Louth 0-15
Mayo 3-23
Mayo’s Awake! At Croke Park at the weekend, they stormed into another Croke Park final, making Louth’s first trip to a semifinal since 1957 a miserable one.
Sunday’s semifinal turned out to be a competitive game, but on Saturday the Westerners trounced the Wee Country, who’d dared to dream of a repeat of their title-winning year of ’57.
What was expected to be an even enough contest beforehand, and appeared so up through halftime, ran away from the Leinster side in the second half. Mayo had a four-point lead at the break, having trailed for a time, but the momentum was on their side and they quickly established a big lead in the third quarter. Indeed, Louth did not score between the 28th minute and the 57th minute. Meantime, in that same period, Mayo racked up 13 points.
Now the Westerners must face a different kind of pressure, one particular to them, as they ponder the Sunday, July 26, final against Kerry, the most successful county in All Ireland history with 39 titles.
The stats are somewhat known and sobering – Mayo have been in 18 All Ireland finals, beginning 110 years ago, and have won just three of them. The last win was against Meath in 1951, which followed up their win against Louth the previous year. For the first half of the title-less three-quarters of a century they failed to qualify for a single Croke Park decider in the senior championship. After their return to an All Ireland final in 1989, there were two more appearances in the next decade, 1996 and 1997, and then eight additional losses from 2004 through 2021. In the half-decade since the most recent appearance in a Sam Maguire decider, the last of the personalities who’d any connection to 1951 have died.
Louth drew first blood on three minutes with a Dara McDonnell point; however, Mayo via Paul Towey intercepted a poor pass in a renewed attack and he sent a long ball up-field to Kobe McDonald whose deft flick put it into the path of Ryan O’Donoghue who after a few paces and a couple of bounces blasted to the back of the net.
At 15 minutes, it was even, 0-05 to 1-02, and Louth took the lead again on 20 minutes, 0-08 to 1-04, thanks to their patient picking off of points. But up stepped Ryan O’Donoghue with a two-pointer, making his personal tally 1-05 at just 21 minutes.
Conor Grimes’s fine two-pointer made it even stevens again at 0-11 to 1-08 on 28 minutes, but disappointingly for Louth fans that was it for another half-hour of play. Mayo used the remaining minutes of the half to establish a gap of four –notably by capitalizing on a disorganized defense with a scrambled goal from Darragh Beirne.
As 40 minutes approached, Jordan Flynn’s two-pointer and Kobe McDonald’s second point of the game put the gap at seven points – not a huge gap in the scheme of things but it presented Louth with a psychological hill that they seemed unable to climb. At 49 minutes, Louth lost possession in attack and Mayo led by Tommy Conroy swept forward in a move that had Conor Loftus scoring their third goal from close range and it was now 3-14 to 0-11. There would be no way back surely? And there wasn’t.
