Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds
Pre-match analysis - from an entirely biased perspective, of course - of the All-Ireland Final. And at the risk of looking foolish, it's entirely based on projections of the heart rather than the mind
We have been blessed with a curse. It’s kept passions and interest – and ironically enough, probably even people alive – at times. People from far and wide have heard of it, though no-one’s sure whether they believe in it or not. I think a lot of people do believe in it but don’t think they do. Are curses real? We can’t tell. How do you break a curse? Are they destined to remain in place until their stipulations have been met? Or is there a force more powerful than a curse that can break it? People curse all the time, we forget that. They curse not just for anger but sometimes in times of great joy.
“Yip! Yoo! G’wan up to fuck ya beautiful fuckin’ hooer ya!”
How do you beat a curse? Even curses of great rage and fury can be met with a laugh. Not the laugh of someone who’s being too nice, being gracious in defeat, taking their beating with a forced smile on their face. No, those ones hurt. Not everyone can fight off a curse, they get in deep and burrow under your skin, carried around with you and passed on for generations. Curses cannot be broken, perhaps, but they can be absorbed and the energy reflected back into the world as a force for good.
It turns out we’ve been feeding off the curse. The county has thrived over the last decade, coming out of the dark days of the recession. Towns and villages have been rejuvenated.
Milking it like the village of Cong milks The Quiet Man. There’ll be a Netflix movie about it yet. Everyone wants to come to Mayo now. No longer Mayo (God Help Us). It hasn’t been a co-ordinated marketing campaign from a council or a committee. Instead, every man, woman and child has played their part in proliferating the myth. Someone asks you about the curse – they could be from Dublin or Chicago – and you just can’t resist playing the whole thing up. You realise then that it’s half the fun. Who’d even want to be from a place that isn’t cursed?!
The effect the football has had on it is not to be dismissed. How could it be so, if tragedy on the pitch begets more tragedy in real life? Maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe the annual fall of the team at the last hurdle is better for us than others assume.
Outsiders think losing those finals and semi-finals must have corrupted our hearts for good – but there’s no evidence it has at all. It’s just a logical assumption on their part, or a projection by someone who would surely have been killed off or slumped into a depression if they’d been on the losing side themselves. We’ve all been there. We’ve all assumed it’d kill us off too. But we’re still here. The energy of defeat can’t sit idle. It’ll either destroy you or vitalise you. And somehow it’s given us life.
It's not an accident or luck that Dublin have won those finals. There’s something to the champions’ mentality, and sadly, it must be admitted, to Mayo not quite having had that same mentality to get over the line themselves. Mayo seemed possessed by pursuit of the holy grail, though their physical forms suffered an inevitable decline over the years. They were already written off as over the hill by 2016, Dublin still on the ascendancy, and yet it was so close. 2017 again. Newbridge was a step too far, and Dublin finished them off in the semi-final last year. They were done for at half time, bodies already broken.
And yet, here they are, a half different starting line-up but still looking like the same Mayo time of the last decade, but somehow fresher than ever.
By all logical analysis Mayo must have been dead and buried by now. But if your logical model is constantly wrong, and Mayo have been returning stronger than ever for as long as you can remember, then maybe this isn’t a game that’s so governed by logic after all. Maybe there are other things at play. Much is made of Dublin’s conveyor belt of players who emerge and slot into the plan. They embody the spirit of the team first, their individuality is second. But Mayo’s teams are possessed by their own spirit. Both teams appear to operate as guided by some force from above.
The pundits can’t handle what they don’t understand or can’t predict. So they started writing us off ten minutes before the end of the semi-final. Focusing on the negatives, the obvious things they could point to as to why we wouldn’t win. The final will be like this match or that match. The pundits need certainty and to prove their expertise and give us all the evidence as to why Mayo can’t do it and how they’re fools for even trying, we’re fools for even believing. But the final will be its own thing.
The red carpets have already been rolled out by the pundits for six in a row, and the inquisitions into the state of football are premature. Subtle propaganda planted in the nation’s heads: a dubious panel discussion on how to restructure the championship on the Sunday game, after the Dublin Cavan highlights but before they’d even shown Mayo. The message is: “We know how this will turn out. Resistance is futile. Here is the future of the championship – the result of the Mayo game is irrelevant.”
Only the impartial observer, sitting on the fence when asked to make a call will go for the obvious answer: Dublin to win fairly handy. The pundit, with his facts and expertise and national broadcaster accreditation: Dublin for six-in-a-row, with a token opinion on how to restructure the championship.
Those with their hearts on the line know it’ll go to the wire again. The Dublin players know it themselves. They practice putting teams to the sword for over seventy minutes every time because they know they’ll have to do it to get over the line against Mayo. And Mayo know that if they’re to ever beat Dublin, they’ll have to go buck-wild, shake things up, take maddening risks and put their bodies on the line, and in the end, there’ll only be the width of a post, or the bounce of a ball, or the beat of a heart in it.
This is how they play, as if in an All-Ireland final against Dublin, every single time. To the outsider it might look like dicing with death and indecision and frustration every time they play, whether against Galway or Tipperary or Down in a qualifier. But really they’re playing the only way they know they can win the big one. Going down to the wire every time. It’s a psychological projection of the stakes.
If you’ve written this match off as a foregone conclusion, I don’t know what to say to you. It is a difference in perspective of how the world works that cannot be resolved. If Mayo prevail you’ll see things as we do here in the west. Our eyes have been sharpened over the years by the breaking and rebuilding of our hearts, year after year.
How do you defeat a curse? By shrugging it off. By staring at it and laughing. By marching towards it, going after it again and again. At this stage there is no curse. The whole world is cursed. When you’ve lived in chaos and defeat for years then these are the days you’re made for. The Dubs are immune to expected shake-ups and setbacks, of the normal variety. They’re not immune to Mayo. The Dubs excel by executing ruthless efficiency. Mayo revel in anarchy and chaos. And in this chaotic year, they look calmer than ever.
Bill Shankly once said that football is much more important than life or death. Perhaps he knew that there were other forces involved, that teams and athletes have always represented something vital about the places they represent, an aspect perhaps lost in the era of multi-billion euro football franchises. But we haven’t lost our sense of place in Ireland yet, and not in the GAA. All-Ireland finals are closer in nature to boxing matches than the computer-game algorithms of American sports or even the Premiership, and finals between Mayo and Dublin are the greatest of scraps.
A cold and calculated logical engineer versus a wild untameable beast from the mountains. Masculine versus feminine energy, as Jung might have labelled them. Dublin is Brahma, the creator of the universe – in the universe of the GAA the creator of the most profoundly organised, talented and skilful football team in the game’s history. Mayo have sought to embody Shiva: the destroyer of worlds. But not quite.
The world has changed forever this year, though we don’t yet know the extent to which it will continue to change in the coming months and years. Will this match represent the changing of the guard? Or will it simply be the crowning moment on a decade of dominance for Dublin. Maybe their dominance will be one of the constant elements of order that will bridge the gap between the past and the future.
Or maybe football is just a test of physicality and I’m reading too much into it. But for what other reasons does it exist, if not to divine grand insights from as to the workings of life and the universe? We don’t see change happening until after the fact, and despite all logic saying Dublin will win, maybe this game is bigger than a merely physical test.
Misplaced hope depends on what level you’re looking at things. The physical world says all hope is lost. But these teams exist now on a different level. You can see it in the county. And you can see it in the team, if you know what you’re looking for. In these darkest days, eyes shine brighter behind masks than ever before.
Instincts have been honed by this year, us all existing in isolation and forced to reckon with what they know about themselves and the world. You can only truly discern these things from within your own heart. The world doesn’t make sense now at all otherwise. We’ll look back and realise we were right all along about what we were looking at. What effects do the heart have on the mind?
I know I’m not the only one who believes. All bets are off. Everyone’s afraid to say it – but fuck it - I’m going to say it:
MAYO FOR SAM
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