We forgot. Tyrone don’t show up just for the fun of it. Now we know what we were watching through this strange, topsy-turvy summer that proved all best guesses, all the doubters, all the world, wrong, wrong and wrong again. It was hiding in plain sight: A Red Hand masterclass. The Tyrone manual of how to win and how to deepen one county’s aura of self-reliance and a tradition of Gaelic football that is gloriously independent in spirit. The world does not matter. Only Tyrone: All-Ireland senior football champions for 2021.
What a season. Nothing could stop them. Not Donegal, not Monaghan, not Kerry, not the outbreak of the Covid virus in their camp and the loose debate afterwards which they felt questioned their integrity.
Nobody is questioning now.
What began with a mid-June league humiliation in Kerry ended with one of those irresistible Tyrone All-Ireland raids when we watched a young team bloom into greatness even as they played. On Saturday, Tyrone faced a huge wave of sentimental hope for Mayo that spread like wildfire throughout the island all week. Picture Ireland’s emotional landscape from a satellite on Saturday afternoon and the entire island would have been coloured green and red of Mayo except for the vivid pulsing Tyrone belief in the middle of the land. It was Tyrone against the world: odds they love in O’Neill country.
“My starting ambition was to win one match,” smiled Feargal Logan, the understated manager who, for a long time, has been one of the best-liked football people within Tyrone.
“We had no big plans. We just mucked in night after night and it was up and down and it ended happily with Tyrone as All-Ireland champions.”
Bamboozled
It wasn’t the prettiest of games but fascinating to watch, from high in the stands, as Tyrone slowly and steadily bamboozled the Mayo men, lulling them with their fast-slow game, looking so smooth and comfortable, dancing through all attempts at pressure and then ripping the heart out of the late Mayo dream with two sweet, deadly second half goals. The first was a tomahawk fist from Cathal McShane who had just arrived on the field and then a visionary pass from Conor McKenna, surging with big-game temperament, for McCurry to bat into a gaping net.
By then, it was clear that Mayo were chasing shadows; that all the old demons and ghosts were gathering for another winter of wishing. It finished 2-14 to 0-15 and Tyrone looked at home, again, in the old amphitheatre.
At half time, Tyrone led 0-10 to 0-8 and as the kettles steamed and the beer taps flowed around the country, the consensus was that yes, it would go down the wire. We were not watching closely enough. There were signs in the first half that Tyrone were subtly and indelibly re-imagining the occasion and turning it Ulster-flavoured.
Mayo are well used to the trappings and atmosphere of these All-Ireland days. But as the evening deepened, it began to look and feel like one of those cloying days in Clones so that if you peeked over the wall of Hill 16 you wouldn’t see the Georgian terraces of inner city Dublin but the Creighton Hotel and the bunting on Fermanagh Street and the burger vans idling.
Where do Mayo go from here? Ryan O’Donoghue was one of the team’s more convincing and bullish performers but his missed penalty in the 41st minute must have sent a familiar dread shooting through Mayo souls. They kept plugging away, mainly through the stubborn, brilliant interventions of Keegan, Patrick Durcan and Oisín Mullin but increasingly they looked like men caught in a blizzard, moving blindly and on instinct. In a way, this was the most depressing defeat of all: infuriating rather than profound or heroic disappointment. As a unit, they looked burdened by the honour of playing in a final while Tyrone looked liberated by the same experience.
Darren McCurry finished with 1-4 to complete a dazzling summer, big Conn Kilpatrick and Brian Kennedy owned the day at midfield. Niall Morgan didn’t put a foot wrong. Kieran McGeary had another marvellous day, striking a wonderful first half point but mostly moving about the field like a busy shop steward counselling and organising on the factory floor. The Tyrone fans were delighted. But they didn’t seem particularly surprised as the Red Hand jigsaw fell into place.
It felt significant that Kevin McLoughlin, one of Mayo’s stoic performers through thick and thin hung back for a long while afterwards. Lee Keegan also remained on the fabled field, holding his baby daughter Lile and watching on as the Tyrone team celebrated. Keegan has now played in seven All-Ireland finals, scoring a combined 2-4 while blotting out some of the best attackers in the contemporary game. No, he has never won a Celtic Cross but to ever call him a ‘loser’ is not so much reductive as stupid. The sight of Keegan standing alone, a witness to the other crowd’s euphoria, felt like a last act of courage. ‘The war is over for me now’, as the line goes in the old anti-war movie.
But it will always be there.
For the rest of my days.
Crushing experiences
Mayo have lost 11 All-Ireland finals since that lodestone year of 1951. But they have also lost six since 2011. It’s a shocking psychic toll for players and people. The arguments that this was the year seemed grounded in a calmer logic as the year came to nothing. The worst of it is that now the younger brigade - Mullin, O’Hora, O’Donoghue - have been sucked into the vortex of these crushing experiences, with back-to-back All-Ireland defeats. The return of Cillian O’Connor next season will be welcome. James Horan’s capacity to push on beyond usual human endurance has been vital through this. But who in Mayo has the heart or stomach to even think about the next football season right now?
In any other year, Tyrone would have been shouting for Mayo, too. But they are sharp and bold and emphatic in their ability to summon and forge a kind of certainty in their potential to sculpt these granite days. When the dust settles and 2021 joins 2003, 2005 and 2008 as the perfect football years in O’Neill country, they might stop to think about how tortuous the counter-experience is for Mayo. But only for a moment or two. “The way we look at it is: don’t wait until tomorrow,” Brian Dooher said afterwards. Tyrone are the prime example of the truth that you have to take your chances when you get here. And that it is easy to sleep on another man’s wound.
