THERE SEEMS TO be a quiet confidence brewing out west — in so far as Mayo football fans are ever truly confident and not gripped by perpetual fear of another false dawn.
The feeling is that this Mayo team is somehow ‘different’ to their predecessors who have tried and come up short in the past. If that is true, captain Andy Moran thinks he has pinpointed the moment things changed.
It was this time last year. Mayo were stunned by two early Donegal goals and Colm McFadden was bearing down for a third, looking to wrap up the All-Ireland final there and then.
David Clarke was not going to let that happen.
“He nearly broke his own leg and nearly broke Colm’s leg,” Moran recalls. “He was going to save that ball and it drove us on.
“To me, that is the major point of that game. Yes, we lost the All-Ireland and it was another All-Ireland that we lost but we lost it fighting and that’s the key thing.”
Mayo won’t know until five o’clock on Sunday evening if that really was a turning point for their fortunes. If they do finally end their 62-year wait, it is only right that Clarke is credited for his contribution.
Clarke saves at the feet of Colm McFadden (INPHO/Donall Farmer)
It has been a frustrating summer for the Ballina stopper. James Horan’s first-choice at the start of the Championship, Clarke tore his hamstring against Roscommon in the Connacht semi-final and hasn’t played since.
No stone was left unturned in a bid to have him back fit for Sunday’s final. The Sports Surgery Clinic in Santry tried blood spinning to speed up the healing process; after a bit of rest and light rehab, he was using an isokinetic machine for resistance training.
“Kicking and running are still not quite there 100 per cent,” Clarke said earlier this month.
It’s a position people don’t think you have to run, but if you’re not able to do things at 100 per cent speed, you’re wasting your time.
Because of the position that it’s in, blood doesn’t get there as much so I’m told, so it takes a bit longer to heal. The last bit can take that bit longer to come. But as I said, it’s getting there.
“It’s improving every day but …”
The end of the sentence trails off. That ‘but’ looks to be the thing that will keep him out of action on Sunday. Instead Rob Hennelly, who wasn’t even on the panel at the start of the Championship, is set to continue between the posts for a fourth straight start.
Former inter-county great Liam McHale admits that he had his worries about Hennelly’s ability to come in from the cold and deputise.
“He was a bit flaky as few years ago and I can understand why he was dropped off the panel,” McHale said.
“It is absolutely fantastic that he has played as well because when Clarkey and [Kenneth] O’Malley went out you would have been concerned.
The last time we saw Robert playing he was coming out 40 yards looking for the ball and doing crazy things at times. So he seems to have matured and settled down.
Faraway, so close: Sam Maguire is within touching distance again for Mayo (INPHO/James Crombie)
Clarke, however, is confident that Mayo are in the safe hands of “a top class goalkeeper.”
“We’d a battle there a couple of years ago. He’s got experience from that.
“He’s been up in Dublin with DCU who have probably one of the top academies in the country. He’s played and trained with some of the best players of this generation. He’s stood in the last [three] games and he’s been flawless.
“He is, I suppose as any goalkeeper needs to be, supremely confident in his own ability. Lovely strike of a ball. For a man that’s 23, he’s a fully-grown man at this stage.”
A vital intervention to stop Bernard Brogan in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final (INPHO/James Crombie)
That’s well and good but after being on the losing side of All-Ireland finals in 2006 and again last year is there not a part of Clarke that is cursing his luck at being injured when Mayo are on the cusp of their greatest victory in generations?
“Look, I can give you the sob story. There is, yeah, but you just get on with it.
“If you start thinking too much like that, you’re not even going to get out of bed to go to the gym. You have days like that. You’ve just got to keep on going, rolling with it.”
