Kieran Shannon: James McCarthy was Dublin’s master of the big moments and the little things

Yet in the intervening years the game had been reduced to its mere shorthand: Con’s early goal in front of the Hill, Keegan’s at the same end, Dean Rock and that GPS, Mayo men being dragged to the ground, then Dublin playing keep-ball to win another All-Ireland.

So we stayed on Premier Sport to see if the match still stood up. Was it as good as we thought it was?

It was.

And James McCarthy was even better.

With 62 minutes gone, everything seemed to be with Mayo. The momentum. The force. The sense that their time had finally come.

Cillian O’Connor was just about to take a free to put them 1-15 to 1-13 up. Andy Moran, the eventual footballer of that year, was jogging over to the sideline, his shift over, his job done, prompting a further wave of roars and applause from the Mayo crowd, radiating and enforcing the feeling: This, finally, is our day.

Only James McCarthy intervened and basically told them: No. Not Today.

Normally such a line would be the preserve of a team refusing to be denied their breakthrough. It’s what Paul Curran told any Kilkenny player in his orbit in 2010. It’s what Kevin Cassidy and every Donegal player told Tyrone in Clones in 2011. This is our year. Like Michael Collins confided to Kitty Kiernan in a Dublin hotel room if Neil Jordan is to be believed: Give us the future. We’ve had enough of your past.

Everything about Mayo that day exemplified that defiance. And yet when it came to it McCarthy more than any other Dublin player looked straight back at them in the eye and refused to yield or blink. Instead it was the oppressor, the serial champion, who still refused to lose.

After O’Connor tapped over that free to put Mayo two up, Stephen Cluxton would restart the play by finding Michael Fitzsimons. A couple of further passes through the hands and McCarthy provided the hockey assist for Brian Fenton to set up Paul Mannion for a point.

Then from David Clarke’s kickout, Fenton broke it to McCarthy who in turn popped to Mannion.

Another player would have just sat there in midfield, McCarthy’s nominal position that day, as Mannion played a foot pass into Bernard Brogan, who had just been introduced. Instead McCarthy darted goalwards, to receive Brogan’s layoff.

Many another player would have declined taking on a shot. Especially at that stage in the game. And especially a non-forward.

McCarthy curled the ball on the run inside the near post.

A few minutes later, after Dean Rock and Cillian O’Connor exchanged a couple of sublime points from play – reminding us that they were far more than just freetakers – the sides were still level when David Clarke kicked the ball out from the Davin End towards the Cusack Stand sideline.

All four midfielders that day were in that orbit. Aidan O’Shea. Tom Parsons. Brian Fenton. And yet it was McCarthy who rose above them all to claim it. A couple of pop passes later and Diarmuid Connolly had drawn the free that Rock would famously put over.

That’s where the game was won. That’s what and who turned it. As ravenous and as brilliant as Mayo were that day and during that era, somehow they were ultimately outwanted and outplayed by someone who refused to be denied yet another All-Ireland. McCarthy was the master of the big moments and the little things.

No footballer has won more All-Irelands (nine) yet just as astonishing a stat is that he never lost a provincial championship match.

Though he made his league and championship debut in 2010, he did not play in Dublin’s defeat to Meath that June. It is no coincidence that Dublin’s dominance began and continued with him. In the 2011 Leinster final Dublin were stuttering and struggling against Wexford, a side that had taken them to extra time the previous year, until McCarthy broke through and fired the ball to the net. Dublin won that game by a solitary goal. Not for the last time McCarthy proved to be the difference.

There were bigger names on that Dublin team. Cluxton. The Brogans. Connolly. Con. But within the circle no one was more admired and respected, especially by those bigger names.

In his book, Bernard Brogan recounts a week in the spring of 2019. The Dubs for the first time in the Jim Gavin era have missed out on qualifying for a league final and so they go back to basics and back to two-a-day sessions, just like they used to in McCarthy’s rookie year under Pat Gilroy. In the evening session they do a tackling drill, then a Bronco test, then back into a tackling drill. “It’s animal,” writes Brogan and no one is more animal that evening than McCarthy. “At one stage we’re in a circle and James McCarthy, that great big silverback gorilla of ours that rarely says a word is stomping around, gritting his teeth: Fuckin love it! This is what it’s all about, lads!”

The previous season Brogan nearly retired. He’d done his cruciate. Got only a minute’s playing time in the championship. But the Tuesday after they beat Tyrone in that 2018 final, the pair of them were seated together in the Dropping Well in Milltown as Danny O’Reilly from The Coronas and his mother Mary Black led a sing-song. At one stage in the night McCarthy told Brogan: Stay with me on the journey. Give us one more year. We started this run together. Let’s finish it together.

“And God, that wobbled me,” Brogan would write. “To basically be told, Look, six All-Irelands is fine but it doesn’t really mean anything. Five in a row is history. Let’s go for it.” 

Their fathers had made history in the 70s with Kevin Heffernan. Now they could enhance that legacy by going where no team had gone before. “When one of our greatest soldiers says, Come with me on the journey, what do you do?” Sure, only come back, just as Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey would a few years later after being coaxed to do so at McCarthy’s wedding.

You couldn’t say no to him, just as he somehow had no problem continuously saying no to Mayo and everyone else.