1998 RECALLED
DANIEL CAREY
REPORTER
danielcarey@mayonews.ie
“IT’S nearly as bad as losing the two All-Irelands.” So said John Casey in the immediate aftermath of Mayo’s defeat to to Galway in the 1998 Connacht Senior Football Championship. “What we worked for during the whole winter is now gone down the drain on one bad performance.”
In the era when the back door was simply a way of entering a house from the rear, there was no second chance for a side which had reached the All-Ireland final in 1996 and 1997. Galway, managed by John O’Mahony, had taken the first step on the road to winning the Sam Maguire Cup.
Ask most Mayo people what their over-riding memory of that game in Castlebar is and they’ll recall Ciaran McDonald hitting the crossbar with an effort which, Stephen O’Grady wrote, had shades of Pádraig Brogan in 1985. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t go in. McDonald had already scored two goals, and had he added a third, things might have turned out very differently. The first goal came after Martin McNamara’s ‘crazy clearance’ went straight to John Casey, who teed up the Crossmolina man. The second, a superbly manufactured effort, came after Colm McManamon had fed David Nestor, who cut inside before releasing McDonald. That goal had come immediately after Derek Savage found the net at the other end via the underside of the crossbar.
Mayo had got off to a great start, leading by 1-5 to 0-4 after 25 minutes. Yet their first half goals, as Kevin McStay noted afterwards, covered ‘gaping faults’ in a ‘poor’ performance. Nestor was twice denied by McNamara, while Peter Burke made a string of outstanding saves in the second half. Mayo scored only a single point in the second half, yet the minimum separated the sides with five minutes remaining. Three late points from Niall Finnegan wrapped up a 1-13 to 2-6 victory for Galway.
“This is as low as it gets for the last three years,” said Liam McHale afterwards. “It’s a different sort of feeling to losing an All-Ireland.” Having been so close to the summit, Kevin Cahill mused that ‘it feels like we have to start at the very beginning again’.
Seán Rice noted that the absence of Pat Fallon ‘left Mayo disadvantaged’, though John Maughan had no interest in playing ‘what if’ games in relation to the midfielder. “We’ll never know,” he said, asked whether Fallon would have made a difference. “It’s history. I mean if we had Pat Fallon, we could have brought back Tom Langan as well. Pat Fallon is a great footballer but he was out of the equation.”
John O’Mahony said it had been ‘difficult’ facing his native county but added: “I’m delighted to have worked with a group of players that he pulled it off”. Noting that the Ballaghaderreen clubman used words like ‘Galway’, ‘they’ and ‘then’ to describe the men in maroon, Stephen O’Grady noted: “He speaks of his adopted team in the third person … yet his contribution to their victory is not in doubt”. Just how good things would get for the Tribesmen, few knew at the time, although Kevin McStay had an inkling that they ‘may well go the whole way’ to All-Ireland glory.
“Galway look like developing into the genuine article, and because of a better forward line will avail of opportunities that we had but failed to take in ’96 and ’97,” he wrote in his Mayo News column the week after the game. Pádraig Joyce, Ja Fallon and Michael Donnellan had set down a marker, while questions were inevitably asked about the Mayo attack. McStay noted: “The whole country has known for some time that our forwards are not up to scratch and yet we have stayed with a patently flawed unit … The last decent forward line we had was during the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s.”
Yet as some talked of the end of ‘a two-and-a-half-year era’, McStay was unequivocal that Maughan should stay on. The columnist ended on an upbeat and, as it transpired, prophetic note. “I do hope [Galway] win Sam – the province needs it,” he wrote. “Then we’ll bring them back to earth again in Tuam in the summer of ’99.”
