A brief history of why Mayo and Galway matters

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Colin Sheridan

IT’S not easy to be a Mayo man living in Galway. Never has been. We look the same, talk the same even, but there’s an intangible that hangs in the air like unaccounted for flatulence. It’s there. Everybody knows it’s there. We are just too polite to say it.

It’s not that they look down at us as such. Like the Irish in London, we built their roads and bridges, we teach their kids and frequent their ale houses. They know our value. 

But they are of course indifferent to us as Mayo folk, as only Galway people can be. 

Their condescension is not direct but subliminal and measured; they laugh at our jokes in that vacuous way Jimmy Fallon laughs at Colin Farrell. They could care less about us to such an extent they’d probably be happy to see us win an All-Ireland. Which is a little sick.

I guess they will never fully know how much they hurt us. It was all going so well in the mid-nineties. Mayo’s final losses of ‘96 and ‘97 were sickening, sure, but to a teenager like myself those halcyon days came with the naïve fallacy that this was how it was always going to be – a lifetime of elongated championship summers and even longer nights in Cosmos nightclub.

Winning an All-Ireland was surely only a matter of time. Knock on the door enough and someone will let you in, right? Oh, how wrong. 
What that Galway team did to me and others in 1998 was life-altering. This was a time when worrying about the artistic direction Dawson’s Creek was headed was the most worrying aspect of adolescent life, but Jinking Ja and Joyce and Donnellan, they made me look at the world with a cynical eye I was far too young to possess.

Mayo, like Brodie in Homeland, endured a glorious pioneering conversion in ‘96 and ‘97, ultimately all for nought. They closed their eyes to sleep in 1998 and Galway swooped in like Uncle Mike and stole our college sweetheart from right underneath our noses. At least Brodie had his new found faith to fall back on. We were left with nothing.

In the two decades that have passed, the balance of power has ebbed and flowed like the Moy. Mayo have appeared in six All-Ireland finals since Galway last won in 2001, Galway have had six managers and their only trips to Dublin have been cultural days out, or maybe to watch the hurlers.

AS Mayo challenged again throughout the noughties, Galway lost their way a little. They abandoned Tuam, their Jerusalem, in favour of Salthill’s Pearse Stadium, a venue so windy the good folk at The CERN institute in Geneva should consider it a backup if the Higgs Boson Collider ever cut out. Even when Galway had success against Mayo they’d somehow conspire to lose the next round, and then a qualifier away to a Meath or a Tipp, always suspiciously just in time for race week in Ballybrit. 

They wore their losses in a far less catholic way then Mayo did. They’d be on Shop Street drinking flat whites the following day, whereas our boys would be locked in a windowless cellar listening to Drake’s Marvin’s Room on repeat. Like I said, they may be our near neighbours, we may intermarry often, but we wear different faces.

Behind the indifferent façade, there was an inner turmoil that afflicted Galway during those lost years. Underage success, the go-to azimuth check for rude health, came easier for them than many, including Mayo, but this Tuam business had the profound, if never discussed effect of accentuating the divide between West and North Galway. 

Managers came and went, surely mystified at the lack of unity and willingness of many to commit to playing for a county who had the tradition and the strut many other teams would die for. In clubs like Milltown, Tuam Stars, Killererin and Corofin you have the equivalent of the Helmand province. Young players bound by blood and club-before-county loyalty. The city and the west were viewed with suspicion. Slowly though, the Connemara clubs have eroded the prevalent mistrust and now form the spine of a team that enjoys the support of an entire county. The aristocrats believe.

So much so that last month, Galway won the National Football League, becoming the first team in history to do it by actually losing the final to Dublin, by four points. A collective swooning of the national press followed. Hyperbole dripped from back pages and danced across the airwaves. Galway, the sleeping giant, are rubbing the sleep from their eyes! 

You can picture Colm Boyle doing his handclap push-ups, newspaper clippings on the wall, holding his veins over the naked gas flame like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, listening to the Tribesman being lauded as the second coming of Kanye, repeating May 13th over and over again in his head.

Finally, it’s upon us. The narrative is set. Galway are now the glamorous matador wielding a colourful muleta at Mayo’s powerful but wounded bull, the crowd yelling ole at their every shimmy. If this brief history has taught us anything it is that you ignore Galway and they will wipe your eye. They have beaten us soundly three times in three serious attempts now. 

This is what makes this Sunday’s battle such a seminal occasion. A wise man, who may or may not be my father, says always of these encounters – you cannot beat Galway often enough, nor by enough. He should know – he watched them do it in triplicate in the sixties. I’m sure it changed him, too.
Mayo are currently favourites, proving the bookmakers are not half as sentimental as the national sportswriters. How real all of this is will soon be born out. Like the song says — We all want the same thing.

Published by The Mayo News