“Everybody is hunting for it.”
It’s probably fair to say that the majority of GAA fans wanted Mayo to get over the line, when they played Tyrone in Saturday’s All-Ireland final.
Although they might be disappointed in the result, every county can take some inspiration from Tyrone’s rise to the top and breaking the Dublin winning cycle.
Sky Sports pundit and former Kerry forward, Kieran Donaghy believes that the Ulster side winning will be a good thing for the GAA as a whole.
“The last few years going into the championship, it was quite mundane, we knew that there was a team that was a good bit ahead of everybody else. And they were going to be hard to rattle.
“Mayo will go home today, they’ll know a missed penalty, a few bits, they’ll come back. This Tyrone team are obviously going to be around for a while.
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“Kerry are licking their wounds. Dublin are going to go away and figure things out and come back really fresh next year.
“The rest of the teams in Division 1 will all be sniffing around. Donegal will be back. Armagh will be back. Galway will be back.
“Everybody is hunting for it. And there’s that bit of excitement around between GAA followers that this is more open than it’s ever been. There’s huge excitement that comes with that.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the Congress. Even the Super 8s, having that back, the eight top teams going against each other, that will be exciting if that happens next year.
“Having more crowds, we were here last year, freezing in December with nobody in the stadium,” Donaghy continued.
“There was 42,000, there was a huge crowd here. Just to have the fans back, and to be putting Covid hopefully away in some capacity and getting back to what we love best as Gaels.”
Former Donegal manager and 2012 All-Ireland winner, Jim McGuinness, was in agreement with his Kerry co-worker.
“What Tyrone winning brings is hope. There is probably eight, 10, 12 teams in the country that will look at that and think ‘that could be us’.
“Maybe they’re six months away from it, a year away from it, two years away from it. But that is possible.
“And they will know that themselves, ‘if we get all the things right’… Kieran McGeary spoke about when everybody on the bus is going the same direction, it’s hard to stop. That’s the type of thing you need within the camp.
“It’s surprising how things can start to travel when everybody is moving in the right direction.”
