Regardless of how the 2011 League campaign had gone, Mayo’s first year under new manager James Horan was ultimately going to be judged by what kind of championship we had. A Connacht title followed by defeat with honour in Croke Park, preferably not at the quarter-final stage, was probably the height of our ambitions going into that championship season. That […]
For any new stars debuting on any GAA team you’re instantly on a mission to make a name for yourself the first chance you get. The time you have been dreaming about all your life has finally come to show people what you can do. 2020 was a year like no other but it was a year where we got […]
Although Mayo’s calamitous defeat in the qualifiers to Longford at the end of June 2010 didn’t – as had happened to me in the blog’s first year back in 2007 – leave me bereft of topics to talk about, it did leave me in a daze over the weeks that followed. After Longford, the Mayo GAA story didn’t remain static. […]
In the opening weeks of the blog’s existence in early 2007, it was just me talking to myself. I’d read articles about blogs, I knew that the majority of them never became established and died rapidly, that many never attracted any readers at all. That was of no concern to me at the outset. To be honest, I’d probably have […]
It’s certainly not an anniversary to celebrate but if nothing else it’s worth noting that it’s a full year to the day since our lives were upended due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. It was on this day exactly twelve months ago that then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced from Washington DC the first suite of public health restrictions, including a […]
Several different strands came together the morning in February 2007 that I brought into being the phenomenon that became known as the Mayo GAA Blog. At one level, what I did that day was just a flight of fancy, a mere whim, an idea that simply may not have been followed through on at all. It wouldn’t have been the […]
One way of thinking about how individuals live their lives – it’s certainly a method I often use to frame my own existence – is to parcel the single contiguous existence into discrete chunks. Childhood and adulthood are obvious divisions, the individual decades are, of course, a handy means for carving up bits of what might be a long life […]
This football-less Covid era is getting to all of us. A further yawning period of more than two months now stretches before us ahead of the most optimistic date at which the ball might be thrown in to start the 2021 inter-county season. We’ll all be driven bats before then. Up until last year, all of our lives had a […]
Happy St Brigid’s Day all. I know we were all taught in school that today’s the first day of spring, which of course it isn’t – not in the meteorological sense – but the days are getting longer and spring is indeed on the way. The first day in February is also significant from the perspective of the blog. It […]
I usually do the annual update on web traffic stats for the blog earlier in January. Last week’s glut of retirements blind-sided me a bit in that respect, however, so here, a little later than usual, is this year’s update. Covid-19 has caused plenty of graphs that were pointing upwards to tip vertiginously in the opposite direction. It certainly did […]