The Mayo team which started against Sligo in the 1981 Connacht final. From left, back row: Anthony Egan, Tom Kearney, Willie Nally, MicheΡl Webb, Willie Joe Padden, Jimmy Lyons, Jimmy Maughan, Joe McGrath. Front row: Mick O’Toole, Adrian Garvey, Michael Gavin, Martin Carney, Henry Gavin, Jimmy Burke, Tom Reilly.?Pic: Frank Dolan
The first trip to Ruislip
1981 was an eventful year for SeΡn Luskin and Anthony Egan
Feature
Daniel Carey
SEÁN Luskin has a particular reason to remember Mayo’s first game in Ruislip – that 1981 meeting with London was his very first senior championship match.
Deployed at full-back in the absence of Anthony Egan, he was “nervous” about “being thrown in at the centre of defence”. But Luskin had just won back-to-back Sigerson Cup titles with University College Galway. He and his fellow student Jimmy Lyons flew to London later than the rest of the Mayo gang due to exams. The day itself, he remembers, was “a scorcher”, and the occasion helped bind the group together – “I remember coming back after, there was great slaggin’ and a bit of banter,” he recalls.
“The team didn’t play particularly well that day, but we got a result,” adds Anthony Egan, who watched from the sidelines having picked up a shoulder injury in training. “We knew at that stage that the winners were meeting Galway, who were after winning the National League title, and they came to Castlebar as raging hot favourites. [Manager] Seamie Daly left no stone unturned – he was a great motivator, a great man with players.”
Luskin and Egan both played in the full-back line for that Connacht semi-final. Egan remembers “a mighty game”, having a royal battle with Galway full-forward Tommy Joe Gilmore, the Tribesmen missing “a few easy frees”, and Willie Nally giving an exhibition at midfield – “He caught everything that flew around Castlebar that day”. Beating Galway that day “was actually like winning a Connacht title,” says the Bonniconlon man. “There was fierce excitement in the dressing room afterwards.”
Luskin marked Val Daly, who was in his debut season for Galway, and the corner back made a vital late intervention, taking the ball off the goal-line after sweeping in behind goalkeeper Mick Webb – “It was just an instinctive thing”, he says. He wasn’t to know it, but he had just played his last championship match of 1981, suffering an unfortunate injury playing for The Neale shortly afterwards.
“It was a very, very unimportant tournament match in Kilmaine,” he says wryly, “and actually, I remember my own colleagues on The Neale team and the management saying: ‘Jesus, SeΡn, you’d better not play in this … you never know … it’s not worth it’. Sure all I wanted to do at that time was play football. But in the second half, I smashed my ankle. I was on crutches for the Connacht final.”
Mayo put in a “brilliant performance” against Galway but failed to repeat that in the provincial decider against Sligo. The semi-final was “the real test”, Geraldine Collins wrote in this newspaper at the time, and Egan concurs that that final was “a poor game” which “failed to get off the ground”.
But it finished with Martin Carney becoming the first Mayo captain since 1969 to raise aloft the Nestor Cup. Just what that victory meant to players and supporters alike is clear from Frank Dolan’s evocative post-match photographs. “Winning it was the main thing,” says Egan. “It was a big breakthrough for Mayo at the time.”
That victory sent Mayo (wearing white) to Croke Park for their first All-Ireland semi-final in 12 years. Unfortunately, they ran smack bang into a blue-clad Kerry team who were on their way to four in a row. Egan went off early with a back injury, and watched the second half from the Mater hospital. “We played well in the first half,” says the man who went on to captain and manage Mayo, “but it was a massive Kerry team, and they tore us apart in the second half.”
A Eugene McHale goal (marked by a memorable celebration) meant Mayo trailed by just four points at the interval, but they failed to score in the second period. As Jimmy Lyons, who lined out at midfield that day, put it in a 2006 article for this publication: “I’m sure there are more than a few other teams who failed to score for 30 or 35 minutes in Croker – our misfortune was that all the minutes were in the same half.”
Just as Swedish soccer player Jan Olsson feels lucky to have been a victim of the Cruyff turn in the 1974 World Cup, SeΡn Luskin says he regrets not having played against that all-conquering Kerry side in the championship – “I know they hammered us on the day … [but] that was one of the best teams, that Kerry team,” he explains.
Luskin reckons he was “at the peak of my fitness” in 1981, coming off the back of two Sigersons. But that ankle injury left him on crutches, and then he went working in Copenhagen for two years.
“When I came back … I got back onto the league panel, but I never really got back fully into the Mayo set-up after that,” explains the Tullamore-based Cong man, for whom things could have worked out very differently. “[The injury] was just one of those unfortunate things. It was a stupid thing to do. All I wanted to do that day was play football. You live and learn. I definitely think I would probably have been there in ’89.”
Thirty years on, Mayo are returning to Ruislip with many supporters targeting a Connacht title. “James Horan has a lot of new players in the panel at the moment, which is a good thing to see,” said Anthony Egan. “Hopefully we’ll have a good run this year.”
