COLUMN: The straw that broke the camel’s back

Which pretty much sums up my club’s fortunes in the Mayo Senior Championship this year. We fell through it in Ballyhaunis, relegated after six years at the top table, beaten 1-13 to 0-14 by Ballaghaderreen in a game we led by five points with four minutes of normal time left.

A few weeks have passed now and I’ve had plenty of time to sit with it. I thought about not writing this column at all. Letting it slide by while the county finals took the attention, hoping nobody would notice.

That would have been the easy option, and the easy option is for cowards. We were the ones who felt it, so we should be the ones to talk about it. And a bit of distance has done the argument no harm.

​A RUTHLESS SPACE

Senior football in Mayo is unforgiving. Give or take, there are 12 clubs who are steadfast, experienced senior outfits and who are very unlikely to ever go down. Breaking through that ceiling is a tough ask for a small club.

Our record speaks for itself. Two championship wins in six years, both against Mayo Gaels, in 2024 and 2025. Four relegation battles in that time, including a relegation final in our first year. We were flirting with badness for too long.

Were we good enough? On those numbers, no. But we competed in most of those games, and there is plenty of mitigation when you look at who we were asked to compete against.

​THE LUCK OF THE DRAW

I went back through every group we were drawn in since 2021 and it makes for grim reading.

2021: Castlebar Mitchels, Westport and Ballaghaderreen. Westport were champions the following year. 2022: Breaffy and Belmullet, the 2021 finalists, plus Claremorris. 2023: Ballina Stephenites and Breaffy, who went on to contest that year’s county final, plus Mayo Gaels. 2024: Ballina, the champions, and Westport again. 2025: Westport, who reached the final, and Knockmore, who reached the semi-final. 2026: Ballina, chasing four in a row, plus Castlebar Mitchels and Garrymore, this year’s county finalists.

The draw was never kind to us. The seeding was changed last year so only the four semi-finalists were kept apart, and our name was used as the example of why the change was needed at a County Board meeting. We came off a decent 2025 and expected something gentler. Instead we got the toughest group we ever had.

We were awful against Mitchels in round one and felt the full wrath of the would-be county champions. After that, any of the last four games was there to be won, and really and truly we should have won all four. The stats from each game tell the story: high double-digit wides and conversion rates below 30 percent.

Against Garrymore away from home we dominated the second half, but a harsh black card midway through and five missed frees, along with a host of wides, cost us. Against Ballina and Mayo Gaels, we should have been heading for home at half time. Instead our yips in front of the posts infected the whole team and both sides ground out the wins.

If you can’t convert scores at senior level you will be punished for it, and rightly so.

THE MORAN FACTOR

Then there was the relegation final, the game that went viral thanks to Andy Moran who can do no wrong. It made for great headlines and plenty of social media posts, but as often with media these days, it was surface level analysis and populist. Those that were at the game saw a different side to the story.

With 15 minutes left, the 2017 Footballer of the Year and All-Ireland winning manager came off the bench and yours truly was handed the job of marking him. At 42 he still has every ounce of the cuteness you’d expect. He kicked two points and set up the winning goal.

But his reputation carried massive favour too. I’ve long held the view that referees give county players the benefit of the doubt, and most people would agree. In this columnists humble (and slightly biased opinion), Moran got that and more from referee James Regan when the game was in the melting pot, with two crucial (and soft) frees that produced 1-1 and swung a very physical game in his favour. If Aidan O’Shea had been minded like that by referees and umpires alike in his career, God knows what Mayo would have won.

Most people have seen the video of the winning gal by now. Plenty in the comment section pointed out there was little contact to warrant a free and they weren’t wrong. In the weeks since, I’ve spoken to countless football people from a lot of clubs who were at the game, people whose opinions I respect, and every one of them said the same thing. We were ‘shafted’.

I’m long enough in the game to know this is football. Decisions go against you and you get on with it. But accepting a call doesn’t make it right, and it shouldn’t stop you naming it, the same way you’d name a fella who missed a 20-metre free at the death. In my opinion, the referee got the biggest call of the day very wrong at the moment it mattered most. A team puts a full year into one game like that and to have it turn on a decision like that is hard to take.

​TIME HEALS

A word on talking about defeats in public. Anything a player or a columnist says about a loss reads as sore losing, doubly so when officials come into it. And the book falls with players at the end of the day. We threw away a five-point lead in the closing minutes, added time or not, and that is not good enough at senior level.

I won’t pretend the anger wasn’t there. For the first couple of weeks it was all anyone around the club could talk about.

The strange thing is that people are still coming up to me, weeks later, telling me how hard done-by we were. I don’t know whether it makes me feel better or worse. Part of me appreciates it and another part would rather stop reliving it. Either way, what happened to us shouldn’t be glossed over because we are the ones living with the consequences.

​MOVING ON

So it’s intermediate football for 2027, and one question keeps coming back. What is better for a club? Six years flirting with the relegation zone and struggling to make ground, or a spell at the other end, competing for something, winning games, regrouping?

For a young panel, a run at silverware might be no bad thing. Football moves on quickly and by the time this column is published, we’ll have assigned a new manager in Brian Benson of Crossmolina, and already the focus in the club has shifted.

The conversation moves from what went wrong in Ballyhaunis to what we do about it now. That’s the game. No matter how hard the fall, it always sucks you back in with the first glimpse of optimism.