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You are > Home > A funny old summer for football in the West
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A funny old summer for football in the West
By James Laffey
IN A summer in which Connacht football has been turned on its head more than once, Roscommon produced the most remarkable head-spinner of all at McHale Park last Sunday by winning the Nestor Cup on the same ground where they were demolished by Mayo a year earlier.
If ever a result demonstrated the futility of assessing teams on their league form it was Roscommon’s annexing of a 20th Connacht senior crown.
Sligo, the Division 3 champions, were humbled by a side that lost six of its seven matches in the same division. Roscommon, who will play their football in Division 4 next year, are contesting an AllIreland quarter-final while Mayo and Galway – two Division 1 teams – are warming the championship bench. It’s been a funny old summer so far.
The Sligo dressingroom must have been a pretty desolate place around teatime on Sunday evening. The Yeats men made all the running in the Connacht championship, beating Mayo and Galway in thrilling encounters, only to stumble at the final hurdle, the one that seemed easiest to overcome.
They’ll never again get a chance to beat Connacht’s so-called ‘Big Three’ in a single championship season and one suspects the effects of last Sunday’s defeat will linger long in the Yeats’ County. If Kevin Walsh can rouse them in time for next weekend against Down it will be a monumental achievement because Sligo cannot be in a good place right now.
There weren’t too many people throwing their lot in with Roscommon in the days before the Connacht final. The bookies, who are supposed to know a thing or two about these things, were quoting prices of 4-1 on a Roscommon victory, an extraordinarily generous price in a two-horse race.
Perhaps the pre-match odds made sense on championship and league form but it was crazy for people to be so dismissive of a Roscommon team that was never going to have any hang-ups about playing Sligo in a Connacht final.
Roscommon were always going to be dangerous, especially if they got off to a good start, which is precisely what happened. In Donal Shine they had the outstanding forward on the day, while their half-backs and half forwards got through a power of work on the vital breaking ball.
One hopes that those in charge of the future of Mayo football were taking notes from their comfortable seats in the magnificent stand at McHale Park because last Sunday should serve as an inspiration – and a warning – about where we need go in this new decade. Much was made of the fact that Roscommon manager Fergal O’Donnell built his team around the group of minors who won an All-Ireland title in 2006. But who won the All-Ireland U-21 title that year? Yes, it was Mayo, and ten of our starting team that day were part of the panel defeated by Longford last month.
In fact, four of the six defenders from the U-21 winning side started in that humiliating debacle at Pearse Park.
How do good players turn bad when they pull on a Mayo senior jersey? It’s a question that continues to perplex and Alan Costello became the latest enigma in this county’s frustrating footballing history by popping over five outstanding points last Sunday. This is the same Alan Costello who, had he waited on in Mayo, would have needed to invade the pitch at McHale Park to get noticed.
Every team in Connacht should take heart from last Sunday because Roscommon have demonstrated that a team’s fortunes can be transformed in a matter of 70 minutes. All the talk in the build-up to the Connacht final was of ‘poor old Roscommon’, yet along comes a team of determined, exuberant youngsters and in a single afternoon they erase the trials and tribulations of a decade.
It also proves that managers must be given a chance to nourish the talent they have unearthed at the underage grades. Here in Mayo we have homegrown managers like Ray Dempsey who have dedicated countless hours to their underage teams yet we seem to believe that we can solve all our problems by helicoptering in the likes of Mick O’Dwyer or Páidí O Sé.
Of course, the usual health warning about Connacht football needs to accompany Roscommon’s victory, but it would be churlish to talk about such matters on the week that’s in it. I don’t think there is a single Mayo person who would begrudge this young Roscommon side their victory, and it is particularly fitting that it should have come only weeks after the county laid to rest its greatest footballer of the modern era. Dermot Earley would be mighty proud of this new generation of Roscommon footballers.
A final point: Roscommon have now won the Nestor Cup in every decade since the 1940s.Mayo’s lost years in the 1970s means we can never match that feat while Galway will have to wait until next year, at least, before they can lay claim to a similar statistic.
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