Mayo-Galway 95-99: The heyday and the rise of Connacht

Thankfully, Ed Sheeran is elsewhere for the day and so we can be confident that Mayo-Galway will proceed at the time agreed in Hastings MacHale Park on Sunday afternoon.

It's the last of the 'Old Firm' provincial rivalries to still have relevance, what with Cork's aggressive embrace of mediocrity post 2010 and Dublin leaving Meath for dust in the past decade.

While there's been a fair degree of needle in the Mayo-Galway relationship in last decade, the footballing heyday of the rivalry was unquestionably the late 90s, when Connacht football rose from the ashes and games out west finally got the nation's attention.

Precursor - grim times in the west

Before the '95 Connacht final, this writer has a vague memory of one Mayo supporter contacting Sunday Sport wondering whether it'd be better to lose it (good luck to anyone going back to verify that this wasn't imagined).

All-Ireland semi-final day had become a relentlessly humbling experience for football folk from the west and Connacht were due to meet Ulster that year. Things could get ugly.

For the guts of two decades, Connacht teams only ever reached All-Ireland finals when they met the Ulster champions in the semis - and vice versa. The calculus changed in the early 90s when the Nordie teams quite rudely and abruptly started winning All-Irelands every year. Connacht, meanwhile, only got worse.

Galway football had been in one of its occasional slumbers since the late 80s, the team badly underperforming against its less well resourced neighbours, the county at large appearing not to care. Historically, the Galway GAA public has never been slow to decide that one or other of their senior teams are at nothing and planning their Sundays accordingly. When they drew with Leitrim in