Playing a captain’s part
Sean Rice
FEW will find fault with the appointment of Alan Dillon as captain of the Mayo senior side for the coming championship. For no one deserves the accolade more than the Ballintubber man.
Dillon has been a leading member of the Mayo attack ever since he first donned the jersey back in 2003. He has experienced more downs than ups in those eight years, more heartache than glory.
Yet he continues to perform as if the next year will be better, as if the mists will soon roll away and a bright, breezy, exciting Mayo will re-appear on the football field.
Unlike the county’s successful sides of the fifties, when Sean Flanagan ruled assertively, modern captains are not leaders in the Flanagan sense.
The advent of the all-powerful manager changed all that. I don’t know of any other captain who would take down a pencil and a sheet of foolscap to outline for Paddy Prendergast how to play the full-back role.
But then Flanagan was unique. As one of a number of players who took the County Board to task for its apparent lack of concern for football, he was obliged to take the reins and to lead his team-mates, with help from Eamon Mongey, to cleave a path through that jungle of apathy.
Flanagan’s reputation pivoted on the outcome of his confrontation with the County Board. On reaching the All-Ireland final two years later, he and his cohorts had proved their mettle and his leadership in 1950 and 1951 on and off the field took on a life of its own… the legend if anything becoming greater than the man,
The captain was boss. There was no equivocation. Apart from perhaps Mongey, Carney, Gilvarry and Liam Hastings, who was on the fringes of the team, the players deferred to him, and the power Flanagan wielded appeared to be greater even than that of the selectors, of whom there were about sixteen… or the trainers.
And Mayo prospered.
Ultimate power now wrests with the manager. Rallying calls from captains are confined to personal deeds on the field of play, to exhibiting an invincible spirit, staggering on against all sorts of adversity.
Alan Dillon must have won more man-of-the-match awards for club and county than any other current member of the Mayo team.
On one or two occasions recently the old pragmatism seemed to have deserted him and we wondered!… but then saw him finish in style proving that the nether world of county failure had not diminished his capacity to bounce back.
Maybe it is too much to expect that Dillon will meet with more success than any other Mayo captain over the past six decades? But we can hope. And he does have the good wishes of every Mayo person.
As vice-captain Andy Moran is also a worthy choice. Like Dillon, we have come to depend on Moran for victory and his consistency over a long period is deserving of the honour.
James Horan has lined up a couple of interesting challenges in the coming weeks before venturing over to Ruislip for his first taste of championship football, against London, with the team he has been building since January.
On May 1 Antrim come to Kiltimagh to sniff the strength of the Mayo challenge, and on May 14, Offaly travel to Ballintubber for their pre-championship workout.
Meanwhile, the manager beckoned David Gavin of Breaffy and Michael Forde of Ballycastle to his pruned squad last week. Not so sure of Horan’s motive. Neither of the two featured in either the FBD or Allianz league. They have been impressing of late and perhaps the manager wants to see how they might mix with the big boys on the training ground.
ELSEWHERE, Pat Harte, who has been out of the game for many months with injury, has not yet recovered sufficiently to test his injured knee in competition. But the appearance of the Mayo midfielder on the sideline in Westport on Sunday suggests that a full recovery is imminent.
Meanwhile, the performance of his colleague Aidan Tighe at centre-half back was the highlight of Ballina’s three-point win. Tighe has had previous stints at wing-back and at full forward, but none as convincing as his role in Westport.
Provinces to split?
THERE once was a clamour from Gaelic football gurus to scrap the provincial championships and to have the All-Ireland competition decided on an open draw.
But tradition won the day. No one was prepared to see a competition abandoned, the winning of which meant so much to counties who could never hope to reach the All-Ireland summit. For them provincial success is their All-Ireland.
For the more successful sides it is not the prestigious competition it once was… not since the play-offs were introduced. Galway were the first to benefit from that system, going all the way ten years ago even though Roscommon captured the Connacht title that season.
That was Roscommon’s first in a decade and after such a long period in the wilderness it meant almost as much to them as the All-Ireland did to Galway.
So, too, with Leitrim who won the provincial title in 1994, their first in sixty-seven years, and the celebrations that greeted that victory were unprecedented in the county.
Sligo’s mountain has always been the Connacht championship. They have scaled it four times, their last in 2007 when they beat Galway, and celebrated wildly. Last year they were the form team in the province until they lost to Roscommon in the final… and the tremors of disappointment were felt in every corner of the county.
So for the likes of Leitrim, Sligo and even current champions Roscommon, a Connacht title fulfils a lot of dreams.
While the call to abandon the competition has ceased, GAA president Christy Cooney, among many suggestions in his address to Congress, appealed for a realignment of the four provinces into groups of eight counties.
It is a suggestion that merits consideration, and would certainly free a clogged fixtures list. In the case of Connacht the flow would be inward… three new counties hived off from some other province… with New York and London as bonus counties.
Longford, which has had loose connections with competitions in the province, and perhaps Donegal and either Clare or Westmeath might be asked to make the transfer.
Existing Connacht counties could have few objections to such a move. But those asked to transfer might demur on the grounds of tradition and allegiance and loyalty… launching a campaign of resistance to what they might regard as going to Connacht being worse than going to Hell.
Well, would not we in Mayo baulk if asked to join some other province?
Just a thought …
There's a lot to be said for splitting Dublin into two regions with separate county boards for Gaelic games. With over a million of a population one county team cannot cater for all young aspiring footballers.
