A family wedding in Boston gave me a different perspective on the blink-and-you-miss-it All-Ireland championship. Boston is the unofficial sports capital of the States and we arrived just in time for Celtics bedlam. The revered city basketball team are in the NBA finals against the Golden State Warriors. Had you looked at the league tables around Christmas, not many people were giving them a prayer. But since then, they have put together a series of victories which the announcers like to call ‘statement wins.’ It’s a useful phrase in the context of what many of the remaining teams in the All-Ireland are hoping to achieve.
The time zones play havoc with the body but we arrived in Boston just hours before game one, which took placed in San Francisco, and it made magnificent theatre. The Celtics have not been in the NBA finals for 12 years and there was a sense of the city glued to this event on the other coast. They call it the world championship - although I am unaware of any other country taking part. ‘Titletown’ is the nickname Boston sports fans have bestowed on their city. It’s a bit of bravado but the success of the Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics is a badge of identity.
The Celtics are pushing hard to add to their championship lineage. The American method – a best of seven series – is an interesting one, I don’t think it would ever take off in Ireland. But it is fun to see the way form swings and lurches from game to game. You can get into the Garden for game three on Wednesday night - if you are willing to pay 1200 dollars for a nosebleed seat. It is serious business, when all is said.
At the weekend, we somehow managed to fit in the GAA games through streaming in between tuxedo fittings and preliminaries. I haven’t had occasion to use the GAAGO service before but my family here are very enthusiastic about it. It has opened the championship to a new overseas audience and it gives new, young commentators a start. So we were set up for a morning of games.
We headed down to my sister’s basement, which is a feature of American homes: man-caves converted into a sports fans bolt hole, with a 65 inch screen, a big comfy couch and the sound of the Sunday Game. It was eleven in the morning and it was wonderful to see the sunshine of MacHale Park from this unusual vantage point.
It felt like a proper, cutting-edge game. The removal of the Tailteann Cup 16 has brought an immediate sense of urgency to the qualifiers, even as that contest is gaining momentum. But in Castlebar, we were looking at the end of Monaghan and Mayo for the summer. For both counties, it was a nerve-wracking day.
My brother and two sisters living in Boston almost know more about Mayo than people at home. They have digital access to the local papers and they devour all the GAA podcasts on their way to work. They would often send me snippets of this or that. When they lived at home, I never had the sense that they were so interested but in Boston, they like to keep themselves informed. One of the topics that came up as we sat waiting for the game to start was the state of mind of a qualifier team.
How does a team get ready to survive and advance? There is ample evidence that the key ingredient is the time between a team’s initial championship defeat and the next game. There was a period, during the early years of the qualifying system, when teams who lost provincial finals who were slated for a qualifier game a week later were in a perilous position. They were tired, demoralised and their vision for the season had been terribly disrupted. And they were facing a team who had settled into a nice qualifier run. They simply couldn’t get themselves ‘up’ for another game a week later.
There were mitigating factors. If you lost despite a really strong performance, then a team can convince itself that the qualifying game is a chance for atonement. But it is a tricky and elusive mindset.
In 2016, we in Roscommon played Clare six days after losing a provincial final heavily to Galway. On paper, we were the stronger team and there was an All-Ireland quarter final on offer. But we could not do it. It was a football hangover. It happened to teams again and again.
This was running through my mind watching the Mayo and Monaghan teams warming up. Time was not an issue here. Mayo had six weeks to get ready for this and Monaghan five. So, then you turn to the issue of confidence - which can affect the management and supporters as well as the players. Both teams met in the knowledge that they had underperformed this year. They were both searching for a spark and both sets of supporters were pessimistic going into this. A single defeat can alter the entire perception of a team in the mind’s eye. Yet they entertained this vague thought: ‘if we can just get over this game then maybe we can bounce into an All-Ireland quarter final… and then, who knows?’
Monaghan are the great survivors in division one and have had giant killing days in Ulster. But it has not really translated to the big picture. Monaghan have been in one All-Ireland semi-final in 30 years. Look at the other teams who are yearning to reach that last four. Kildare, Roscommon, Armagh, Derry and Clare would find themselves in rare territory if they make it. Donegal, a big football county, have been in just four All-Ireland semi-finals since 1992.
Roscommon, for instance, have had their provincial joys in recent years. But breaking into the last four is the short-term goal for them now. I read Enda Smyth’s interview on these pages and I was taken aback to read that he had four division two medals. He has been through the extremes with his team. The bottom line is that no Roscommon team has appeared in an All-Ireland semi-final in thirty years. It was 1991 - the last time they were two-in-a-row Connacht champions. Marty McDermott was the manager then and in my time in charge, we wanted to emulate his achievement.
But we didn’t. No matter the route to the semi-final, Roscommon teams have fallen short. A team needs a six-to-seven year period when they are winning consistently and popping up in quarter finals in order to shatter this glass ceiling.
This is where Mayo are the outliers. They excel at extricating themselves from tricky moments in the championship. They can look ordinary - even horrible - but somehow produce these statement wins. Now, that is not quite what happened on Saturday. It was controversial. And it did look like a Monaghan penalty from where we were watching - which was across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, it never seemed that Mayo would lose the game. But for all of that, it relaunched nothing. It was the same old Mayo. That is the crucial thing.
On Sunday, we saw Armagh send the All-Ireland champions packing. That was a statement win. Vitally, they looked like a team reborn. They are travelling at a rate of knots towards an assignment with Donegal that could propel them into the quarter finals as a dangerous proposition.
Mayo, though, were unconvincing in the error strewn closing minutes. There was an overall lack of accuracy in foot-passing and hand passing, which introduced a chaotic element to their closing act. And they just about avoided an extra time bout. So, it doesn’t erase too many doubts. It just gives them another chance to deliver that statement win that will return them to the quarter-finals with their suit of armour restored.
What the qualifiers have done is that it makes it easy to categorise the quality of teams still in contention. The more games we see, the more apparent it is that the gap between Dublin, Kerry and the rest is growing. Armagh are shaping up to be a dangerous opponent for anyone - if they can replicate that standard of play outside the Athletics Grounds.
Can they string together two big wins and reach the penultimate stage of the All-Ireland? This is the challenge now. The favourites to emerge are Mayo and Armagh while Roscommon and Cork would be the other two likely to come through. Donegal are in a deeply vulnerable place: they are facing the fight of their lives.
That’s where the qualifier system is designed to place teams: into a challenging mindset when they must overcome doubt and adversity and somehow catch fire when nobody is expecting it.
