In Mayo’s long relationship with hope, when hope and Mayo were inseparable, there were no limits. Hope filled the gaps that reason abandoned and, sometimes, hope knew better. For the guts of a decade, when Mayo were a Croke Park team and a fancied runner in the race, hope was renewable too. It didn’t need to be invented or explained or defended; it had no truck with wishful thinking: it had status; it stood on its own two feet.
So, what happens when hope leaves? When the team is not the same, and the results take a turn for the worse, and some of the crowd realise they had things to do other than follow a rainbow?
“So much of sport has been reduced to tidy little stories of redemption, of winning in the end,” wrote Keith Duggan in House of Pain, his brilliant exploration of Mayo football. “So much time and genuflection is afforded to the champions, to those who prevail and who make victory seem like the easiest thing in the world. But for most teams and sportspeople, the opposite is true. Losing is the universal sporting experience.”
In 2021 Mayo contested their sixth All-Ireland final in 10 years, but that defeat to Tyrone was more concussive than the others. They lost to a team that came and went and seized a day from under Mayo’s nose. In the desert, Mayo had arrived gasping at another mirage. With the loss of hope, part of Mayo’s identity and their public face and their energy were taken.
“It [the following for the team] has changed hugely and there’s a very specific breakpoint and that was the 2021 All-Ireland,” says John Gunnigan, owner and moderator of the MayoGAABlog website. “I think that broke everyone. Until then, we were always in that happy bubble that we could say, ‘Okay, we didn’t get over the line but, do you know what, we never bowed the knee.’
“Everyone prostrated themselves in front of the greatest team of all-time, which were Dublin. But we never gave them an inch. We fought them all the way and I think they respected us. But if you remember that ‘21 final, we blew it, we absolutely blew it.
“Our narrative was now gone. Every Mayo supporter up to then would always have gone to war over the notion that we were chokers, because we never choked in those big finals against Dublin. We fought to our dying breath every single time and we were just beaten by a better team. In 2021, though, we choked. Of course we did.”
In the decade when Mayo were perennial contenders their quest for Sam Maguire was an opium for the masses. Outside of Dublin, they had the biggest following in the football championship. Unlike Dublin their supporters were exposed to all kinds of weather. Winning and losing were liable to be extreme events.
It was something like Munster chasing the Heineken Cup in the early years of the century, when their supporters were at the heart of the story too. Munster’s longing was etched in every supporter’s face, but that emotional covenant wouldn’t have lasted indefinitely either. As it turned out, their suffering was compressed into six years. There was no backstory of defeat stretching out for decades.
Munster struggle to fill Thomond Park for Champions Cup matches now. Hope turned to glory and then into something that wasn’t one thing or the other. Mayo reached that place without passing through glory on the way.
“At the start of this year I’ve never seen the supporters at a lower point – and I’ve been doing this blog since 2007,” says Gunnigan. “Certainly since 2011 [a year after losing to Longford in the qualifiers] I’ve never seen anything like this. You know what they say, the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference and there was a lot of that. There was no real belief in the team at the start of the year.”
The creeping apathy was reflected in attendances. A crowd of just over 6,000 turned up for the game against Tyrone, the smallest crowd at a home league game since 2011. In their pomp Mayo have attracted crowds twice that size for a preseason game in the FBD League, though that was unsustainable too.
“It was a stunning drop-off,” says Rob Murphy, host of the Mayo GAA podcast. “For the last six or eight years Mayo were getting five figure crowds regularly for league games.”
Last weekend, a healthy crowd of about 9,000 turned up for the Donegal game, but that was still 5,000 fewer than the last time they hosted Donegal in Castlebar in the league, eight years ago.
“The chase or the love of the chase is gone among certain people, who were probably just along for the ride anyway as much as anything,” says Colm Boyle, who played for Mayo for 14 years. “What you are left with now are hard-core supporters.”
At the height of Mayo’s powers in the last decade, you wonder what difference the crowd made? Boyle remembers a qualifier game against Cork in 2017 that slipped from their grasp and bled into extra-time. He reckons the Mayo supporters outnumbered Cork’s by “about nine to one,” that day, and in a one-point game, how could you dismiss their breath in Mayo’s sails?
“In big moments, in a game like that, I think the crowd can make a difference,” says Boyle. “That was at a time when the Mayo public was absolutely invested in everything that the senior football team did. Were there times when I felt like ‘God, I don’t want to talk about football to everyone I meet for the next couple of weeks.’ Absolutely. But that was just part of the deal.
“I’ve heard Paul Flynn [former Dublin footballer] say a couple of times that the Mayo crowd were the only crowd who could rattle Dublin in Croke Park with the support they could bring. That’s not something we should take for granted.”
That phenomenon probably reached a peak in the 2017 All-Ireland final against Dublin. “You look back at that match on YouTube,” says Murphy, “and you’ll see that Mayo had about 50 per cent of the crowd that day which is an outrageous return from a county with a population of 128,000.
“That connection, or that kind of shared experience, is definitely gone at the moment. But I do think there’s something to be said for what’s there. It was becoming more about the fans themselves rather than the team. It became less about just going along to watch guys playing good football – which I think it is now.”
In the second half of the league there have been shafts of light: good results, fewer inhibitions; some cheer. “A really important thing that needs to be underlined is that the type of football Mayo were playing last year was really frustrating,” says Murphy. “This is where the public would really be at loggerheads with the management. There was far too much caution from the get-go.
“I think that’s a massive factor in the mood. The football [in the second half of the league] has been good to watch. If Mayo go down firing shots this year, I don’t think there’ll be a lot of anger. But I don’t think the fans will have any patience for a safe approach, that’s for sure.”
Style matters. When Mayo were flying in the middle of the last decade, they played football that was laced with risk. They didn’t countenance any other way; they were convinced it was the only way to beat Dublin. Dash and danger were bound up with the thrill. Mayo dared to win. After 2021, they followed everybody else into a safety harness.
“We had been fed on a diet of riding the roller coaster,” says Gunnigan, “because the Horan-ball stuff was just nuts. We didn’t play in a cautious way that everyone else did. We left acres of space between the half back line and the full back line and everyone was expected to fight their own battles.
“The style of football that we were playing until half-time in the Armagh game [in round four of this year’s league] was just awful. After the Galway game [which Mayo lost by 10 points in round two] I was asked on the [Mayo] podcast, ‘What do the fans want?’ I just said they want a bit of excitement in their lives. They don’t want to watch this rubbish where they’re passing the ball sideways. They want to see us having a cut and I think that’s what happened in the second half in Armagh.
“The day against Tyrone [in round three] we looked absolutely rigid with fear. We were shrunken into ourselves. We somehow managed to stumble over the line and that was a priceless win.”
Under Kevin McStay, the team has been growing a new skin. For about 10 minutes of the Donegal match last weekend, there was no player from the 2017 team on the field. Donnacha McHugh has been terrific at full back and tomorrow he will probably be asked to reprise the job he did on David Clifford in Castlebar. Since round four, Ryan Donoghue and Mattie Ruane have been sensational.
“What people are forgetting,” says Boyle, “is that the championship is more wide open now than ever. A few years ago the concentration nationwide, and certainly in Mayo, was on the exceptional Dublin team. Now you don’t have to worry about any exceptional team out there. What you have is, on any given day, anyone can beat anyone. We are certainly part of that.”
Does that constitute hope? No feeling is final.
