THE famed Dublin surgeon and All-Ireland winner David Hickey said last year he had “no time for this Mayo team, they are a tragic outfit. They win All-Star awards and Player of the Year awards and all that sort of crap. Dublin win All-Irelands.”

Mayo have now played in five All-Ireland finals since 2012 (six if you count replays) and lost all of them. The team embodies, as does their manager, the culture of the individual that is at the heart of Mayo’s dysfunction.

Before Pat Gilroy, Dublin were precisely the same. The dyed hair. The partying in Coppers. The promotional work. The paid appearances. The ‘look at me’ stuff. Gazza not Ronaldo.

Gilroy had a simple philosophy when he took over the Dubs, who were at that time very similar to this Mayo group. He told them “If you are not completely happy to sacrifice yourself for the team, find another pastime.” He ruthlessly got rid of those players who set themselves apart from the group. As he later explained “They just weren’t suited to serving a cause. It wasn’t their fault. But they could not be accommodated. Otherwise, it is like cancer. Leave even a little bit of it in and it will spread and eventually kill the culture.”

By Gilroy’s arrival, Dublin had played extremely entertaining football for over a decade and like Mayo, had gotten nowhere. Their most recent All-Ireland was 1995, a full 15 years earlier.

In the noughties, they had played a lot of highly enjoyable football, but always wilted on the biggest days.

“We would have won a couple of All-Irelands at least if we hadn’t come up against such brilliant Kerry and Tyrone teams,” was the constant refrain. “We had no luck.”

In the last quarter of those big games, when they had looked as though they might go on and win, they failed. Yet they were ‘heroes’ in Dublin and around the country. Their culture of victimhood (‘Poor me’) made them the plucky losers everyone loved. Mayo’s ‘curse’ is the same.

When Pat was asked to take over, he was initially reluctant, and only did so having got assurances from Dublin’s chairman John Costello that he had his full backing for what Pat had promised would be a painful transformation of the culture.

He left his glitzy corner-forward Bernard Brogan on the bench for four successive league games. “He wouldn’t tackle,” said Gilroy. “After four games on the bench, he was the hardest tackler on the team.” He dropped Diarmuid Connolly altogether in 2010. Connolly missed a training session two days after the Leinster final. Pat met him that night:

Pat: You’re out Dermo. You can stay on as number 40 on the panel with no chance of playing or you can fuck off.

Dairmuid: I’ll fuck off so.

Pat: good choice.

They were clubmates and teammates. They were friends. They had played together in the St Vincent’s team that won the All-Ireland Club final against Nemo in 2008. Connolly was a big star. That didn’t matter. The group was the only thing that did.

On the morning of the 2010 quarter-final, the Dublin bus drove past Connolly, sitting outside Gaffney’s in Fairview, having a pint. Later that afternoon, the team made their first serious statement, beating Tyrone in the All-Ireland quarter final.

At the start of 2011, Diarmuid met Pat, apologised and asked to be taken back. Pat said he would have to ask the group.

The group said yes, on condition he get himself properly fit. For two months, Diarmuid trained alone, fanatically, until he was in the shape of his life. When he came back in, no one trained harder.

He dropped Jayo, a Hill 16 icon. Jayo remains bitter about it to this day.

One night, Gilroy went into a bar in the city and bumped into Mark Vaughan, the bleached blonde full-forward from Kilmacud Crokes with the sensational skills and flamboyant on-field persona. The next day he dropped him from the panel. Permanently.

Celebrity appearances were banned. From now on, sponsorship money would go into a shared players’ pool.

By 2011 they were ready to play serious football. In September, they were All-Ireland champions, beating the Kerry team that had beaten them by 17 points in the quarter-final two years earlier.

It was, Gilroy recalls, a very painful transition. In particular, dropping Connolly caused Gilroy great personal angst and friction in the club and county. But there was no other way.

Like that pre-Gilroy Dublin, a number of the senior Mayo players succumbed at an early stage of their careers to what Hickey calls “the curse of individuality.”

Horan has a charmed group of untouchables, who will never be taken off regardless of performance. This is corrosive to the culture. The others feel they are dispensable and when they are unable to logically justify the disparity in treatment, they become aggrieved, the bonds of togetherness essential for serious success are not forged and the project is doomed.

So, in 2012, they were crushed by Donegal. In 2014, by a very young Kerry team who galloped through them in the semi-final replay. Kildare beat them in 2018. They shook their heads and refused to go to war in the dying moments against Dublin in 2015, 2016 and 2017. This group is doomed and will not win an All-Ireland until the celebrity culture is banished by a manager who is not himself a part of the celebrity culture.

Holmes and Connelly tried but were ejected after one season by a coup spearheaded by the charmed inner circle. Rochford brought them closer than anyone with the excellence of his coaching. But they were doomed to fail, inevitably losing out when it came to the crunch, because Rochford did not have the courage to take on the problem.

Instead, the players quietly got rid of him after two seasons, preferring to go back to the comfort of their first coach. Never mind that he was tried and failed. Things would be just the way they liked them under Horan. Another three years of plucky failures, plenty of commercial opportunities, lots of TV time, TikTok videos and a smattering of All-Star awards.

Dublin’s culture means victory is inevitable on Saturday. This Mayo group truly does not understand the joy of football, which is all in the journey, not in the anti-climax of a victory.

They are a team that does not operate in the real world. They do not face the truth and deal with it. Instead, they are happy with the instant gratification that comes from awards and a victory here and there. A league title. A Connacht title. Padraig O’Hora has come in (belatedly) and is made of the right stuff. As are Keegan, O’Donoghue, Mullan and a few others. But it is not enough.

To beat Dublin, you cannot have any weak characters. As Alex Ferguson famously said “sport, in the end, is about character.”

Dublin, like the All-Blacks or South Africa, serve a cause bigger than themselves. They have total respect for the game and the opposition. They do everything in their body to achieve the perfect performance. The needs of others are considered ahead of their own. It is inspiring and humbling. They provide us with a guidebook not just for sport but life.

We are lucky to have them as role models, this special, devoted, selfless collective, where the team is the star and TikTok is the sound of a clock.