Mayo GAA Blog

Mayo GAA news, views and over a century of results

If the opportunity doesn’t knock, sometimes you have to build yourself a door

Alright.  So, I shouldn’t have taken the Galway flag from its perfectly positioned place on our kitchen door and thrown it on the ground on Sunday night. And it probably wasn’t a good idea to sing – to the air of ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’ – “You can stick your Connacht medal up your […]

As a Mayo GAA fan I was happy Galway got to the All-Ireland final

Ah – the things you do for love.  Myself and my Tuam-ian fiancée met just one month out from the All-Ireland final in 2016. To be exact, it was the night before Mayo’s All-Ireland semi-final clash with Tipperary. On the weekend of the final she came to Dublin and met my sister for the very first time and, while she […]

Not long till Kingdom comes

I recently proposed to my long-term girlfriend and long-suffering Galway GAA fanatic (2017 aside). Unlike Mayo of the last decade, she didn’t leave me sweating and with my heart in my mouth and said yes after repeating thrice “you’re messing…is this serious?” No, I’m just on one knee for the good of my health.  You would think that that moment […]

Atmosphere is Dublin like a saucepan on the hob

I love my songs about Mayo and this time of year, if the Lord spares us, the demand for them in my music library increases tenfold.  Famous singer/songwriter and long-time pal of The Saw Doctors, Padraig Stevens, has a song called ‘Up Mayo’.  The starting lyrics of it go: “In ainm an Athair, aon athair De, something is starting in […]

No hype, no Hill but do we have a hope in hell?

I remember the first time I witnessed Cillian O’Connor in action, I was maybe six or seven and Ballintubber school were facing Killawalla, my school, in a Cumann Na mBunscoil game on our hallowed turf. That team was full of what would become future well-known Ballintubber stars but Cillian stood out a mile. One of the teachers in our school, […]

“The tears of your children will be the laughter of mine” – the Mayo v Galway rivalry explained

You could wax lyrical about what the rivalry between Mayo and Galway is and I have done this in the past for this blog. But nothing sums it up better than what I was told in a pub in Liverpool at the start of this year, when the next game on the horizon was a crucial League relegation battle for […]

Overriding the Rossies in unprecedented times

It’s been a while since I put pen to paper for this blog. April to be precise. David Brady’s Laochra Gael had just aired and we faced into an indefinite number of months without sport.  It was a tough slog, we kept ourselves entertained with 5km challenges, zoom quizzes and reruns of Reeling in The Years and Love/Hate. My housemate […]