We’ve been reading the wrong fairytale.
It was easy to paint Dublin as the villain of this story. The bad guys.
They’ve the biggest population, they have the most resources, they have the best team. They even had the gall to go and get a man guilty as sin to walk free after a third trial only 12 hours before throw-in.
And Mayo are Mayo.
The guys from the west. The would-be pretenders to a throne they have been daring to sit on for over a decade now. They could win an All-Ireland. They’ve come closer to doing it more times than teams who have actually won the thing and no-one would begrudge them the success they have been relentlessly chasing. No-one.
Heck, they even clawed back a seven-point deficit the last day through nothing else but pure, unadulterated, raw passion. A refusal to have another nearly-story hanging over their winter.
But we didn’t even think of how much Dublin wanted it. We didn’t even consider how much it meant to them because we’ve portrayed them as Goliath when, really, they’re just a group of men the same as any of us.
They’re just a group of men who would die for their county.
Why do we never think of that when we think of Dublin?
Yes, they’re talented. Yes, they have a big pool of players and, yes, they’re the capital city outfit that the rest of the country apparently love to hate. But why would football mean any less to Dublin than it would anywhere else in Ireland?
Come Saturday, come another classic battle with Mayo, they had the chance to shove that disdain and scorn down the throats of 31 other counties and, Jesus, didn’t they just take it?
They took it with all of us tutting and shaking our heads. And they took it from the brink of defeat. A four-point defeat that they somehow frighteningly obliterated with an 11-point swing before the end of the game.
Why? Because they’re good, sure. But mostly because they’re hungry. They’re starving. They’re downright savages, seemingly insatiable. Because they will stop at nothing and they will tear every one and thing apart in their way until they get what they want.
Granted, Mayo didn’t help themselves.
They didn’t appear to learn anything from the first day out. They came into the game with no attacking strategy and sent nothing balls lumped in the general direction of Aidan O’Shea who was stranded three-on-one for the entirety of the outing. And they deployed a permanent sweeper that Philly McMahon’s free role absolutely ridiculed.
They have two managers. You’d think at least one of them might’ve thought that it was a good idea to use one of the best footballers in the country – at least for a little while. How’d that conversation go down?
– ‘Do you want to use Aidan O’Shea today?’
– ‘Nah.’
– ‘Me neither.’
They persisted with a strategy – which, in hindsight, wasn’t a strategy at all – that worked in Connacht because O’Shea bullied weak backlines. It didn’t work the last day out, it didn’t even come close to working, so how could they sit back for yet another 70 minutes and watch their best player have no effect on the game?
Dublin, of course, kept him on a leash.
Any time O’Shea came near to touching a ball, he was hounded. Literally, the hounds were sent for him and he was never let off that cruel leash that Jim Gavin had tied firmly around his neck.
Lee Keegan wasn’t allowed to destroy Dublin from deep either. He was tracked, he was harassed and, anything good Diarmuid Connolly did in that replay, it was defensively keeping tabs on Mayo’s soon-to-be All-Star wing back.
But because the Leinster champions are perennially romping through a sub-standard provincial series, we question their mentality. We question how much they want it and how many times they actually need to go to the well.
In the heat of battle, with less than half an hour to save their season, four points down and rocked, Dublin were asked questions that they’ve never been asked this season and they found 15 men with buckets and spades ready to dig and plunge to depths they have never been before.
Because they want it. They need it.
And they’re doing it with Paul Flynn having his worst season to date. They’re doing it with Michael Darragh MacAuley not even making the team and they did it on Saturday with Diarmuid Connolly unusually peripheral in their hour of need.
They did it because they had bite. They had drive. And they had that same refusal to go under that we’re so quick to credit everyone else with. But for some reason not Dublin.
Paddy Andrews stepped up to the plate, Kevin McManamon came in wired to the moon and anyone lucky enough to be sprung in front of 80,000 rapturous Gaels at the home of Gaelic Football were coming in ready to lay their bodies on the line for the cause.
We spoke in the build-up to the replay about a switch that the best footballers have that transforms them into nonnegotiable, primal animals where nothing else in the world matters but a size five football.
Dublin had the talent to win an All-Ireland semi final on Saturday but so, too, did Mayo. Talent had nothing to do with this win.
With their backs to the walls, Dublin came out fighting. They went to that place only the finest athletes can find.
They went to life-or-death mode.
And they came out at the other side with their eyes bulging, their teeth grinding and jaws dripping because they were ready for war.
They came out because they were ready to die for it.
They were ready to do that for their county.
