Just time for a few quick lines before the off today.  Once more – for the fourth time in five years, to be precise – a Mayo team will be involved in the action on All-Ireland day and, once again, we’re heading off hoping to see the lads in Green and Red bring home the silverware.  This is, I think, the perfect answer to everyone who, somewhat condescendingly, describes Mayo supporters as “long-suffering”: how many people who follow their county year after year don’t get within an ass’s roar of Croke Park on the biggest Sunday of the year?  No, my friends, we’re the lucky ones, although it would be nice if, once in a while, that luck were to continue to apply on the big day itself.

And so off we head to a packed Croke Park again today, hoping to see the lads win the final, willing them on to victory on the biggest stage that Gaelic football has to offer. Today we’ll be mere spectators for the senior final (though, like myself, I suspect that most of the Mayo support will be shouting for the beardy lads in that one) but with the talent we have coming through the ranks, we have to hope – and hope is never in short supply to your average Mayo supporter – that we’ll soon be back slugging it out at that level on All-Ireland day once again.  In the meantime, this marvellous bunch of minors deserve our full support today.  Let others talk of hoodoos and all that negative stuff – every final we reach offers the chance of redemption and this is the opportunity that’s there to be grasped by Ray Dempsey’s charges today.  Go for it lads, we’ll be right there with you.  Come on the Green and Red!