Mid-June and already it’s time for the Croke Park hoover to start sucking the championship summer towards it.
A double-header today, the Tailteann Cup semi-finals next weekend, the All-Ireland quarter-finals the weekend after. The dance-card is full at headquarters all the way to the end of July. It’s always the signal for the serious business to begin.
Everything is finite from here on out. No style points, no learnings for the next day. You do it now and or the next day is next year. Most pressingly, you do it in Croke Park. Which is usually where Mayo enter the equation.
The great green and red caravan rolls into town for the first time in this championship, facing off against Kildare at teatime. You wouldn’t say the decision to fix the game for Jones’s Road has been universally popular out west. And right enough, hauling three counties from west of the Shannon to Dublin for a Saturday double bill is hardly the most supporter-friendly idea the GAA has ever come up with.
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And yet for the Mayo players themselves, it is clearly the ideal venue at the ideal time. Apart from the literal case of Dublin, no team in the country is more at home in Croke Park. The football that gets played there – fast, athletic, often chaotic – suits them. They generally raise themselves to meet the moment there.
It’s surely no coincidence that the last time they went out of the championship in a county ground – the Newbridge Or Nowhere game against Kildare in 2018 – is the only time since 2011 that someone other than the eventual All-Ireland champions knocked them out. They are and have been a Croke Park team, as evidence by the 15 named by James Horan on Friday.
Despite injuries, transition, team turnover and all the rest of it, Horan was able to name a team in which only two players – Enda Hession and Jack Carney – haven’t started a championship game in Croke Park. And Hession was the first sub off the bench in last year’s All-Ireland final. Jason Doherty and Conor Loftus come in for Aiden Orme and Bryan Walsh, adding yet more experience of the big house.
So Mayo will relish Croke Park. The question is what Kildare team turns up. Will it be the one that excited its people throughout the league, beating Dublin and Monaghan in Newbridge and drawing with Kerry? Or will it be the one that folded in the face of Dublin’s opening 20-minute blitz in the Leinster final?
And if it isn’t, will that be because Glenn Ryan and his brains trust have decided to abandon the attacking style that lit a fire under the county in the early part of the year and instead find themselves a bus to park? Every heart in Kildare would sink at the thought. Every head would point out that Galway showed in the Connacht semi-final that an obdurate, deep-set defensive wall is the one thing Mayo really don’t enjoy trying to find their way around. Decisions, decisions.
All around the country, it’s a weekend for them. Clare meet Roscommon in the first match in Croke Park, a rare chance for the Clare football team to get a championship run out in headquarters before the hurlers have made it there. The juiciest qualifier of the lot is in Clones, where Armagh take on Donegal, the tie neither side wanted to come out of the hat.
Most eye-catching of all, the Cork footballers face Limerick in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, 24 hours after the Cork hurlers meet Antrim in Corrigan Park. One county, two do-or-die games, just the 420km separating them. They’re called the All-Ireland championships for a reason.
