Once it was the time of their lives but the Mayo journey has now curdled for their loyal supporters

And you may find yourself sitting in the Hogan Stand, cursing. You may find yourself wishing your Mayo football team would just go away and leave you in peace. You may find yourself roaring, once again, for a try-hard wing forward to settle himself and plant his feet before taking on a shot.

You may find yourself in the green and red of Mayo, talking fast and cross as you stride up Clonliffe Road, grouchy and curdled by the years, sore and sour at what it has all become, this voyage, this supposed Via Dolorosa, this thing that was such a joyride, such a fulfilling slice of your identity, not so very long ago before it all went to shit. And you may ask yourself — “Am I right? Am I wrong?”

It’s a question now in a way it never was for Mayo supporters. For a decade — for longer than that, obviously, but especially so since 2011 — they’ve been coming to Croke Park on weekends like this, wired to the cause, as much a part of the thing as the players down on the pitch. Not universally confident that it would turn out for the best but always, always certain that this was the best use of their time. That they wouldn’t be anywhere else. That there was no decision to make.

And now? Now it’s trickier. Complicated in a way it never was. There will still be a huge Mayo crowd in the big house tomorrow but it’s fair to say the love isn’t unconditional any more. It isn’t just the fact that you will search long and hard to find a Mayo supporter who thinks they will beat Kerry. That’s a given, the workaday fatalism of the long-suffering fan.

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“People think ‘there are hostages – it is what it is’. But there are families who cannot carry on with their lives”

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No, this is harsher than that. More pointed, for a start. And definitely more targeted. A significant rump of the Mayo support has had enough of the current management. Plenty have had enough of certain players on the team.

But in a more macro sense, just about everyone has had enough of the life at this stage. Enough of the whole shebang, of the year-after-year, the close-but-no-cigar. The general sense is that if there’s gonna be no cigar, then let there be no cigar. But one way or another, can everyone please shut up about the f**king cigar?

“Ah yeah, we’re sick to death of it now,” laughs John Gunnigan, owner and (more pertinently) moderator of the MayoGAABlog website. “I remember sometime in the mid-2000s talking to a Kildare fan who was still traumatised by 1998 and he was saying, ‘Oh Jesus no, I couldn’t go through that again.’ And I was going, ‘Ah, once you have the first three or four final defeats over you, it’s not so bad.’ Little did I know what was ahead of us.”

Thing is, for most of the way, it has been the time of their lives. Five years ago, The Irish Times spoke to Gunnigan and a handful of other Mayo fans in the middle of one of those summers of endless madness. The 2017 championship was an absolute classic of the Mayo genre — beaten in Connacht by Galway, taken to extra-time in qualifiers against Derry and Cork, a draw and replay against the Rossies, a draw and replay against Kerry. All leading to the best All-Ireland final of the century against Dublin.

And they loved every minute. Yes, every minute. Losing the final by a point — it was the one that ended with Dean Rock and Lee Keegan and the GPS — yes it was gut-wrenching and yes it was awful and bruising and everything else. But it was living. Glorious, adrenalised, empty-yourself living. This is not that.

“You go back to 2017, it was bonkers,” says Gunnigan. “It was completely bats. I left that final in 2017 and I was never more proud of Mayo. We gave it everything. We poured everything into that summer and couldn’t have given it one inch more and we came up a point short in the best final I have ever seen. It was a killer but I was able to go, ‘I’ll take that. That’s fine.’

“Whereas now, we’ve had it up to our eyeballs. The Tyrone final broke an awful lot of people. Our excuse was always, ‘Arra sure we’re up against the best team of all time, arra sure this, arra sure that.’ But we had Tyrone in last year’s final and they looked like perfect opponents, a team we had beaten several times in Croke Park, coming off the back of ending the Dublin hoodoo. And we didn’t get it done.

“September was a huge inflection point. There’s a general weariness and crankiness about Mayo supporters now that has gone into a different orbit since September. The amount of giveoutery about anything and everything is gone bananas. People were moaning endlessly about the Kildare game being in Croke Park and I was going, ‘Jesus, will ye stop moaning — if ye don’t want to go, don’t go!’

“And then I get it in the neck for complaining about people moaning and I’m just going, ‘You don’t have to do this. If you don’t like it, find something you do like!’ And sure the ironic thing at the end of it all was that if that game had been in any other ground only Croke Park, we would absolutely be gone from the championship now.”

Those empty seats the last day certainly told one part of the story. These things are always impossible to quantify but if you want numbers, there’s the fact that the 16,485 who turned up was the lowest Croke Park crowd for a Mayo game since the 2011 league semi-finals. Some of it was to do with cost, some of it was a reaction to the GAA taking the Mayo support for granted and hauling them up to the city.

But Occam’s Razor holds too. Mayo have not been very good since the early stages of the league and a sizeable chunk of their people don’t enjoy watching them. The fact that they’ve beaten two Division One teams in a row isn’t cutting a lot of ice. There’s a real sense of waiting to be put out of their misery.

“Mayo people still love Mayo football,” says Rob Murphy, whose double life as the presenter of the Mayo News Football podcast and the owner/manager of Murphy’s Centra in Ballinrobe gives him all sorts of insight into psyche on the ground. “If you only heard the way people are talking about the minor team at the minute — everybody’s loving them and there’s a real momentum building behind them because they’re a breath of fresh air.

“But when it comes to the seniors, it’s just different. One guy was in the shop the other day and he was telling me he wasn’t going to go to the game. ‘I can’t stand watching them,’ he said. ‘I cannot stand watching Mayo any more. The one thing that got me through the years of losing finals was the football was enjoyable to watch. Not any more.’

“And you can feel that around the place. The atmosphere after last year’s All-Ireland final was horrible. Even during the game, the mood got so low, so fast. Once the penalty was missed and once the wides started happening, there was that old tension in the Mayo crowd. There was hardly a Mayo chant in the entire match and that has continued since.

“The first Mayo-Mayo chant in the Monaghan game was four minutes from the end. And it wasn’t that Monaghan had gone to Castlebar and silenced the crowd. It was more like they had walked into a house where there was a huge fight going on and lots of tension was hanging in the air.”

Why, though? From the outside looking in, the charge sheet against the Mayo set-up and the team itself doesn’t appear to be particularly long. It’s true that they put in a desperately shoddy first half against Kildare but they still outscored them 2-8 to 0-3 in the closing half-hour.

It’s also true that they are relying on their defenders for key scores at crucial times but when has that not been the case? As Andy Moran has noted, Mayo produce hard-running point-scoring half-backs the way other counties produce slinky, stylish corner-forwards. It’s their blessing and their curse.

Even the commonly-held complaint that James Horan doesn’t communicate enough with the Mayo public surely only carries so much weight. Horan is no more secretive or closed off than his peers in this regard. Dessie Farrell, Kieran McGeeney, Jack O’Connor — none of them are doing fireside chats with local radio on a Monday night to bring their people inside the circle. Enabled by lily-livered county boards, they simply don’t feel the need. Mayo are far from unique in this regard.

No, when all comes to all, the problem is the problem. Mayo haven’t won their All-Ireland. The team they could have won it with is gone and the one they have at the minute is injury-ravaged and probably isn’t as good at any rate. The Camino is long and the walkers are weary.

“I think we’re shaped by everything that’s happened,” says Murphy. “It’s an accumulation of defeats. It’s the feeling of having missed the boat, especially against Tyrone last year. That one was probably too much to bear for a lot of people. It’s coming out of two years of Covid too. The whole thing just isn’t as enjoyable for a lot of people as it was. That’s the sense you get around the place.”

On the MayoGAABlog, the beat goes on, relentless and cranky and hopeful and hopeless all at once. Gunnigan says the traffic on his site for last year was a record 3.9 million page views and that it’s already up to 4.9 million this year with five and a bit months to go. It will be six million by the end of the year. The sky might be darkening but it’s not stopping the crowds gathering to stare and point and pronounce upon it.

“I’d say there is probably less belief around for this than I’ve seen in any big game, certainly since 2011,” Gunnigan says. “I don’t think Kerry are as good as people are saying but will we beat them? It’s very hard to see it. I think we’re all hoping for wind and rain and if we’re still there in it on 55 minutes, then we can unleash the madness. But I’m not sure that hangs together as a strategy really.”

They must go on. They can’t go on. They’ll go on.