Mayo won but don’t take it as a compliment – parts of this game looked like an audition for The Underdogs

Joe Brolly

Oisín Mullin of Mayo goes past Paul Cribbin of Kildare on his way to scoring a goal during the championship clash at Croke Park. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

June 11 2022 09:30 PM

The first half of the game between Mayo and Kildare looked more like a regional audition for The Underdogs. If it had been, very few of the players on view would have made it through to the next round.

From the throw-in, Kildare, still traumatised from the Dublin horror, flooded the defence with all their outfield players. They didn’t have one sweeper against the Dubs. Here, they had five. Both teams proceeded to play like teams that didn’t see a bright future for themselves in the championship. Mayo, as always when they are confronted by a mass defence, had no idea how to break it down. As for Kildare, it is all very well to flood the defence, but if you are going to do this, you need to work out how to get scores at the other end.

The game began with a symbol of Kildare’s performance. A long ball was kicked in to Daniel Flynn, who rose easily above Oisín Mullin and took the mark in front of goal. Good start for Kildare, we thought, the long ball to Flynn is going to cause pandemonium. Only for Flynn to carelessly kick the easy mark wide. The crowd groaned.

I assumed beforehand that Flynn would stay close to goal and terrorise Mayo’s vulnerable full-backs, none of whom can catch a ball over their heads. Instead, he roved outfield into his own defensive area, leaving Mullin relieved and delighted, so delighted that he scored the decisive goal in the 62nd minute, levelling the game at 1-10 to 0-13.

Flynn is maddening to watch. He wins the ball superbly, then takes off like a bucking bronco, pirouetting about the field, driving past men, turning back, driving past them again, getting blocked down, taking the wrong option and sometimes, just sometimes doing something very special.

In the 40th minute, he went on one of his bewildering solo runs, doubled back on himself and surged off at a different angle, bamboozling the defending pack and kicking a beautiful point to put Kildare 0-10 to 0-5 up. A few minutes later they were six up. The game ought to have been secure but it never felt like that.

The turning point revolved around Flynn. In the 45th minute, with Kildare five up and the game having entered its crucial phase, he went on another electrifying solo run, made acres of space to kick an easy point to put them six up, but crazily, decided to keep going and try for goal.

His kick ballooned up off one of the three Mayo defenders converging on him, Mayo counter attacked and Cillian O’Connor kicked a point to reduce the gap to 0-11 to 0-7. This transformed the atmosphere. Mayo suddenly had hope. Kildare went into panic mode.

It would have been different if Kildare had been able to win their own kick-outs, but these were a horror show. Four times, the goalie put kick-outs over the sideline. Six more were lost, including a kamikaze short one in the 66th minute, which put Cillian O’Connor through on goal and required heroics from the Kildare defender to deflect it over the bar, leaving the score 1-12 to 0-14.

Kildare needed to retain their own kick-outs and there was no particular reason they shouldn’t have. As it was, the keeper’s meltdown spread panic through their ranks and his terrible day was compounded when Jordan Flynn accidentally lobbed him at the end when he got caught out of his nets. Jordan’s guilty smile was proof of his intent. He must learn to pretend he meant it, a particular skill of mine when I was playing. Modesty is an over-rated quality.

Mayo were, as usual this season, an unstructured mess, with every man doing his own thing. Lee Keegan changed the mood with his two superb, defiant points. Oisin Mullin’s goal came out of the blue. He looked to have been bottled up, then boomeranged out of the scrum and was suddenly away. A quick one-two with O’Hora and a brilliant finish was enough to get this job done.

Mayo won, but like last weekend (when Barry Cassidy, strangely, gave the benefit of the doubt to Lee Keegan) they could easily have lost. Mayo won because Kildare were not serious. By that, I mean they were merely content to defend in numbers, work hard and hope for the best.

They won because of Lee Keegan. They won because they had a better balance than Kildare, who eventually exhausted themselves with their deep defending and disorganised sprinting out of defence. They won because Kildare’s kick-out disintegrated.

Indeed, the most that can be said about Mayo is that they won.