THE MIDDLE THIRD:A FRIEND OF mine has a business in Cork renting out bouncy castles and that kind of thing. A month ago, he was cleaning out the shed when he came across an inflatable Winnie The Pooh that had been sitting there for a while.
He had no hope of getting any use out of it – the thing blew up to about 20 feet in height but then all you were left with was a 20-foot high Winnie The Pooh with a generator humming behind it and sure what good is that to anyone? So he stuck it up on
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to see could he get any takers for it.
In fairness, he had no confidence whatsoever about being able to get rid of it. But lo and behold, a fella rang him up and said he’d take it. Happy as he was to get it out the door, my friend didn’t ask any questions, just gave directions of where to come to pick it up. A day or two later, two boys landed down in a Hiace van delighted with themselves. They were from Donegal and Winnie was just the man they were looking for. Ever since, my friend has been keeping an eye out in the papers to see what they did with it. He hasn’t come across it yet but he’s fairly sure Winnie is wearing a green and gold jersey somewhere up there as we speak.
Any All-Ireland final will have its share of madness but it gets heightened, obviously, when there’s a novel pairing like this one. It goes without saying that in Donegal and Mayo, the players’ first job is to get about as far away from it all as possible. In this week, what matters above all for players is routine. The decks are cleared – your suits are measured, your tickets are handed out, the media can’t get at you. You’re not going to get any fitter or stronger or better. All you have to worry about from day to day is routine.
That’s why at training tonight or tomorrow night, the one new thing the teams will practice is the warm-up they will use on Sunday. On All-Ireland final day, the preliminaries take that bit longer so instead of a 15-minute warm-up drill, the trainers will come up with one that lasts 20 minutes.
The last thing they want is for players to be on the pitch at three o’clock on Sunday feeling thrown out of their usual routine.
Beyond training, the players will spend a lot of time together this week.
At this stage of the year, you want to be in the company of the people you shared the road with. Sometimes you’ll talk about the game but mostly you won’t – keep that for the team meetings and the dressingroom. Your best friend in a week like this can often be a team-mate who you can share a silence with and not feel that either of you needs to fill it.
The game looms over everything without you having to mention it. You’re thinking about it even when you’re thinking about other things. You’re watching other fellas in your team to see what kind of mood they’re in, hoping to draw your own confidence from it. Colm Cooper always went quiet the week of an All-Ireland final and everyone would see that and know it could only mean business. Other guys would be chirpier, trying to let on they were cool as a breeze about the whole thing. We knew they were bricking it like the rest of us and just dealing with it in their own way.
In a way, you have to be selfish this week. Family and friends have to leave you alone, even though they’re all up in the city and probably worrying about how you’re going to handle it. You have to analyse each situation and imagine what you’re going to get out of it. If you think that by walking through the lobby of the hotel there’s a chance you might run into a couple of well-wishers, you should probably just avoid the place altogether.
This might all sound a bit precious – like, how badly are you going to be affected by a bit of chit-chat with supporters? But that’s missing the point. The build-up to an All-Ireland has to be all about working out what is going to help you. That’s all that matters. Talking to some people will help you out, talking to others might wear you out. Weigh it up and choose.
If in doubt, avoid. It’s ruthless enough but that’s what it has to be.
There’ll be all the time in the world for chit-chat after Sunday.
The day itself passes so quickly. That was one of the things I really noticed the older I got and one of the reasons I came to realise that routine was so important. When you know the plan for the day, when everything is set out and time is allotted, you’re better able to settle into it.
If things are too unstructured, if you’re not being told where to go and what to do at a specific time, then you can all of a sudden arrive at 10-to-three and be running out onto the pitch feeling as if the day only started a half an hour ago.
From that point on, it goes in a flash. I could never understand how guys like Jack O’Shea were able to walk around in the parade winking at fellas in the stand. I was always far too nervous for that. I would pick a point in the stand ahead of me and stare at it until I turned a corner and then pick another point in the next one.
I always threw the odd glance over at my opposite number to see could I pick up anything in his body language. I might convince myself I had even if I hadn’t. Anything to make sure that when the helter-skelter began at the throw-in, I was confident in myself and ready to do what I was sent out there for.
So much of an All-Ireland final is mindset. It’s taking your nerves and using them for good rather than letting them weigh you down. That’s a huge part of what Jim McGuinness and James Horan will be working on all week.
They’re too clever, both of them, to be going around telling their players that this is just another game. All-Ireland finals are a different kettle of fish entirely and that goes for whether it’s your first or your fifth.
For most of the players on Sunday, it will be their first. It would be silly to think that none of them will get overwhelmed by it.
This is one of the reasons why I’m leaning towards Mayo. A lot of the talk all year has been about what an excellent up-and-coming manager McGuinness has been, so much so that Horan’s achievement probably hasn’t got the attention it deserves. He’s taken a team that was going nowhere to an All-Ireland final, knocking out the reigning champions two years in a row with a team that is just as hard-working, just as diligent and just as physical as Donegal are.
Donegal are the favourites and it’s easy to see why. People thought they wouldn’t beat Kerry and they did. People thought they wouldn’t beat Cork and they did. People don’t like to be fooled three times so they were going to be favourites on Sunday no matter who came out of the other side of the draw. But I think in their heart of hearts, they would have rathered Dublin than Mayo on Sunday.
Look at the Mayo forward line for a start. There is no gallery forward there. No Gooch, no Colm O’Neill, no Bernard Brogan. That might sound like a negative but I think against Donegal, it’s a positive. It means that there is nobody in the forward line who is going out there with only scoring on his mind. You can be certain that for every Donegal corner back bombing forward, there will be a Mayo corner forward right there on his shoulder. There is nobody in that front six who will be allowed to be a luxury. Donegal have been able to wear teams down because eventually some of the opposition players have given up the chase. Mayo won’t do that.
As a result, I think we’re in for a low-scoring game. A final score of something like 0-14 to 0-13 could be on the cards because you’re going to have two teams who will concentrate on getting their defensive formation right from the start and then trying to kick on from there. We might very well end up with a cautious, tense game that boils down to a shoot-out between the free-takers.
Donegal have been the phenomenon of the championship and one of the things that gets overlooked when people talk about them is their discipline. I was told that before the Cork game, Aidan Walsh kicked 10 frees from beyond the 45 at training – seven over the bar, one off the post and two just wide.
Yet even with him, O’Neill, Donncha O’Connor and Daniel Goulding on the pitch, Donegal conceded just one point from a free in the whole of the semi-final. That’s incredible discipline.
You won’t have a day like that every day, though. You definitely won’t have it when every one of you is playing in your first All-Ireland final.
McGuinness and his team have been very good at setting a specific gameplan for each team they have come up against but Mayo aren’t as straightforward a prospect as Cork and Kerry were.
Put it this way – any Cork or Kerry gameplan had to be based around getting their gallery forwards on the ball so they could rack up the scores to win the game. It was an obvious point for Donegal to begin at. But where do they start with Mayo? Horan’s team is very much like McGuinness’s in that they have a different approach depending on the opposition. It’s going to be a tactical battle all day.
In the end, I’m going to go with Mayo. I’ve been wrong about Donegal before every game this year and there’s a very good chance I will be again but I just get the feeling that people are handing it to them too easily. Yes, they’ve been fit, fast and exciting but Mayo have got to the final almost without too many people noticing that they’re just as physical, just as motivated and just as dead-set on going all the way.
My friend in Cork might be getting a phone call seeing does he want Winnie back come Sunday night.
