Darragh Ó Sé on Mayo’s win: Why did I get it wrong and predict a Kerry victory?

Mayo deserve to be All-Ireland champions. We all got our predictions wrong and so now they’re spending the week painting Castlebar and Ballyhaunis and Belmullet green and red. And more luck to them. The best team wins the All-Ireland and they showed themselves to be the best team, no question about it.

In Kerry, these days hurt. Of course they do. Nobody has lost more All-Ireland finals than we have and it never gets any easier. Happy and all as you’d be for Mayo people this week, it’s still never a good day when you lose an All-Ireland final. Especially one we all thought we should be winning.

It was very obvious where Mayo could hurt Kerry. We all said it. We knew the inside line of Darragh Beirne, Kobe McDonald and Ryan O’Donoghue would fancy themselves against the Kerry full-back line. We knew they would press high and try to disrupt Kerry. We knew they would try to score as many two-pointers as they could. Mayo didn’t pull any rabbits out of a hat on Sunday.

So why were we all so wrong with our predictions? I think there are a few reasons. One, I think we underestimated the strength of their win over Louth. I know I definitely did. I didn’t give Mayo enough credit for how they blew Louth away – and I probably didn’t give Louth enough credit for being there in the first place, having beaten Dublin, Armagh and Monaghan.

We were too quick to dismiss the high press. I think a lot of us just presumed Kerry would play their way around it; that they would kick through the lines and move the ball quickly and get up the pitch and do damage. It’s all very well pressing high when it’s working but if the opposition is able to play around your press, you can run out of steam doing it very quickly.

Mayo had done their homework. They wanted Paul Murphy getting on the ball so that they could go after him. I thought Paul did pretty well coming out with it but he needed help. Mayo just went after him and after fouling him the first few times, eventually they suckered him into overcarrying. That gave them huge energy and showed that this high press could work.

Contrast that with the way Ryan O’Donoghue managed to get past three Kerry tacklers to start the move that led to the goal. If you want a montage of clips to tell the story of where this final was won and lost, you’d have O’Donoghue and the boys turning over Paul Murphy in one clip and then O’Donoghue streaking away from Joe O’Connor in the next.

That was the difference between the two teams. Mayo tackled like demons, they pinned Kerry in and even when a Kerry defender got out of a tackle and into space, he was wrecked from the effort. O’Donoghue dodged around Mark O’Shea, Seán O’Brien and Joe O’Connor and then when he got into space, he was able to leave the three of them for dead. He had to be pinching himself and wondering: “Was that really that easy?”

It was. O’Donoghue got the same treatment from Kerry that Paudie Clifford got from Donegal last year. Nobody tagged him and he made full use of his freedom.

Like any Kerry manager who loses an All-Ireland, Jack O’Connor has been getting it in the neck a bit down here over the past couple of days. But you I don’t think he could have done much once the game started on Sunday. It seemed to me he was fighting an uphill battle all year.

The difference between the level of physical output Mayo and Kerry were capable of in the final was obvious to everybody. Joe O’Connor, Gavin White, Seánie O’Shea – none of these lads had anything like the energy they brought to last year’s final. Think of Gavin White 12 months ago, bursting on to everything and blowing Donegal away. He just didn’t have it in the legs this time around.

If the Kerry management have questions to answer, that’s where they are. There was a fuel crisis in the Kerry squad and it came to the fore on the worst possible day. Why was that allowed to happen? What went wrong? Was it avoidable?

I think everyone assumed after beating Dublin that they were coming good at the right time, that all the injuries had more or less cleared up and now they’d be able to play with a bit of freedom and let the handbrake off. But there’s no substitute for playing football and some of the Kerry players just missed too much of it this year.

Kerry didn’t get much of a bounce off the bench. Too many of their starting players didn’t perform. David Clifford and Paudie Clifford fought all the way to the end but the reality is that the final came down to the same thing it always comes down to: how many Mayo players played above themselves compared to Kerry players? I think you would probably get well into double figures if you went through it.

It reminded me a bit of the 2002 final against Armagh. We came off the pitch that day feeling like no matter how hard we pushed, the Armagh players pushed back harder. The more you went at it, the more it felt like you were trying to beat back the tide. They grew and they found energy where they didn’t have energy. And Kerry were overwhelmed by it.

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Mayo looked at Kerry and saw that they had been playing at a slower pace this year compared to last year and made the decision to ramp the whole thing up as much as they could. Kerry want to play slow? Well, let’s not give them the choice. Let’s see how they react to high energy, high pace, plenty of hits and annoyance. They got their reward for it and they won their All-Ireland.

Kerry had injuries through the year and they ended up in an All-Ireland final with players who didn’t have the legs for Mayo. No point crying about it. There’s no great mystery about what comes next – you find players who are fit or you mind the ones you have. Either way, it’s the obvious starting point for next year.

For now, there’s nothing for it but to congratulate Mayo. Everyone is delighted for them, even in Kerry. Apart from anything else, we’ve all decided down here that since we can’t make Mayo jokes any more, we’ll have to transfer them all across to Cork.

Every cloud …

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