Kicking points with his eyes closed

Kicking points with his eyes closed


SeΡn Rice

TOMMY Ainsworth watched Mayo struggle with Tyrone and wondered what has become of our game. What has happened to high fielding, accurate foot-passing, long-range scores?
“Having watched how that game was played, football to my mind has deteriorated,” said the former Castlebar Mitchels star. “If it keeps going like that people will not bother looking at it.”
Modern methods of preparation have progressed the standard of Mayo football. But in one fundamental facet they have underachieved. That is their lack of economy in getting the ball between the posts.
In a forward line wholly unpredictable in front of goal, Cillian O’Connor is a rarity. No one scores with his authority. Others occasionally rein in impressive points, random scores from various angles. But there is no consistency, no real conviction, nothing to suggest that the same player would score again from the same angle.
Tommy Ainsworth was a model of consistency, regarded by those of his own vintage as one of the most accurate forwards of his time. How he honed that accuracy is interesting.
“We did not have the training methods they have now, or the facilities. We played mixed matches in MacHale Park three evenings a week with many local soccer players joining us ... even though ‘the ban’ was in place.
“When the match was over, Josie Munnelly, a Mayo and Mitchels star of old, would start to practise kicking for points from the corner flag, someone retrieving the ball for him and he bending it over the bar again and again.
“While he was practising, as many as 20 of us lined out across the field on the 30-yard line, and kicked for points ... with our eyes closed. Whoever missed was out. Those who scored went into the next round, to be taken from a distance of 40 yards. The final was from 50 yards out, still with our eyes closed.”
That sort of practise, he said, helped them enormously in competitive games. While Gaelic football has thrillingly evolved in Mayo in many ways, one wonders is the essence of game being neglected ... practise in the art of scoring, which is what the game is all about.
Tommy Ainsworth knew the value of such preparation. Even at the age of 16 and a half, his accuracy with the ball had excited Castlebar Mitchels selectors to the extent that he was asked to join the bench in 1949 for the county senior final against Ballina Stephenites.
“I remember it well,” he says. “The final was held in Foxford, and I togged out having cycled all the way from Castlebar at my own request.”
But the players from the two teams were flaking one another on the pitch in a tough, grudging, spiteful game. It was so dangerous that the light young Castlebar man was advised not to play if called upon.
The following year he was a fully-fledged member of the Mitchels side, winning the first of his five county senior medals the same year that Mayo won the first of their back-to-back All-Irelands.
In those years, only four teams competed in the senior championship­ (Ballina Stephenites, Castlebar Mitchels, Crossmolina and Claremorris), which was on the knockout system, with a league running throughout the summer. There were no intermediate or under-21 competitions and no burnout.
Two years later Ainsworth’s career nosedived when, in a challenge match against Tuam Stars, an opponent’s knee to the tummy ruptured his gallbladder, confining him to a two-month stay in hospital. The disappointment was aggravated by the verdict of a doctor that he should never play football again.
The warning did not deter him, however, and within two years he was back on a Mitchels side for a league match against Claremorris that had scarcely begun when a ‘sandwich’ injury landed him back in hospital, an x-ray revealing that he had a collapsed lung.
“My lung was as flat as a pancake and I spent six further weeks in the hospital just sitting in the bed waiting for the lung to fill up,” he said.
Nor did that setback dissuade him from returning. Within a few months he was back paving a trail to glory, winning an All-Ireland junior title with Mayo in 1957 and a Post Office All-Ireland the same year.  Two further senior county medals were followed by two more Post Office All-Irelands, a West Mayo junior medal with a team he himself nurtured, and West Mayo footballer of the year award in 1961.