Eugene McHale believes that Sligo now mean business
Daniel Carey
ASK most former Mayo players which meeting with Sligo they remember best from their playing days, and most will, understandably, plump for one they featured in themselves. Not Eugene McHale, however. The Knockmore man had a particular reason for recalling the 1981 Connacht final – and not just because it marked the end of Mayo’s 12-year wait for a provincial title. Had McHale not been injured for that game, he would have created his own little bit of history, as he would have lined out against his brother Eddie, who scored one of Sligo’s four points in an eight-point defeat for the Yeats County.
As it was, those ‘most unusual’ circumstances whereby two siblings represented different counties in the same Connacht final didn’t come to pass.
Eugene McHale moved to Sligo the previous year, 1980, and has been there ever since. A Garda in Grange, ten miles from Sligo town, he has managed various teams and is now a referee as well as a columnist with the Sligo Weekender. And he has a word of warning for Mayo fans who are already counting their Galway chickens.
“Sligo went through a sticky patch in the league and they lost a number of games. But they were unfortunate enough to lose some of them by one or two points, and they’ve played a number of challenge games against top-class teams and have done well. I think they’re coming into a rich vein of form at the minute.”
Defeats to the likes of Fermanagh and Wexford are being re-assessed in light of those counties’ championship successes, and McHale feels a lot ‘will boil down to fitness’, an increasingly crucial part of ‘the modern game’. He doesn’t doubt that John O’Mahony will have Mayo in ‘tip-top shape’, but adds: ‘Don’t rule out a surprise’.
“The perception out there seems to be that Sligo are very, very poor and that Mayo would be way ahead of them, but I don’t agree with that. I don’t think Mayo are as good as people are making out, and Sligo certainly aren’t as bad as people are saying.”
McHale recalls ‘great games’ between the two counties in the late 1960s and 1970s, and believes ‘the best Mayo team of all time’ was that which won the National League title in 1970 – “It’s amazing they didn’t win a Connacht championship in the 1970s,” he says. He recalls Mickey Kearns (‘without doubt the best footballer I ever saw’) scoring 14 points in a game in Castlebar but losing. “There hasn’t been that much between Mayo and Sligo in the last number of years, and I think the gap between the top teams and the bottom teams has narrowed,” he adds. In recent times, he has donned the whistle, and would like to see more understanding for the referee.
“Johnny Prenty said I refereed when I was playing!” he jokes. “You wouldn’t be doing it unless you enjoyed it … Gaelic football was very, very good to me, so it’s only a case of giving something back … But referees get a lot of abuse, and I think a lot of it is unjustified. On The Sunday Game, referees are analysed more than any of the players! They look at overhead views to decide whether he’s right or wrong, but the referee hasn’t that when the game is on, and he has to make a decision. In rugby, players always accept decisions from the referee, whether they’re right or wrong, and I think that has to be brought in [to the GAA] … though maybe I wouldn’t have said that years ago when I was playing!”
He says ‘when I was playing’, yet despite reaching the half century mark, he was top scorer in a divisional final earlier this year. Marked by a man 31 years his junior, he registered seven points – five from play – for St Molaise Gaels, though he feels his high tally is a poor reflection on the state of club football. “If I did that [scored seven points] 20 years ago,” he laughs, “I’d be back in the Mayo team!”
