becoming so accusatory now that they are beginning to frazzle the Mayo minds. We have a generation of footballers who have played seven All-Ireland finals, including the 2016 draw, and lost six times. I feel that Lee Keegan is pound for pound the best footballer Mayo has ever produced. Is that the number that will or should be attached to him as a legacy? My family often accuses me of being cold and clinical in my public analysis of Mayo. I think it might be because of the company I keep over a championship season: people who are informed about the game. And mixing with people like Colm O’Rourke and Seán Cavanagh and Oisín McConville, who have a deep understanding of what it takes to win an All-Ireland. I travelled to Dublin over the weekend with high hopes founded on logical reasons why Mayo could win this. Modern finals have become real ‘events’, with a momentum and anticipation which builds up over the week. Media coverage is massive and people have as much fine detail as they want. I love that part of it. But the weekend reminded me of how transient it all is. On Friday night, we bumped into Brian Fenton, walking home in Clontarf with a takeaway under his arm. And I found it kind of amazing that he was suddenly no longer part of this: that it was Mayo and Tyrone’s show. He was gracious and wished us well. Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing Then, on Saturday morning I happened upon Peter Canavan at the lift in the hotel. Naturally, his focus was on the family aspect. One of the greatest players of all time was quite rightly just another nervous, proud father of a son who was playing. He was caught up in it. I wished him well. When I next saw Peter, he was standing all alone in the 76th minute caught in the absolute joy of knowing there was another Celtic Cross coming into the family home. What a beautiful moment for him. The contrasts between the Tyrone joy and the crushing realisation that yet another Mayo team were being thrust into the same purgatorial place became very clear and pronounced in those fading minutes of the contest. The texts came thick and fast after the game from former players and people involved in the sport. The message was: tough loss. But you cannot expect a Mayo team to win when they play like that. Brilliant fortune I feel that many fans don’t have that same cold perspective. There is a tendency to contextualise and equivocate: we are young! We had a great run! Morgan was off his line for the penalty! Sure we will have Cillian back next year! To former All-Ireland champions, these excuses are irrelevant. To them, this is the truth. The game was beautifully poised at half time. Mayo got the brilliant fortune of a penalty at the perfect time. Young O’Donoghue had a very fine game but I am sure he wishes he could take that penalty again. It wasn’t just the miss: it was the embellished run up which drew further attention to the miss. That moment wasn’t the winning and losing of the game. But it set Mayo off into a nightmare closing half hour. In the 50th minute Cathal McShane had a horrible wide for Tyrone from a free. Right then, the wide count was pretty even: Tyrone 7, Mayo 6. It was to be Tyrone’s last wide. But for the remaining 27 minutes of the match, Mayo missed a penalty, kicked eight further wides, two others shot into the goalkeeper’s hands, had crazy turnovers and fell into a pattern of awful decision making. It wasn’t quite a meltdown. But there was a sense that as a group, they were afraid to go and win the All-Ireland final: that they found it hard to muster up the courage to take responsibility and make the right pass and do the right thing. You cannot keep returning to these finals and repeat the errors of yesteryear. From an analytical point of view, it is unacceptable. I think the Mayo management will be at a loss to understand how it got so bad. The substitutions, rather than add energy, actually sucked energy out of it. The wides I am talking about aren’t just ‘wides’ as a fan would count them. They are not just missed shots or a statistic. You have to examine what kind of wide it is. And the unsightly part is that that 50 per cent of those wides were down to lack of quality and poor shot selection. I have spoken before about the ASS statistic: It’s a simple breakdown which explains so much. The ideal attacks/shots/scores rate is 40/30/20 or better. Mayo on Saturday broke down as: 46/31/15. It was yet another case of a disastrous inability to convert chances into scores. Rather than working hard to create the easy score, the Mayo players began to take snatch shots based on blind hope. I wrote here that five or six wides is where a team needs to be at the end of a game. Our twelfth wide was a simple handpass from Oisín Mullin to Darren Coen that dribbled out over the endline. It summed up the day. Where did the composure go? And why did it leave Mayo? After all, Tyrone had issues, too. They had many opportunities to extend a very good lead but failed to capitalise on them. However, the Tyrone attack, whether by design or otherwise, were informed by a sense of purpose and know-how: that they were all reading off the same page. Their two goals were emblematic of this. And they disguised a glaring barren spell for the Tyrone attack also. Tyrone failed to score a point from play from half time until the 67th minute of the second half, when Darragh Canavan fisted a ball over the bar. That is not a system failure but it is not the sign of a rampant team either. Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing. We need to be cold. We need to throw off the comfort blankets and the gallows humour and the sense that they will be back next year. This time, the team needs to have a massive post mortem about their second half. Otherwise, they are fated to repeat those mistakes in future big games. Do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years? The management must look at their panel again. We must get the balance between athlete and footballer more accurately aligned. Conor Meyler is an incredible athlete. But look at his ball playing skills, too. We don’t quite have that. The Tyrone approach negated Mayo’s athletic profile. Their big fear, surely, was allowing Mayo to slip into their running game. How did they break it up so effectively? They went man to man high up the field and took a chance on the inside line. They gambled. Mayo had goal chances. But the Mayo running game rarely got into flow. It was a very brave call by Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher and there was risk involved in it. But that is the job of management: to make the assessment and judge the risk. So in the end, Mayo’s prime weapon - their running power - looked blunted. There is a debate I often had in the 1990s with John Maughan. We had a dearth of forwards but endless defenders who kept Mayo in games. Kenneth Mortimer was the prototype. He was a terrific defender but he was so good that he could play forward too. And John did play him at 11 at times. But do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years? It surely has to start down at academy level where we begin to produce and coach specific types of forwards rather than just another fine all round player who often gravitates into defence and becomes these marauding attacking defenders. Brushstroke dismissals Look at Aidan O’Shea. Nobody but nobody can agree where Mayo should play him and what his best position is, yet he has been playing for over a decade. Maybe Mayo have done O’Shea a disservice here. Has his role ever been clarified for him? Or has he been asked to be all things for too many Mayo teams down the years? His game has suffered because of that. This was true on Saturday. Aidan had a very decent start. I felt he was one of the top three Mayo players at half time. If people are being honest about it rather than the brushstroke dismissals of him, here is a synopsis. He wins the throw-in (both halves) and gives a lovely assist for Tommy Conroy and Mayo have a very early and very encouraging score. In the opening 20 minutes he regularly won his ball in front of Ronan McNamee. He then kicked a wide which I felt was the key moment for his day. And it was illustrative of a guy who is a bit low on confidence. He knows the chance is there and he knows he has to take it. But somewhere in his mind he is doubting himself and he just doesn’t strike it with enough conviction. Very soon after comes the golden chance: a goal opportunity. And it is the same want of confidence. If this is a league game or a game in Connacht, Aidan scores that all day long. He shows McNamee the ball and lets him skid past him and then he has Morgan at his mercy or Conor Loftus coming on his right. In my opinion, he actually tried to chip a point. And that is why McNamee got the block. Still, he created the penalty shout for Pádraig O’Hora. He had at least 10 positive plays. His second half deteriorated badly - but he was part of a failing unit. He was still on the ball a lot. He still kept showing. So he was low on confidence. But ask yourself this: if you took the kind of * that is thrown at Aidan O’Shea all the time, wouldn’t you be too? He came in for some harsh treatment on social media on Saturday night. You cannot govern that. But not for the first time, he was central to the criticism of Joe Brolly’s latest dissection of Mayo in his newspaper column with the Sunday Independent. I worked with Joe for a long time on RTÉ. We were never close, as they say. He can be good company and he is affable. And Joe has had a privileged platform and influence for many years. The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan’s career. I am sure Aidan knows this You have to be careful how you use that. He puts himself up there when he is talking about the requirement of winning All-Irelands as though he is some kind of leading authority on the subject. He played with a county that made it to an All-Ireland final once - ever - and won it: good luck to him. But he played county ball for many years: by his standard he was a failure in all bar one of those. He personalises Mayo’ defeats and puts it down to a failure of moral character. He talks of cliques and of Aidan as “a protected captain” and questions James Horan’s authority. None of that equates to what I hear of what goes on within Mayo. We have had a lot of retirements here. If those issues were prevalent, they would have come to the fore. My sense is that they run a very decent show in the Mayo camp. Not balanced I felt Joe stepped over the line in his treatment of Aidan and it was lousy: it was personal and not balanced. You can take issue with how a football player presents himself to the world. But it doesn’t give you carte blanche to trample all over somebody’s personality or reputation. Everyone knows the Mayo effort was not good enough. But you cannot pile it on O’Shea and James Horan. Everyone is entitled to a fair hearing and you cannot manipulate an entire career down to a few games. The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan’s career. I am sure Aidan knows this. But the manner in which Joe is going after Aidan O’Shea is just bloody wrong. Here’s a story. O’Shea lost his fifth final on Saturday, December 19th, 2020. He didn’t score. Dublin won with no undue fuss. On Monday, January 18th 2021 a friend of mine had a meeting with a sports consultant in the Sism gym in Castlebar. It is run by a member of the Mayo backroom team. It was a wet damp old morning and as he went into the office, my friend spotted O’Shea doing a weights session. He had started back the week before. People don’t see that side of it. He has been doing this for a decade. Joe doesn’t see that. Up to recently, Aidan O’Shea hadn’t missed a game for Mayo in 10 years. I imagine that he won’t miss many next summer either. In the meantime, Mayo have to immediately begin to rectify the failures that have repeatedly destroyed us in All-Ireland finals. Change needs to happen in the dressing room and across the county. Otherwise another 70 years will slip by and we will all be pretty old by then. We need more info on what type of player is needed. The issue with social media is that off-the-ball is excluded as few have been at the game and so AO'6 was judged by his few key errors on the ball. Confidence can be an issue with Mayo and less so us - I think it stems for over confidence and then it collapses when one finds they are losing a grip on a game they believed was theirs for the taking. As for Joe, there was also him praying in mocking manner in The Indo - unhealthy stuff and won't help his case. He is better than that surely? |
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 14, 2021 12:26:00 GMT
Meanwhile Joe is suing RTE for defamation.
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Post by glengael on Sept 14, 2021 12:40:18 GMT
Meanwhile Joe is suing RTE for defamation. I think that case relates to a current affairs programme not sport so for a different forum. |
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Post by markisback on Sept 14, 2021 14:26:21 GMT
Meanwhile Joe is suing RTE for defamation. I think that case relates to a current affairs programme not sport so for a different forum. That’s right. To be fair he may have a point about the current affairs matter, but as you say it’s not football related, so we won’t dwell on that. What seems clear is that his attacks on Aidan O’Shea are really unfair. Joe, like many of the pundits who write in the Sunday papers takes the result of a match and works backwards. I have always thought that Aidan was a little bit overrated in the sense that there was a concentration on him far over and above other really good players like Keith Higgins, Chris Barrett, Colm Boyle and others. But he is a good player and it’s really disappointing to see him singled out by Joe Brolly when things don’t go Mayo’s way. |
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Sept 14, 2021 14:35:31 GMT
I am happy to hear Joe Brolly roundly criticised on the podcast circuit. I didn't and wouldn't read the article but happy to describe it as shameful.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 15, 2021 8:42:11 GMT
Darragh O'Se
All-Ireland finals are merciless occasions. They don’t care who you are or what you’ve been through or how far you’ve come. They are over so quickly that there’s no time for anything other than cold, calculated professionalism. You either turn up ready for business or you spend the winter wondering what happened to you.
I always watch finals with a few fundamental questions in my head. Who has grasped what’s needed here? Which team has turned up with a clear idea of what has to be done to come out the other side of it smiling? How many players on either side truly get it?
The glaring difference on Saturday night was that so many more Tyrone players were tuned into the terms and conditions of the final. There was a game to be won and they went and did it. They didn’t try anything they shouldn’t have.
Go back to the semi-final and think of how Niall Morgan tried three different long kick passes with the outside of his boot and sprayed them everywhere, including out over the sideline. In the final, he was a different player. It wasn’t about big Hollywood passes, showing off how good a footballer he was. It was professional, precise, no-messing kind of stuff.
That went right through the team for Tyrone. Their two big midfielders didn’t do anything more hectic or special than compete for high ball around the middle and move it on.
I was a bit amused afterwards to hear everyone raving about Conn Kilpatrick’s catch to set up the second Tyrone goal. It was like the Roy Keane line about not clapping for the postman because he gets the envelope through the letterbox. That’s why he was in the team.
There’s a difference between being desperate to score and being serious enough about it to do the right thing to guarantee it
It was a good catch, don’t get me wrong. And he moved the ball onto Conor McKenna smartly and quickly. But if he had done anything less than that, you’d be asking questions. Big hardy midfielders are there to catch the ball and give it on to the smaller, quicker, more skilful lads. Especially in an All-Ireland final.
To be fair, that’s one of the big changes to Tyrone since Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan took over. They have brought in Kilpatrick and Brian Kennedy and given them the job of being an option long down the field for Morgan’s kick-outs. If you look at where Kilpatrick took that catch, it was midway between the Mayo 65 and 45. If you went back through the past five years under Mickey Harte, you’d struggle to find many Tyrone kick-outs that landed in that area.
'Think about Aidan O’Shea’s kick in the first half, coming out on the loop onto his good left foot. He was too casual about it and pulled it wide on the near side.' Photograph: Tommy Dickson/Inpho
There’s a simplicity to it that can be hard to beat. Stand your 6ft5in midfielder at centre-forward and ping the ball down on top of him. As good a catch as it was, Kilpatrick had his two feet on the ground when he took it. This is my point – you use the weapons you have to their fullest effect. You don’t have to be flashy, you don’t have to be spectacular. Just be good at the things that matter.
Great strengths
After the Kerry game, it was so obvious that one of Tyrone’s great strengths was their ability to handpass out of tight situations. The way McKenna went straight for goal from Kilpatrick’s pass to draw the defence before flicking away to his left for McCurry was a prime example of it.
He had two defenders and the goalkeeper coming to poleaxe him but he waited until it was definitely going to hurt to squeeze out the handpass. If you watch it again, you can see that he doesn’t look over to telegraph it – he makes sure McCurry is going to have every chance and every bit of space he can eke out to palm the ball home.
That is what you need to do. Total maximisation of the opportunity. Nobody did anything amazing, but all four players involved did the thing they have practiced in training a thousand times.
How many kick-outs has Conn Kilpatrick caught in his life? How many times has Conor McKenna done drills that involved drawing defenders to create space before getting the handpass away? How many times has Darren McCurry made that sprint to the back post to finish off a move? I’d say they’re all nearly bored doing those basic things by this stage.
And yet, when the chance came and the right thing had to be done, all that practice and training clicked into place and they buried Mayo without having to even think about what they were doing.
This is where Mayo fell down, in my eyes. I would exempt Lee Keegan from any criticism because you could see he understood the rules of engagement. Straight after McCurry’s goal, he took it upon himself to get forward and strike a point.
Lee Keegan with his daughter Lile at Croke Park: The Mayo veteran had total certainty about what was needed and he went out and showed it. You can’t say that for some of the other Mayo players. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
Lee Keegan with his daughter Lile at Croke Park: The Mayo veteran had total certainty about what was needed and he went out and showed it. You can’t say that for some of the other Mayo players. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
Go back and watch his kick for it – he was 40 metres out and had to cut across the ball to get the right swerve on it but he did it with no fuss. A minute later, he won a free to bring the margin back to three. He had total certainty about what was needed and he went out and showed it.
You can’t say that for some of the other Mayo players. I felt at times that they hadn’t a true understanding of where the game stood and how easily it was getting away from them. They were missing chances by not taking them seriously enough.
I know that probably comes across as a stupid thing to say – it’s an All-Ireland final and there was nothing in their lives that they were taking more seriously right at that moment. But there’s a difference between being desperate to score and being serious enough about it to do the right thing to guarantee it. And if you go back and look at some of the Mayo misses in the second half especially, they came about because of bad execution of straightforward skills.
Think about Aidan O’Shea’s kick in the first half, coming out on the loop onto his good left foot. He was too casual about it and pulled it wide on the near side. Think about Conor Loftus coming in off the left in the second half when it was 1-10 to 0-10. He was too rushed with his shot and cut across the ball and screwed it way wide on the far side.
Crucial time
Now if you took either of those guys onto a pitch and told them you wanted them to show young players how to kick a point from where they kicked those ones, they’d make them nine times out of 10. They would go through their kicking action, they would steady themselves and make sure of their footing and they would more than likely split the posts. But they made a mess of their kicks here.
You don’t have to play cat and mouse with the goalkeeper. You don’t have to pick out the postage stamp in the top corner
Same with Ryan O’Donoghue and his penalty. You could see throughout the game that O’Donoghue was embracing the big stage. Of all the Mayo forwards, he was fighting to get into the game. He wanted the ball. He went out there absolutely convinced he had the beating of the Tyrone defence. I love that about him – it’s one of his great attributes. He doesn’t care who he’s playing, he’s going to go for it and let them know all about it.
But that only counts for something as long as you do what you’re there for. And although he kicked his frees pretty well, he missed his penalty at an absolutely crucial time in the game. And worse, he missed it by not being professional and clinical about it.
Go back over the penalties that have been scored in big Croke Park matches in the last five or six years. Cillian O’Connor, Diarmuid Connolly, Peter Harte. None of them was flamboyant or technically complicated. They all went with the low shot pulled into the near corner. That’s where you can get the most power just through your natural body shape.
You don’t have to play cat and mouse with the goalkeeper. You don’t have to pick out the postage stamp in the top corner. All you have to do is drill a low shot a foot inside the post and it won’t matter a damn what the goalie does.
Why can’t you keep your head and do the basics right when it really matters in an All-Ireland final?
I know it’s all a matter of inches and that O’Donoghue’s shot only shaved the outside of the post. Half a foot to the left and it would have been hailed by everyone as a brilliant penalty for a young fella to have the balls to pull off in an All-Ireland final. But you get the same number of points on the scoreboard for one that goes in the bottom corner so why wouldn’t you just do the simple thing and go and mark your man for the kick-out?
All-Ireland finals are about finding the simplest route to the Sam Maguire. I have seen them lost because fellas were thinking about All Stars. I have seen them coughed up because fellas wanted to prove a point to management or because they wanted to show that they can do miraculous things. But at the end of the day, they come down to who was able to show that they could do the right thing at the right time. Everything else is beside the point.
The job for Mayo now is to work out why they weren’t able to do it. Why can’t you keep your head and do the basics right when it really matters in an All-Ireland final? What is it that you’re going out to achieve that stops you executing these skills that you know you have?
O’Shea and Loftus and O’Donoghue and all the rest of them have kicked plenty of scores in their lives. They’re not poor footballers. They’re every bit as good as the Tyrone players who walked up the steps of the Hogan Stand. They just didn’t show it when it mattered.
They have another winter now to come up with the reasons for that.
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Post by veteran on Sept 16, 2021 9:08:27 GMT
I don’t think Tyroneperson and Dermot have posted here since Tyrone’s great win. Perhaps, is is because one or two people have made them unwelcome. That is a shame.
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