Football

Seamus O'Shea still chasing elusive Sam Maguire

Seamus O'Shea tangles with Tyrone's Sean Cavanagh in the All-Ireland quarter-final
Seamus O'Shea tangles with Tyrone's Sean Cavanagh in the All-Ireland quarter-final Seamus O'Shea tangles with Tyrone's Sean Cavanagh in the All-Ireland quarter-final

MAYO have chased Gaelic Football’s biggest prize relentlessly for five years, but Sam Maguire has chosen to hang with the cool kids.

First Kerry, then Dublin, then Donegal and in the last two seasons Kerry and Dublin again, both after nail-biting semi-final replays, headed off with Sam for a night on the tiles while Mayo’s players went home with their hands in pockets.

Kerry’s roars of delight as they dragged themselves off Limerick’s Gaelic Grounds in 2014 and the Dubs’ at Croke Park last year could have lingered long in their memories but the westerners bounce back and are chasing Sam again.

What do they have to do to land the All-Ireland their years of effort deserve? More. A little bit more at the right times but, of course, that’s easily said.

Seamus O’Shea has been soldiering on for the best part of a decade. After talking to him for a while you get a sneak peak into Mayo’s resilient attitude – he doesn’t dwell on things, he moves on, learns and comes again. Next year lads…

“You keep doing the same thing and getting the same results you probably have to try something different. I don’t know,” says the burly midfielder from Breaffy.

“New management comes in and they are going to want to try something different.

“You set up as a team in a way that you think is going to help you win the game and that could be different week to week or game to game.

“So, I don’t know. The way we played previously seems to get a bad rep because you lose and All-Ireland final by a point or you lose two All-Ireland semi-final replays you must have been doing something wrong because you were one point off at the end of the game.

“Look, the reality is they are close games that could go either way.”

Yes, but the tight ones rarely go Mayo’s way. Is that down to (a lack of) composure? Energy? Ability? Ruthlessness? The curse of 1951? Or just bad luck?

O’Shea could certainly consider himself unlucky to have been black-carded against Dublin last year. Mayo were on top when Jonny Cooper gave him a dig off the ball – he took the bait and had to watch from the bench as his team’s will crumbled under pressure.

“Dublin do that to lots of teams,” he said, looking back.

“They have a good team and when they get on a bit of a run it’s hard to stop them.

“I was off the pitch at that stage and we had a few fellas off the pitch at that stage.

“I think that was the only situation where a team has gotten a run on us over the last few years where they put us away kind of…”

It was a yellow card offence, not a black card. But he knows he shouldn’t have reacted.

“Och, I don’t know to be honest,” he says, it’s not a subject he enjoys discussing.

“I put myself in a position where the referee had to make a decision and that is my own fault. First of all it was stupid of me to react. Generally I don’t react in those situations.

“My disciplinary record is very good. And for whatever reason I just reacted that day. If the referee is telling me it’s a black card, it’s a black card.

“I think for me the black card is more when kind of it’s in the ball, when you pull a fellow down, stuff like that.

“So, the fact it was away from the play I didn’t really expect it.

“I thought even after I went off we went on to play pretty okay for the next five or 10 minutes and then Dublin went on a bit of a run.

“When they get on a bit of a run like that it is hard to stop them and they just had all the momentum and they got it at the right time, so it was just disappointing that I wasn’t out there to help my team-mates but, yeah, what can you do”

He met his team-mates as they came off the field. Another year and another failure... They could have pointed the finger at him and he could have pointed back, but where would it get any of them?

Managers Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly took the fall for the defeat after just one season and this year Mayo had new faces in the dugout for the third season on-the-trot. Stephen Rochford, who included Donie Buckley, Sean Carey and Tony McEntee in his backroom team, didn’t get off to the best of starts.

Auld enemy Galway ended Mayo’s run of five provincial Connacht titles at the semi-final stage. But there was no panic - O’Shea says he expected his county’s dominance to end some time.

“What did we win, five in-a-row? Realistically, we weren’t going to win 25 in-a-row,” he argued.

“It was going to happen at some point. Roscommon or Galway or someone was going to take us out some evening. Unfortunately, it happened this year. It wasn’t something we wanted to happen.

“We enjoyed winning Connacht titles; it has been good to us and it makes the road a bit easier coming through the front door. You guard against it as long as you can. Unfortunately, it just didn’t happen for us this year.”

After that loss to Galway there were two schools of thought. A: Mayo’s spark had finally begun to fade or B: They were saving themselves for the big ones in Croke Park.

“Results dictate it,” said O’Shea.

“Lose the last day and everyone says we’re tired.

“Win and it’s because we’ve honed the system, worked out what we’re trying to do.

“If we lose this one, it will be the same again, ‘they’ve played five games in six games – whatever it is – they’re a tired team’. Or else they’re flying because they’ve been battle hardened.

“It’s been a nice change of scenery to be honest.

“We’re not used to playing this many games at this time of year. Means less training, games every second weekend.

“It’s a big difference between waiting around after a Connacht final for an All-Ireland quarter-final and you know you’ve a big game coming up. Going week to week is a big difference in terms of training, recovery, trying to get ready for the game. It’s the position we’ve found ourselves in so we’ve got to crack on.”

O’Shea knows how fickle the GAA world can be. Mayo ignored their doubter to beat Tyrone at the quarter-final stage and go into Sunday’s semi-final against surprise-packets Tipperary as favourites to reach the final.

“If that’s the perception, that’s the perception – it won’t affect us,” he said.

“Like anything in the GAA, when you lose a game or don’t play well, it’s the end of the world.

“When you win again, like we did against Tyrone, we’re world-beaters again. We tend not to get too high up or low down about these things.

“We knew we weren’t as bad as we looked against Galway.

“We knew we had plenty more in us, even though we weren’t playing well throughout the summer. We felt like there was a big performance in us last time. Hopefully there will be another one in us.”

There were 65 good minutes in Mayo against Tyrone. In the last five, when the game was won, they could well have lost it. That old insecurity resurfaced and instead of killing off a team that had lost Sean Cavanagh to a red card they retreated and tried to run down the clock.

“The fact that they were sitting back a bit, they gave us an opportunity to play the ball around a bit but I think we probably did it a bit too much,” O’Shea admitted.

“We got the ball well up into our forward line at some point and we came back when we probably should have pushed on a little bit.

“We probably put ourselves under a bit of undue pressure, whereas there probably needs to be a goal at the end of it… or not a goal, but you know what I mean, we need to try and get some kind of score or work a score at some point. I think that was probably where we fell down a bit.”

Tyrone had four chances to equalise but couldn’t take any of them and so Mayo went through. You could argue that they earned their slice of luck and now Tipperary stand in their way of a third All-Ireland final in five years. Tipp, who play a free-flowing you-score-five-we’ll-score-six brand of football, will be a totally different challenge.

“I dunno what way Tipp are going to set up,” says O’Shea.

“They could come out with something completely different the next day.

“We were pretty sure the way Tyrone would set up but every game takes on a life of its own.

“It’s hard to know, they’ve been playing fairly open football – they obviously bring Brian Fox back. They play fairly attacking football.

“They’ve a lot of good forwards. We’ll see what way it sets up on the day.”