MOSTLY FOOTBALL: Kingdom march on while Mayo suffer familiar feeling

Michael Hannon

So, Mayo came, they saw and they were conquered. Including injury time played at the end of both halves, this game lasted 79 minutes and the frustrating thing for the westerners will be how they were Dublin’s equals for all bar 12 devastating minutes after half-time. 

I don’t think I have ever seen as devastating and clinical a display as Dublin produced over the course of those dozen second-half minutes. Ciaran Kilkenny, Brian Fenton, Con O’Callaghan and Paul Mannion, all after having modest opening halves by their standards, were simply were unplayable. 

It was a mixture of power, pace, precision, skill, determination and an absolute desire to win that broke Mayo’s will. Thereafter, the sides exchanged scores, tit for tat, 1-3 to Dublin, 1-2 for mayo, much like they had done in the opening half with defences returning to being on top for the final 24 minutes as the rate of scoring dropped. 

James Horan was right when he spoke afterwards about how he didn’t think Dublin did anything new or special. They just did what they did in the first half only did it so much better over the course of those opening 12 second-half minutes. 

That same period after half-time saw Mayo drop a shot short from Paddy Durcan and Cilian O’Connor hit a scorable free wide before Durcan dropped another short off his weaker left foot. 

Dublin would go on to score 1-1 directly from those three missed chances. When people wonder how Dublin are able to open up such a lead so quickly, it’s important to look at what’s happening at both ends of the field. Mayo’s old failings in front of goals played a massive part of their downfall. 

It always amazes me when watching James Horan's team play how the man highest up the field is usually the guy who takes the shot. Why is that important, you might wonder? 

Well, it contrasts so much with what the best sides do – Dublin, for example, or Kerry under Eamon Fitzmaurice when their forward line was operating at its slickest. 

If the guy highest up the field is shooting then it means he has no option ahead of the ball. In other words, he has other choice to make if he doesn’t fancy a difficult shot other than to throw the ball backwards or to take it on.
 
Shifting the ball backwards to a team-mate can often times be the sensible option but moving the ball forward into the scoring zone is what good teams do better than everyone else. 

With Mayo, it always seems to be a case of take on a difficult shot, or recycle backwards and wait for the half-back line to get up to join in the attack. So much depends on them providing punch to their forward line. 

So their attacks are either going wide, over or under the bar, dropping short to the keeper, or getting recycled backwards slowly. Too often, when Cillian O’Connor leaves the full-forward line and wins a ball, he has no-one ahead of him; no-one really makes that effort to replace him inside once he vacates that position. 

Of course, occasionally it happens but with this bunch of Mayo players it’s certainly not done routinely enough that I ever get the impression that the concept of a team having, or maintaining, an attacking shape is ever drilled into them. 

What Mayo did manage to do well the other day in the first half was negate the Dublin sweeper by holding on to the ball for long periods of the game. This allowed them to swarm the field with players - essentially everyone joined in with the attack except goalkeeper Rob Hennelly - and Dublin ended up having to mark man-for-man. 

However it meant Mayo's attacks were slow and laborious, although as per usual, defensively, they were giving it everything that they had. In fact, the worrying news for Kerry is that, at the back, neither they nor Tyrone came close to producing the level that James Horan's men produced, when they clashed in their semi-final the following day. 

Kerry will be able to score against Dublin, they are a very talented attacking unit, but I’m not convinced that they’ll be able to do a whole pile to stop Jim Gavin’s men registering at the other end. 

However they are a young and coming team. And with young players, sometimes you just never know. They can surprise you and elevate themselves to another level that they didn’t know they had within them. 

They’ll take great heart from the way they turned the game against Tyrone. It was mixture of tactical and personnel changes from Peter Keane which saw them turn a four-point deficit into a three-point victory. 

Stephen O’Brien’s black card will have the Kerry management team sweating over the appeal process, such has been his importance to them this summer. 

However, their think tank would really be best served by figuring out two things: how to minimise turnovers against Dublin in the final, and how to slow down ball being kicked into the Kerry full-back line, or even better, stop crossfield ball being kicked in, something Tyrone managed with ease, and something Dublin have added to their attacking game plan this year. 

Doing that would allow them to get more out of their sweeper, who always seems to be watching ball floating over his head and never adds anything from a tackling perspective when it comes to winning turnovers or creating two-on-one situations. 

When we think of Kerry it’s never the defensive aspects of the game that spring to mind. It’s usually the attacking elements which, of course, are traditionally associated with the Kingdom. 

However, based on what we have witnessed over the past five years from Dublin under Gavin, trying to take them on in a shoot-out is not the best course of action, nor is playing ultra-defensively. 

You need to find that balance between the two, something the five-in-a-row chasing All-Ireland champions regularly manage to do so effortlessly themselves.

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