Mayo will be a county of a hundred thousand vigils come 5pm

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Keith Duggan
• Date: 19 December 2020

As soon as the 'shoot' was finished, Michael headed to London to record his segment of a charity single Do They Know It's Christmas. Famously, the Bob Geldof extravaganza kept both Wham! and The Power of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood off the coveted number one spot.

Last Christmas was supposed to be a disposable pop hit but has instead stubbornly stuck around through the changing decades and is now a museum piece classic, burnished by time while remaining curiously timeless and weighted with millions of associated memories.

Nineteen eighty four was also the year that Mayo began to reawaken as a football entity, storming into Kevin Heffernan's Dublin the following August and threatening to return to their first All-Ireland football final since 1951. They didn't make it but Mayo football has never gone away since then either. And you can be sure that the airwaves will be filled with both the sounds of Last Christmas and Mayo football on this December Saturday morning.

Nobody really gives Mayo much of a prayer this evening. But if they are to win it - swirling magic, banished curses, all that malarkey - could there be a more appropriate year than this or a better setting, in the wintry choral silence of Croke Park with the Mayo faithful, both living and dead, locked within the county?

Surface conversation

It has been a year of reckoning for the world. The GAA has navigated its way through the pandemic as well as possible. The football championship has been dominated by surface conversation by Dublin's omnipotence and the financial imperatives and the wisdom of persisting with the century-old, romantic and deeply oppressive county versus county system.

But the real question that people are probably asking is what they want the All-Ireland football championship to be. What do we want from this pageant? And: has it become too serious?

One explanation for the force that Dublin has become lies in the culture of monastic solemnity and the pursuit of excellence that started to infiltrate the intercounty GAA scene about 20 years ago. Yes, the best of Gaelic football was always serious and always intense. But it was also a world of mischief.

The 1960s through to the mid 1990s are laden with tales, mostly unprintable, of players skiving off after league games, of breaking curfew, of post All-Ireland bacchanals: of getting away with it, of grabbing life and necking it straight from the bottle. The behaviour mirrored Irish society at the time.

When teams from the...