Mayo beat 75-year-old ‘curse’ to become Gaelic football champions

Fans celebrate outside Croke park stadium after Mayo beat Kerry in the 138th all-Ireland final. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA View image in fullscreen Fans celebrate outside Croke park stadium after Mayo beat Kerry in the 138th all-Ireland final. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Mayo beat 75-year-old ‘curse’ to become Gaelic football champions Team to return for euphoric homecoming after winning all-Ireland men’s final against Kerry, ending decades of defeats The hex is broken, dispelled, banished, and a story that bewitched Ireland for decades has ended in fairytale: Mayo are all-Ireland champions. Seventy-five years after a supposed curse condemned its Gaelic men’s football team to endless defeat , the county prevailed and uncorked a wave of emotion that engulfed even its rivals. The team will return to the west of Ireland for a euphoric homecoming on Monday evening after winning the senior football championship, a victory that thrilled Ireland and Mayo’s diaspora, including Joe Biden, Mark Carney and Noel and Liam Gallagher. View image in fullscreen Most pundits favoured Kerry to win but there were jubilant scenes when underdogs Mayo triumphed in Dublin instead. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA “Mayo 1-20, Kerry 1-17. Chisel it on the gravestones, scribble it in the sky,” the Irish Times exulted. “Croke Park untethered, the whole place afloat for an hour on a lake of the sweetest tears that were ever cried.” Most pundits had favoured Kerry to win the 138th all-Ireland final and write another chapter of Mayo woe at Sunday’s contest at the Dublin stadium. Instead the underdogs triumphed and even some Kerry fans wept at the catharsis. View image in fullscreen Mayo is the third biggest of the island of Ireland’s 32 counties but sparsely populated, with just 130,000 people. Photograph: Horizon International Images/Alamy Few seriously believed in the curse – it was said no member of the last winning team from 1951 would live to see another – but there was no doubting the drought that followed, with 11 defeats in 11 finals since 1989. A book about Mayo’s quest ​was titled House of Pain. Whenever the county made it to a final, a frisson gripped television viewers and the 82,000-strong stadium crowd: was this the day they would witness the end of the hex? On Sunday it was. “To every young boy and girl across Mayo and our diaspora across the world, never stop dreaming, stick your chest out and be proud to be from Mayo,” the team captain, Jack Coyne, declared as he held aloft the trophy named after Sam Maguire, a legendary player. “The wait is over. Sam is home.” Authorities had provisionally estimated a crowd of 40,000 would greet the team at McHale Park in the county town of Castlebar on Monday but that looks conservative, Gerry Bourke, the homecoming committee chair, told RTÉ . “After what I saw in Croke Park yesterday, I think we’ll have to revisit the plan.” Mayo, a landscape of bogs, rocks and Atlantic cliffs , is the third biggest of the island of Ireland’