Mayo GAA Blog

Mayo GAA news, views and over a century of results

The GAA and the challenge of rural depopulation – Mayo News football podcast 2021 E44

Over the last number of weeks on the Mayo News football podcast, we’ve kept our focus firmly on the here and now, following the Senior, Intermediate and Junior football Championships as they’ve played out round by round. With the spoils now settled at county level for the year, however, we have time to widen the lens out and consider longer-term […]

Change is in the air

The GAA’s Special Congress takes place tomorrow where the future shape of the football Championship is down for debate. Coming into tomorrow’s Special Congress there’s a distinct feeling that change is in the air, though it’s still far from clear how the key vote will go. Proposal A – which is centred on reconfiguring the four provinces into four groups […]

Proposal A, B or neither of them?

In a normal year we’d know by now not only our full schedule of National League games for the following spring but also what the draw is for the next year’s provincial Championships. This year we still know neither of these things. That’s because the structure of the inter-county football competitions for 2022 remain up in the air, with proposals […]

Eight All-Star nominations for us

The list of nominations for the 2021 football All-Stars have been announced. Tyrone, as expected, lead the way with 15 nominees while we have eight players shortlisted. The eight Mayo players nominated are Rob Hennelly, Padraig O’Hora, Lee Keegan, Paddy Durcan, Stephen Coen, Mattie Ruane, Tommy Conroy and Ryan O’Donoghue. Lee is, along with Tyrone’s Conor Meyler and Ciaran McGeary […]

Discovering Gaelic football

I still remember the day I fell in love with Gaelic football: it was July 19th, 2009.  On the previous afternoon, my husband and I drove from his hometown of Westport, Co. Mayo, through Delphi in Connemara to Galway City.  All along the way, on houses in every village, outside every roadside pub or Texaco, the competing county flags of […]

A little bit of history to be repeated

THE venue for this year’s Connacht final may be novel but it is not unprecedented. All of 98 years ago the replayed provincial final of 1922 between Galway and Sligo was also contested at Croke Park on the last day of September in 1923. As was common in those times, the match in question, which was played in late September […]