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Mayo's record in Castlebar is woeful, do they ever win there ?

Dazzler running the show.

Listening to the kerry radio coverage and they said "our forwards are better than Darren McCurry." jesus they are hard to listen to

"Hard to listen to " is putting it mildly !

Joe Brolly having his 'kick Mayo while losing' craic again I see. Was the football that bad last night?

You're worse for reacting to it. ignore him, most people have seen him for what he is.

Exactly, starve him of oxygen, he has passed his sell by date.

Fairly hilarious to see Kerry and Mayo already being installed as firm favourites for the All-Ireland. Despite the fact that Tyrone beat both of them to win it in 2021. The same thing happens every year, do people never learn?

Same thing happens every year I think you will find that Dublin have been favourites for a good few years if you check.

Pink boots! Is this for charity ?

The Dubs have been fairly charitable in recent matches alright !

In fairness, O'Connor knows how to beat Mayo and Cork in All Ireland Finals.

In all fairness, Mayo never turned up in 2004, they beat themselves.

As I said he knows how to beat Mayo and Cork in AI Finals.

Beating Mayo in 2004 and 2006 looks good on his CV, but how much of an achievement was it really ?
These two All Ireland's must go under the 'solf' heading.

In fairness, O'Connor knows how to beat Mayo and Cork in All Ireland Finals.

In all fairness, Mayo never turned up in 2004, they beat themselves.

That's a very honest article by McStay, have always thought he was one of the better pundits working in the media and he has walked the line so has seen the GAA from every side.

He makes particularly good points about how Mayo seem to produce an abundance of athletic running type footballers but very few final third finishers. Also raised an interesting statistic about how Mayo had 8 wides, a missed penalty and 2 balls dropped short in the final third of the match. That is a meltdown of bad decision making by anybodys standards.

I'm also glad that somebody from within Mayo football has finally had a go back at Brolly after he stuck the boot in again the morning after an AI final defeat. He needs to be challenged on those personal attacks but a lot are afraid to get drawn in and speak out about it.

Where was McStay's statement on the personal abuse brolly doled out to Cavanagh a few years ago? Not much use calling out that type of personal attack only when it hits close to home. He has had amble opportunities and a TV platform to call Brolly out previously but failed to do so.

Ah now ! A lot of people in fairness called out Brolly for his attack on Cavanagh, I think that was the start of his downfall in RTÉ .

Fact is, he has become a lot more insidious and nasty in relation to Mayo footballers in the recent past.
These are young men who are amateurs , not Premiership footballers where they have a fat salary to go with the abuse.

Kevin McStay

Monday morning was overcast and squally in the west of Ireland: an appropriate backdrop to the general emotion in Co Mayo. What is the prevailing feeling for us after the latest All-Ireland final failure?

I think it is probably frustration and resignation edging into anger. We have found yet another county to lose an All-Ireland final to. We might have told ourselves stories in other years when we lost to Dublin to Kerry: 'oh Galway got Kildare when they made their breakthrough in 1998'. We were up against Kerry, against Dublin, against that oppressive tradition. Those are self-deceptions. In 2012 it was Donegal who eclipsed us. And on Saturday it was Tyrone. This time, Mayo were favourites. It made no difference. The losing sequence continued.

My sense is that the numbers are becoming so accusatory now that they are beginning to frazzle the Mayo minds. We have a generation of footballers who have played seven All-Ireland finals, including the 2016 draw, and lost six times. I feel that Lee Keegan is pound for pound the best footballer Mayo has ever produced. Is that the number that will or should be attached to him as a legacy?

My family often accuses me of being cold and clinical in my public analysis of Mayo. I think it might be because of the company I keep over a championship season: people who are informed about the game. And mixing with people like Colm O'Rourke and Seán Cavanagh and Oisín McConville, who have a deep understanding of what it takes to win an All-Ireland.

I travelled to Dublin over the weekend with high hopes founded on logical reasons why Mayo could win this. Modern finals have become real 'events', with a momentum and anticipation which builds up over the week. Media coverage is massive and people have as much fine detail as they want. I love that part of it. But the weekend reminded me of how transient it all is. On Friday night, we bumped into Brian Fenton, walking home in Clontarf with a takeaway under his arm. And I found it kind of amazing that he was suddenly no longer part of this: that it was Mayo and Tyrone's show. He was gracious and wished us well.


Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing
Then, on Saturday morning I happened upon Peter Canavan at the lift in the hotel. Naturally, his focus was on the family aspect. One of the greatest players of all time was quite rightly just another nervous, proud father of a son who was playing. He was caught up in it. I wished him well. When I next saw Peter, he was standing all alone in the 76th minute caught in the absolute joy of knowing there was another Celtic Cross coming into the family home. What a beautiful moment for him. The contrasts between the Tyrone joy and the crushing realisation that yet another Mayo team were being thrust into the same purgatorial place became very clear and pronounced in those fading minutes of the contest.


The texts came thick and fast after the game from former players and people involved in the sport. The message was: tough loss. But you cannot expect a Mayo team to win when they play like that.

Brilliant fortune
I feel that many fans don't have that same cold perspective. There is a tendency to contextualise and equivocate: we are young! We had a great run! Morgan was off his line for the penalty! Sure we will have Cillian back next year! To former All-Ireland champions, these excuses are irrelevant. To them, this is the truth. The game was beautifully poised at half time. Mayo got the brilliant fortune of a penalty at the perfect time. Young O'Donoghue had a very fine game but I am sure he wishes he could take that penalty again. It wasn't just the miss: it was the embellished run up which drew further attention to the miss.


That moment wasn't the winning and losing of the game. But it set Mayo off into a nightmare closing half hour. In the 50th minute Cathal McShane had a horrible wide for Tyrone from a free. Right then, the wide count was pretty even: Tyrone 7, Mayo 6. It was to be Tyrone's last wide. But for the remaining 27 minutes of the match, Mayo missed a penalty, kicked eight further wides, two others shot into the goalkeeper's hands, had crazy turnovers and fell into a pattern of awful decision making. It wasn't quite a meltdown. But there was a sense that as a group, they were afraid to go and win the All-Ireland final: that they found it hard to muster up the courage to take responsibility and make the right pass and do the right thing.

You cannot keep returning to these finals and repeat the errors of yesteryear. From an analytical point of view, it is unacceptable. I think the Mayo management will be at a loss to understand how it got so bad. The substitutions, rather than add energy, actually sucked energy out of it.

The wides I am talking about aren't just 'wides' as a fan would count them. They are not just missed shots or a statistic. You have to examine what kind of wide it is. And the unsightly part is that that 50 per cent of those wides were down to lack of quality and poor shot selection. I have spoken before about the ASS statistic: It's a simple breakdown which explains so much. The ideal attacks/shots/scores rate is 40/30/20 or better. Mayo on Saturday broke down as: 46/31/15. It was yet another case of a disastrous inability to convert chances into scores. Rather than working hard to create the easy score, the Mayo players began to take snatch shots based on blind hope. I wrote here that five or six wides is where a team needs to be at the end of a game. Our twelfth wide was a simple handpass from Oisín Mullin to Darren Coen that dribbled out over the endline. It summed up the day.


Where did the composure go? And why did it leave Mayo?

After all, Tyrone had issues, too. They had many opportunities to extend a very good lead but failed to capitalise on them. However, the Tyrone attack, whether by design or otherwise, were informed by a sense of purpose and know-how: that they were all reading off the same page. Their two goals were emblematic of this. And they disguised a glaring barren spell for the Tyrone attack also. Tyrone failed to score a point from play from half time until the 67th minute of the second half, when Darragh Canavan fisted a ball over the bar. That is not a system failure but it is not the sign of a rampant team either.

Mayo have no complaints about this final. As a county, we have nobody to look to now except ourselves. I think that is a good thing. We need to be cold. We need to throw off the comfort blankets and the gallows humour and the sense that they will be back next year. This time, the team needs to have a massive post mortem about their second half. Otherwise, they are fated to repeat those mistakes in future big games.

Do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years?
The management must look at their panel again. We must get the balance between athlete and footballer more accurately aligned. Conor Meyler is an incredible athlete. But look at his ball playing skills, too. We don't quite have that. The Tyrone approach negated Mayo's athletic profile. Their big fear, surely, was allowing Mayo to slip into their running game. How did they break it up so effectively? They went man to man high up the field and took a chance on the inside line. They gambled. Mayo had goal chances. But the Mayo running game rarely got into flow. It was a very brave call by Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher and there was risk involved in it. But that is the job of management: to make the assessment and judge the risk. So in the end, Mayo's prime weapon - their running power - looked blunted.


There is a debate I often had in the 1990s with John Maughan. We had a dearth of forwards but endless defenders who kept Mayo in games. Kenneth Mortimer was the prototype. He was a terrific defender but he was so good that he could play forward too. And John did play him at 11 at times. But do we cultivate and create forwards in Mayo? Why have we not gone about fixing the absence of elite Mayo forwards over the past 30 years? It surely has to start down at academy level where we begin to produce and coach specific types of forwards rather than just another fine all round player who often gravitates into defence and becomes these marauding attacking defenders.

Brushstroke dismissals
Look at Aidan O'Shea. Nobody but nobody can agree where Mayo should play him and what his best position is, yet he has been playing for over a decade. Maybe Mayo have done O'Shea a disservice here. Has his role ever been clarified for him? Or has he been asked to be all things for too many Mayo teams down the years? His game has suffered because of that. This was true on Saturday. Aidan had a very decent start. I felt he was one of the top three Mayo players at half time. If people are being honest about it rather than the brushstroke dismissals of him, here is a synopsis.


He wins the throw-in (both halves) and gives a lovely assist for Tommy Conroy and Mayo have a very early and very encouraging score. In the opening 20 minutes he regularly won his ball in front of Ronan McNamee. He then kicked a wide which I felt was the key moment for his day. And it was illustrative of a guy who is a bit low on confidence. He knows the chance is there and he knows he has to take it. But somewhere in his mind he is doubting himself and he just doesn't strike it with enough conviction. Very soon after comes the golden chance: a goal opportunity. And it is the same want of confidence. If this is a league game or a game in Connacht, Aidan scores that all day long. He shows McNamee the ball and lets him skid past him and then he has Morgan at his mercy or Conor Loftus coming on his right. In my opinion, he actually tried to chip a point. And that is why McNamee got the block. Still, he created the penalty shout for Pádraig O'Hora. He had at least 10 positive plays. His second half deteriorated badly - but he was part of a failing unit. He was still on the ball a lot. He still kept showing.


So he was low on confidence. But ask yourself this: if you took the kind of * that is thrown at Aidan O'Shea all the time, wouldn't you be too?

He came in for some harsh treatment on social media on Saturday night. You cannot govern that. But not for the first time, he was central to the criticism of Joe Brolly's latest dissection of Mayo in his newspaper column with the Sunday Independent. I worked with Joe for a long time on RTÉ. We were never close, as they say. He can be good company and he is affable. And Joe has had a privileged platform and influence for many years.

The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan's career. I am sure Aidan knows this
You have to be careful how you use that. He puts himself up there when he is talking about the requirement of winning All-Irelands as though he is some kind of leading authority on the subject. He played with a county that made it to an All-Ireland final once - ever - and won it: good luck to him. But he played county ball for many years: by his standard he was a failure in all bar one of those. He personalises Mayo' defeats and puts it down to a failure of moral character. He talks of cliques and of Aidan as "a protected captain" and questions James Horan's authority. None of that equates to what I hear of what goes on within Mayo. We have had a lot of retirements here. If those issues were prevalent, they would have come to the fore. My sense is that they run a very decent show in the Mayo camp.

Not balanced
I felt Joe stepped over the line in his treatment of Aidan and it was lousy: it was personal and not balanced. You can take issue with how a football player presents himself to the world. But it doesn't give you carte blanche to trample all over somebody's personality or reputation. Everyone knows the Mayo effort was not good enough. But you cannot pile it on O'Shea and James Horan. Everyone is entitled to a fair hearing and you cannot manipulate an entire career down to a few games. The absence of an All-Ireland medal is a big hole in Aidan's career. I am sure Aidan knows this. But the manner in which Joe is going after Aidan O'Shea is just bloody wrong.

Here's a story. O'Shea lost his fifth final on Saturday, December 19th, 2020. He didn't score. Dublin won with no undue fuss. On Monday, January 18th 2021 a friend of mine had a meeting with a sports consultant in the Sism gym in Castlebar. It is run by a member of the Mayo backroom team. It was a wet damp old morning and as he went into the office, my friend spotted O'Shea doing a weights session. He had started back the week before. People don't see that side of it. He has been doing this for a decade. Joe doesn't see that. Up to recently, Aidan O'Shea hadn't missed a game for Mayo in 10 years.

I imagine that he won't miss many next summer either. In the meantime, Mayo have to immediately begin to rectify the failures that have repeatedly destroyed us in All-Ireland finals. Change needs to happen in the dressing room and across the county. Otherwise another 70 years will slip by and we will all be pretty old by then.Thanks

Was this against Ballina BC?

'Twas

Lovely story , well told.
I remember Ballina winning the Club Football All Ireland a few years ago , also other teams from Mayo like Crossmolina winning it.

To echo a point made earlier..   its amazing that Tyrone beat  Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan, Kerry and Mayo on the way to wining an AI and all many of the pundits can talk about is how poor Mayo and Kerry were.

In fairness , Mayo were poor enough yesterday.

SPORT



Malachy Clerkin at Croke Park
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about 5 hours ago
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The good news for Mayo is that the graph is still pointing upwards. It won't have felt like it wading through the ankle-deep mud of another All-Ireland defeat but it bears pointing out all the same. They have been - and will continue to be - derided for falling short on Saturday night. But if nothing else, they have enough experience of these things to know how to separate the noise from the reality.

In each of the three seasons since James Horan returned, it has taken the All-Ireland champions to beat them in Croke Park. Along the way, Horan has completely reconfigured the playing staff. Seven of their starting team on Saturday have made their championship debut since 2019. Ditto four of the five subs. All of them have played in at least one All-Ireland final now and the majority of them have played in two.

Seen in that light, plenty of counties would love to be as badly off as Mayo. Whatever format the championship takes next year, they will still be among the top four teams. Counties striving to compete with them - your Donegals, your Monaghans, your Galways, your Armaghs, your Kildares - have nothing like their base of experience and development put together. If any of them could start 2022 where Mayo are, they'd be delighted.

But like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball, when you lose the last game of the season, nobody gives a *. Mayo started an All-Ireland final as favourites and finished it as flops. Quite why their failures seem to get so far up the noses of so many people is a mystery best left between the righteous and their therapists. For Mayo, there are far more important matters to interrogate now.

The consensus on Saturday night seemed to be that this was their worst final performance since the bad old days of 2006. Certainly, the fact that so many Mayo players left no real imprint on the biggest game of the year would put anyone in mind of those torchings from Kerry in the mid-2000s. It's one thing to have the experience of playing in a couple of finals. It's another to be on the pitch as they pass you by.


But where this final differs from back then is the fundamental truth that it wouldn't have taken very much for it to turn Mayo's way. For all that Tyrone were the better side with the more pointed gameplan and the smoother execution, the two teams created more or less the same amount of scoring chances. Tyrone made more of theirs. So Tyrone are champions.

Shotmap
Mayo took 31 shots across the game and scored 0-15. Tyrone took 28 shots and scored 2-14. None of Mayo's shots were from outlandish positions - the Armagh-based analyst Colin Trainor posted their shotmap online on Sunday morning and showed that no Mayo player tried a shot from play from outside the 45 or anywhere near the sidelines. They shot, in the main, from the places you're supposed to shoot from. They just shot really badly.


Conor Loftus missed 1-3 and had a nightmare all around. Tommy Conroy was busy and willing and always seemed to have the beating of Pádraig Hampsey but he also missed a brilliant goal chance when Mayo were rampant. Bryan Walsh got hassled out of one goal chance and tried to burst the net with another but blazed wide when a handy fisted point was the obvious option.

Even Ryan O'Donoghue, who was the one Mayo attacker who was clearly loving the stage all day, made a mess of his penalty by trying to be too clever with it. Granted, Niall Morgan definitely came off his line but that's a cop-out. A penalty in an All-Ireland final should be scored - you're too close to the goal to be forgiven a miss, especially when you're trying to pick out the top corner with it. Low and inside the post does it every time.

Is there a common thread to these misses? Possibly. It's no new insight to point out that Mayo's greatest strength can also be their most debilitating weakness. They thrive when the game is taken to that place where only they can live with the intensity. Turnovers, tackles, pouring forward like the 13th Infantry coming over the hill with bayonets drawn.


But too often on Saturday night, they looked to be trying too hard to force that emotional weight onto the game. All three misses listed above needed a more professional execution. Conroy had skinned Hampsey and looked to send Croker into orbit with his shot, so much so that he lashed at it and pulled it wide and didn't for a second consider Aidan O'Shea standing unmarked in the middle of the goal.

Walsh had been anonymous for much of the game and was like a boxer trying to get back into the fight by landing one massive haymaker, rather than jabbing away with a fisted point - or again, slipping to O'Shea in the centre of the goal. And as for O'Donoghue, it wasn't enough to score his penalty, he wanted to score one that people would purr over, a reminder to everyone that he had been a schoolboy soccer international once upon a time.

Cooler heads
Horan was quoted in the build-up as wanting to take the bull* out of Mayo football. His job now is to define for his players exactly what constitutes bull*. He most likely means all the extraneous stuff - the hype, the nonsense of the curse, all that jazz. But when he watches this final back, he will have to reckon with the fact that with cooler heads, Mayo would have scored more of the ample chances they created.

Horan also needs to either find a role in which O'Shea can prosper or end his torment once and for all. Along with Lee Keegan and Kevin McLoughlin, he has now played in seven All-Ireland final matches and never won and never scored. Worse, he has begun to look like a bad footballer, which he is not. His miss on 21 minutes was unforgivable, especially since McLoughlin had created a screen to give him the yard of space on his good foot on the edge of the D to swing over a regulation point.



At 31, it has long been obvious that he isn't an inside forward. But it can't be beyond the wit of the Mayo management to find a job for someone with his physical gifts, his handling, his passing and his fielding ability.

There must be personal responsibility on O'Shea's side too - not for the first time, he has played badly in the biggest game of the year. He has to properly and honestly face up to why this happens.

That can be said of Mayo in general too, of course.

Nothing new there.

Why would Mayo be looking to get rid of Horan anyway, if anything he has overachieved with a team in transition.

Odd that runners up often get more criticism than the 30 counties they finished ahead of.

As do Galway hurlers. What's seldom mentioned is the effort it took to get them there in the first place.
There's no secret to it. You'll win AIs if you have enough good players and if you can minimise the damage done on your weak links. Finding that sweet spot is key.

Agree totally. With rare exceptions, AI champions get there because they have better players, every Tyrone player that played yesterday and several others in the squad have an exceptional skill set . Much as I want to see Mayo get over the line, they still lack the depth of quality in the final third required to win AI. O'donoghue and Conroy will get up to the level required, but they will need more than that. Several Tyrone attackers provided creative attacking quality when it counted. Mayo football ethos emphasises athleticism over flair . No county has won AI without exceptional attAcking talent. Athleticism alone can get u over most teams but when u get to AIF where athleticism is a given in both teams, it's going to take something special to win out. If Mayo want to persist with loading their attack with big athletes they'll never get over the line. Mcshane and matty Donnelly have been exceptional footballers in past few years, but ultimately the additional attacking flair of McKenna , Canavan and a revitalised mccurry was required to get them the AI.

That's some load of old codswallop !

Tyrone were worthy winners. Shot selection/decision making/skill levels were piss piss poor form Mayo while Tyrone made their chances count.

What did Mayo work on in training all season. The pressure came on today and the Mayo forwards were embarrassingly bad . Didn't want to know and  when pressure came on tonight.

Serious questions need to be asked of Horan and his mangement team. Shambolic is the only way to describe that Mayo performance and once again Aidan O'Shea scores nothing on All Ireland finals day when the pressure osoon

The dynamic between Horan and especially one of his management team younger fella black hair was bad during the match with Horan turning away in near disgust after the other fella had been very strongly putting points (or giving out). They destroy themselves. The thing is curses only work if you believe them and Mayo, in the back of their minds, clearly do believe that 'curse'.

Ridiculous statement about the curse.
I'm of a certain age and for the first forty years of my life the curse didn't exist, it's a modern invention, spurred aging by a headline grabbing media.

Anyone able to post Brollys full analysis from the independent?

Premium
No more excuses please from football's great time wasters

Joe Brolly
Mayo is full of cliques and favourites as culture will not change under Horan who made Tyrone's job easy

September 11 2021 10:08 PM
Time wasters. A lot of other counties would give their right arms to be here. The people of Mayo put their heart and soul into their team. And this is what they get?
A manager on the sideline making choices based on political considerations. A protected captain who does not lead and never will.

Substituting Pádraig O'Hora in the 51st minute after he had surged forward to win a free inside the Tyrone half and had been taking the game to Tyrone? Leaving passengers on the field?

It was embarrassing and enraging, even if it was inevitable. The shame is that with a high-performance culture based on merit, Mayo could be so much more than this. I got a text from Pat Gilroy on the final whistle. It said "culture".



At the highest level, the best culture wins. Which is why, in the end, a middling Tyrone team still learning their trade won easily. They are serious.

With Dooher, Logan and Peter Canavan leading the group, there is a merciless search for success. No passengers. No favourites. Winning big games, as they know, is war without guns.

The six in-a-row Dubs might have been highly skilled, highly conditioned, and expertly coached, but they would not have won without bringing war. Tyrone were up for it. Mayo, with a few exceptions, were not. How could they be? They have too many distractions.

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The game was finally over in the 25th minute. Aidan O'Shea was presented with the easiest goal chance I have seen in a final. The Tyrone keeper was caught out and had left his goal empty, chasing back fearing the worst.

His life must have flashed before his eyes. He needn't have worried. "Oh for f**k sake" the Mayo man beside me said. My brother Proinsias texted me, "As I said our boy".

When there are individuals who are undroppable and a manager has favourites, cliques form and it is not a team.

The players know this, and the true bonds of loyalty and togetherness that are compulsory for success are missing.

The manager talks a good game but it is merely talk. I feel bad for Mayo and its people and its wonderful clubs but until this malaise is rooted out, this will continue to be their reality.



Straws will be clutched at. Mayo missed a penalty when they were two points down. But when everything isn't right, nothing is right.

The feeling of liberation at the absence of Dublin and the hope that Mayo might perform was soon replaced with a feeling that nothing has changed. Tyrone, all calm and composed and ruthless when it came to it, won by five points.

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It could have been worse, if for the second game in a row, the 'Son of God' hadn't missed what for him was an easy goal chance.

I have watched him with excitement since he was a teenager and have never seen him miss a goal chance. It must be the Carrickmore in him. He has his first Sam Maguire already. His father, who did not win his first until he was 33, must be well pleased.

I wrote last week that what happened in the last quarter of the Dublin game and in extra-time was not a game plan. It was a crazy, unpredictable, emotional energy that an underdog sometimes taps into.

Tyrone, meanwhile, gloved Kerry, with a miraculous performance from David Clifford keeping Kerry in it. Finals are unsentimental affairs. It is kill or be killed. It is culture v culture. And when one team's philosophy is not based on the principles of logic and merit, defeat is inevitable. The back-to-the-drawing-board bull* does not cut it.

Good culture is the backdrop for the decisive contributions that are required to win an All-Ireland. I think of the Meath team of Colm O'Rourke, all loyalty and stubbornness and refusal to accept defeat, winning All-Irelands against better teams on paper.

Or the 2008 Tyrone team. Or Down of 1991. Or us in 1993. Or the Dubs from 2011 onwards. Mayo's manager will say, "We lost by a point" or "we missed a penalty" or "we couldn't repeat our semi-final performance" but this is just bull*.

Tyrone, a team picked on merit, with a culture of heads down, no commercial distractions and playing for the people of Tyrone, easily won. Two expertly-taken goals will be the headline, but the truth is that their culture is a world away from their opposition's.

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There were any number of moments where we turned to each other and said, "Well that's the end of that", but the truth is that this contest was over before it began.

Tyrone came in at half-time two up, after O'Hora had surged forward defiantly to win a 20-metre free that Ryan O'Donoghue easily converted. But the wheels of this sentimental, public-relations merry-go-round came off altogether in the second half.

McShane came on and fisted a superb goal from a terrific long diagonal ball. The 'Son of God' came on shortly afterwards and played with the precision and expertise one would expect from a Canavan.

The inevitable second Tyrone goal followed, a thrilling long kick-out from Morgan leading to an expertly-taken finish. Calm, precise, serious. Just what you'd expect from a serious team.

Thing is, Tyrone did not expect to be All-Ireland champions at the start of this season. But when they got Mayo in the final, they knew, and we knew, that it was going to happen. In the end, it is a question of culture.

Under this manager, Mayo are time wasters. Soul destroying for good footballers and good clubs. Soul destroying for the people.