There’s an interesting dynamic to this final in that everyone is going for their first All-Ireland success.
The only people in the dressing rooms on Saturday with All-Ireland medals will be Brian Dooher and a few of the Tyrone backroom team. None of the players know what it's like. All of them are walking around today wondering how it will be. They'll be thinking of very little else.
You only win your first All-Ireland once. If you’re very lucky, you get to do it again somewhere down the road but it never feels the same as that first time. I’m not saying one is better or worse than that other – it’s just a different feeling. You never get that sense of a weight being lifted off your shoulders like you do that first time.
My first one came in 1997. Kerry hadn't won an All-Ireland in 11 years. We hadn't even been in a final. We were a young team as well so, outside of the management, there was really nobody who knew what winning an All-Ireland would be like. Stephen Stack had been on the panel in 1986 alright. But otherwise we were clueless.
Kevin McStay: Mayo will win this final, and bring an end to the grand obsession
Darragh Ó Sé: Naive Kerry played a game that was right up Tyrone’s street
Darragh Ó Sé: Dublin’s inability to close out win against Mayo was shocking to see
Darragh Ó Sé: Mayo’s rapid transition a testament to James Horan’s management
The build-up was hectic. There was no chance of it being anything else – unless you were well into your 90s you had no idea what it was like for Kerry to go a full decade without so much as being in a final. So there was huge expectation and massive excitement. And pressure too, obviously.
On a personal level, all I heard all week in the build-up was how there were doubts about me in midfield. Now, obviously, that's not all that was being said in the outside world but it's all I heard. Pat Fallon was going well for Mayo at the time and he was an All Star in waiting. I was a young fella in his first final – and a nephew of the manager to boot. Sure how could you be depending on someone like that?
That suited me, in fairness. The thing about a final is that it can all get too big if you let it. You can worry about too many things or you can try and hit too many markers. I didn’t know it at the time but what all this talk did for me was it allowed me to narrow down my focus for the week. Whatever happens, I know who I’m playing on, I know what I need to do to play against him.
That said, I didn’t sleep a wink on the Saturday night. I had one of those nights where you know you have to sleep so all you can think about is trying to sleep. And then you can’t sleep. And then you pass from trying to sleep to worrying what not sleeping is going to mean for you the next day and now you definitely can’t sleep. I worried about it all through the Sunday morning. At least it kept my mind occupied.
What I didn’t know then – and what would stand to me for any other final I played in – was that even without really knowing it, I had done my sleeping during the week. I had enough sleep banked and had the body rested enough to get me through the game on Sunday even though I couldn’t keep my eyes closed on Saturday night.
Winning a final, having a medal, it all gives you that bit extra. It's a great badge of honour to have
So that was just one small thing that I took away from that first win. If we had lost, it might have been a different story. I might have blamed it all on the bad night’s sleep. I might have spent the rest of my career trying to find a way to get to sleep the night before a final. I might have done a million things to fix something that actually wasn’t a big problem at all. But because we won, I never worried about sleeping before a final again.
Winning your first All-Ireland changes you. It gives you a new kind of confidence in yourself. Whether that’s deserved or not is another matter altogether – you will go on to lose plenty of matches in the following years so the confidence obviously doesn’t make you bulletproof.
More confidence
But you do come away from it feeling a greater sense of authority. It scrubs away some of the doubts you have about yourself. Am I any good? Can I take on this kick? Should I make that run? On some level, you know the answer to those questions already – you don’t make it to an All-Ireland final by sheer luck. But after you win one, you have more confidence in the answers.
You go out to play games at ease with yourself. I can do this. I can be comfortable in this arena. I can express myself here. There’s a small bit of arrogance to it, yes. But that’s often no harm either. There’s nothing wrong with knowing how to do something well and showing that when it’s needed. As long as you have the right attitude to it.
And there’s no doubt in the world about it – winning a final, having a medal, it all gives you that bit extra. It’s a great badge of honour to have. It gives you a fierce comfort in what you’re doing. I don’t know if it makes you a better player necessarily. But it sure makes you a happier one.
Who will be happy on Saturday night? It's a tricky final to assess. When you have two squads with no All-Ireland medal between them, you can't point to one side or the other and say they have more experience. Both sides have been in finals recently. The likes of Lee Keegan, Paddy Durcan and Aidan O'Shea have been through more big days than most so maybe Mayo have an edge on that score. But it's a small one.
The one thing Tyrone can focus on is the fact it will feel like the rest of the country is up for Mayo
Nobody expected this from Tyrone. The Mickey Harte era ended with most people assuming they had gone backwards and that they would take at least a year or two to get themselves back in the reckoning. Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher deserve huge credit for turning it all around so quickly.
They have brought an intensity to it. They have kept Tyrone’s identity. They have puffed out their chests and said, “We are Tyrone, like us or lump us”. And they’re damn right to do so. It’s up to everyone else to realise the terms of engagement and deal with it. If that goes into dark arts territory, so be it. Finals are about playing the game that happens on the day and never being disappointed because it’s not the one you were hoping for.
Tyrone have always needed a cause. On the face of it, they don’t really have a specific one here because they have no bone to pick with Mayo. The two counties don’t have any great history together. There was never any big brawl or bad temper between them.
But the one thing Tyrone can focus on is the fact it will feel like the rest of the country is up for Mayo. There's a romance to the Mayo story that might be a bit overbearing at times but you can’t deny that it’s out there. And the one thing Tyrone would never pretend to be is romantic. They’ll be very happy to rain on the parade.
The championship hasn’t been predictable on any level. Certainly not to me anyway! I thought Galway would beat Mayo, I thought Dublin would beat Mayo, I thought Kerry would beat Tyrone. The patterns throughout the summer have been difficult to work out because no two games have followed the same formula.
When it comes right down to it, Mayo have beaten better teams than Tyrone have over the past few seasons
Oddly enough, I think we have ended up with two pretty similar teams in the final. Both of them like it best when the game loses a bit of structure. They both like to get runners from deep going helter-skelter up the pitch and creating chaos. The two of them have goalkeepers who could win the game for them but who could just as easily lose it. You’d go to war with either of the backlines but you’d still have your doubts about the two attacks.
An edge
The James Horan factor gives Mayo an edge, I reckon. I thought his management of Aidan O'Shea in the semi-final was next level stuff. People were making out that it was a huge call to take his captain off but it was really the only option on the table. O'Shea was having a right shocker of a match and, in that scenario, it would have been actively bad management to leave him on.
The idea that he was sending a message out to the rest of his squad that nobody is safe from being pulled off is nonsense really. If anyone thinks the players don't know that about Horan at this stage, they haven't been paying much attention to him. But it was the decision to send O'Shea back on for the crucial play at the end of the game that stood out to me.
In that moment, Horan was looking to defend the square and make sure that Dublin weren’t able to turn Dean Rock’s 45 into a goal. But he was also telling O’Shea that there were no hard feelings. You played shite, I took you off, but the game is on the line here and I need you to go in and do what you do.
Which he did, by the way. It got lost afterwards because James McCarthy grabbed Lee Keegan while the ball was in the air and got a black card and a free out. But if you watch it again, you’ll see that while that was going on, O’Shea was the one who guarded the small square and came out to punch the ball away. He didn’t just go in there and hide as an extra body. He came on and put his bad performance behind him and got to the dropping ball. He justified Horan’s trust in him.
I fancy O’Shea to have a big role to play on Saturday. Tyrone have a couple of big players around the middle but he’s well fit for big lads – it’s the really mobile ones he struggles with. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are talking about him having silenced the doubters afterwards.
All things considered, I’m siding with Mayo. They have pulled themselves out of disastrous situations against both Galway and Dublin. They have showed that when the intensity gets up to the highest level, that’s where they thrive.
Tyrone knew they could disrupt Kerry by turning up the heat. But the higher they turn the heat on Mayo, the more Mayo like it.
When it comes right down to it, Mayo have beaten better teams than Tyrone have over the past few seasons. They have everything in their track record except the last thing, the most important thing. Now’s their time to go and get it.
