AIF 2021 -- Maigh Eo vs Tír Eoghain

[MK]

Tyrone were the last Ulster county to get the Sam account opened in 2003 and in the year of our Lord 2021 they are just 1 off Down and Cavan

Maybe ask the Ernemen or the Saffrons on this...yet to open their  account afaik

[cjx]

McGuinness has almost got his soccer A licence I doubt if he'd just ditch the career change at this point without having had a proper go at managing on his own. I'd say he's more likely to pop up in the LOI than return to top end GAA management.

People really do need to look at what McGuiness actually achieved with teams Irish, Scottish and Chinese (and how long he stayed with each job) then read carefully the pseudo philosophy and crypto psychology in his media articles and think carefully before hiring him.

[seafoid]

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.

As Sylvie observed,  you'll.win nothing if you don't have a few tinkers

[Buckass]

Horan's changes have to be questioned.
Dublin looked like a side  waiting to be put out of their misery. Throwing kitchen sink at it is not a gameplan.
People on about genius in taking a o shea off in semi...he brought Conor o shea on in same game. Dublin under gavin win that game by 6.
Match ups & length of time guys who were overwhelmed were left on the last day is another question. Had Tyrone not had 3rd quarter jitters (sludden, mcshane free, Mckenna mark) when walking thru mayo it would have been worse.
Players didn't look mentally prepared & had no gameplan to fall back on. Contrast that with Tyrone.
Then take off O Hora who had the balls to run the gauntlet with intent & bring on 'needs his own Ball' Coen & Orme for his first taste?
Then blame players decision making & skills.
I don't agree with the O Shea bashing; what was his role tho? His confidence looked shook & he's been so good in so many games it's hard on him. When used inside for ten in first half he won frees...then he's out around half back line?
Horan vs Dooher/ Logan...that was the big match-up

[Armagh18]

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.

I'd agree about Horan but it seems to be an unpopular opinion.  A lot of people on social media seem more intent in piling on to him and O'Shea as the scapegoats.  A combination of hindsight and anonymous accounts .

O'Shea was poor as he's been touted for years as one of Mayos main men but was very poor last 2 days out. Horan deserves serious praise for getting to 2 finals with almost a totally different team  than 16 and 17. He also deserves criticism for some of the tactics and personnel decisions made. O'Shea should have been off.

[Halfquarter]

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.

[RedHand88]

No county has won AI without exceptional attAcking talent.

Derry 1993.

Brolly, Gormley, Seamus Downey.

[thejuice]

Watched it today. Thought it was a good entertaining game for the neutral. Tyrones unheralded midfield really impressed me, Kennedy and Kilpatrick. Great tackling and fielding by the whole team and they were able to switch up their style of play which is crucial in today's game but so few teams seem to be able to do it well. Well done to Brian and Feargal. They did some job in changing that team around from the league hammering against Kerry.

Mayo could have won it too but those missed goal chances, especially in the start of the second half you could see the writing was on the wall. I don't think Mayo were as bad a people are saying but they need another way of playing and attacking. Aiden O'Shea was again not in his best position I feel, needed to be at 11 to help secure midfield, link play and create pressure high up the field when Tyrone have possession.

Tyrone could be double contenders but Ulster is always minefield.

[tyroneman]

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.

[BennyCake]

No county has won AI without exceptional attAcking talent.

Derry 1993.

Brolly, Gormley, Seamus Downey.

Brolly 0-1, Downey 1-0, Gormley must've got 0-5 or 0-6. The half forwards didn't score. Not prolific by any means.

In the final anyway

[6th sam]

No county has won AI without exceptional attAcking talent.

Derry 1993.

Brolly, Gormley, Seamus Downey.

Heaney Cassidy Barton : all 6 quality forwards.
That Derry team would have one at least two only for meeting a Down team in first round who won the all-ireland that year pulling up.

You don't win an all-ireland without quality productive attackers. Dublin won last 6 on that basis . Tyrone's forwards yesterday were all productive , to think that they took off mattie Donnelly one of the best footballers in ireland over past 10 years , and didn't weaken . Much as people focus on Mayo , Tyrone were  superb yesterday , and they set the standard for the rest of us

[IolarCoisCuain]

Congratulations to Tyrone. Best team in Ireland. They won Ulster, the hardest Championship there is to win, they beat Kerry (again) and they beat last year's finalists and this year's favourites.

Judging from afar and confessing I might be missing all manner of stuff that would be known to Tyrone people themselves, I think Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher are due a huge amount of credit for this win. Mickey Harte's were big boots to fill and fill them they did. I know they had a few close squeaks in Ulster but nothing is easy in Ulster. Against Kerry and against Mayo Logan and Dooher out-generalled the opposition and well done to them.

As for Mayo, I see a lot of "where do Mayo go from here?" articles in the papers. Well, back into the pot for the 2022 Championship is the answer there. Where else can they go? Maybe some older players will retire, maybe some will carry on, maybe some will be dropped. Some newer players will be better than what went before, some will be worse, some will be about the same. Maybe there'll be a change on the sideline, maybe there won't. There's a long winter to figure all that out. The chief thing I'd be hoping is that crowds will be able to go to games again. The past two years have been a pain in the ass.

Finally, in the context of this thread, a tip of the cap to Seafóid for his erudite Procrustean reference, and to whichever Tyrone poster came up with the Tyronavirus. Top class work. Up Mayo.

[6th sam]

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 !

Insightful intelligent response , I want Mayo to win an AI but Groundhog Day , not enough quality forwards. They need to address that or they'll never win one

[Halfquarter]

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.

[mouview]

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.

As Sylvie observed,  you'll.win nothing if you don't have a few tinkers

Not so. Galway 98-01 were nearly as pure a footballing side as you'd get. Sure, they'd men that could mind themselves, but never cynical or robustly physical.