CAUGHT IN THE jet stream of the 24-hour news cycle, wherein countries seem to decide afresh whether they are at war with each other at the start of each new day, it is too easy to move on too quickly from many stories that matter. 

Yes, it’s been nearly six days now, but it would be a mistake to forget the earth-shaking lesson of last Sunday. That lesson being: wait a second, curses are real?

When young Jack Coyne led Mayo to their first Senior Men’s All-Ireland Football final victory in three-score and 15 years, it closed the book on one of the most statistically improbable trophy droughts in the history of the sport (or perhaps, indeed, in any sport — imagine a tennis player losing 13 Grand Slam finals without ever winning one?). And as with many of the other droughts that the world is facing right now, this one, too, was manmade. 

Some people have extremely incorrectly offered the take that Mayo ‘broke the curse’ when they won last weekend. That is the absolute opposite of what happened, and the worst lesson we could possibly take from Mayo’s win. The curse did exactly what it said it was going to do. The curse was not broken; it was fulfilled. 

The story of Mayo’s 75-year wait to be reunited with the Sam Maguire deserves to be studied closely, seeing as how it’s probably the best chance we’ll ever have to understand the rules of how curses work. 

The curse began in 1951, after Mayo won their last All-Ireland Final. Apocryphal or not, the story goes that as the team made their way back to Mayo, they passed through the village of Foxford, where their celebrations in some way interrupted a funeral, at which point a Catholic priest called down a hex upon the county such that they would never win another Sam Maguire until every member of the 1951 squad was dead. 

Between 1951 and last Sunday, Mayo have played in a grand total of 13 All-Ireland Senior Men’s Football Finals and failed to win all 13 (and let’s not overlook that spooky little 13 in the mix, while we’re at it). Sunday’s game marked Mayo’s first All-Ireland Final since Dr Mick Loftus, the final surviving member of the 1951 team, died in 2023. 

Breaking the curse would have necessitated winning the All-Ireland before the last member of the 1951 squad passed away. Winning the All-Ireland not only after the terms of the curse had been met, but at the first possible opportunity? Granted, it took them a few years to make their way back to the final, but that’s only because their spirits had been so broken by so many decades of the curse. Honestly, the only way that the curse could have been any more confirmed is if the last remaining member of the 1951 squad had died at half-time during an All-Ireland Final while Mayo were 10 points down, only for them to come out for the second-half and win a resounding comeback.

The questions we really need to be asking are more along the lines of:

• Since when can Catholic priests do curses? That sort of seems like the opposite of what we’re told Catholic priests are supposed to do (though let’s face it, that hasn’t stopped them from doing all sorts of other things they’re not supposed to do)
• Was God involved somehow? Is it possible that what we have been calling a curse is something more akin to a Moses-like test?
• Do I have to become a priest in order to successfully curse someone?
• Who do we have to curse to solve all of our other problems?

Only by learning exactly how curses work can we appropriately marshal them for more noble purposes. 

Let us turn our attention to a different kind of sporting curse for example, referring, of course, to Fifa president and globally loathed snake man Gianni Infantino. The Darth Vader to Sepp Blatter’s Darth Sidious, Infantino has furthered Fifa’s legacy of being the most corrupt organisation imaginable since he took over the reins from his fellow Swiss. 

Having unilaterally made the decision to change the very structure of football matches by introducing mandatory three-minute hydration breaks in either half during the World Cup just gone, intervening to overturn the red card of US striker Folarin Balogun at the behest of Donald Trump, and of course, inventing a peace prize to give Trump as a permanent reminder of Infantino’s avowed sycophancy, Infantino is now proposing to sell the World Cup off to a private equity consortium helmed by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared. 

The only pleasantly surprising thing about this story is the speed with which Uefa has said that all of its member states will boycott all Fifa tournaments until this proposal is put to bed. Uefa has already been joined by Concacaf and AFC, their counterpart bodies for the continents of North & Central America and Asia. 

While it is no doubt very welcome that Uefa have immediately put pressure on Infantino to scrap the idea, it does raise a certain irony for Irish football fans who have been pleading with the FAI to take the same course of action over Ireland’s upcoming fixtures against Israel in, well, the Uefa Nation’s League. 

While selling off the World Cup – something that in our more dewy-eyed moments we like to think of as owned by the footballing community at large – is no doubt an abominable idea, it is not any more abominable than the actions of Israel in Palestine. The two things are not like-for-like, easy-to-compare moral artefacts, but the reality is that it is hard to imagine anything worse than the campaign of genocide Israel has waged and continues to wage in Gaza and the West Bank. 

That Uefa can recognise not only the repugnance of Infantino’s latest brainchild but also recognise the value of a boycott while continuing to allow Israel to participate in its competitions, and putting pressure on countries like Ireland to fulfil fixtures against them, is hypocritical at best. 

The decision also comes with a lesson for the FAI. If the FAI believes, as they presumably do, that Uefa’s threat to boycott Fifa tournaments is likely to work, then surely they can see the argument of those calling upon them to do the very same in relation to the Israel fixtures. If their counter-argument is that they lack the ‘strength in numbers’ for a meaningful boycott of Israel, then it simply becomes the moral duty of the FAI to reach out to other football associations and petition them to join them. 

As it stands, Ireland are on course to play both fixtures against Israel at the end of September and the start of October. It’s a curse that’s entirely within our power to break.