SAY the name James Carr and your mind’s hard drive will go whirring after that goal against Galway.
You know the one. Collecting Paddy Durcan’s pass a good 55 metres from goal, out on the sideline. Slaloming right, left, right, left. Next thing he’s through all the maroon flags and rattling Bernard Power’s top corner is within his rights.
In the days after, it had amassed eight million views off the GAA’s Twitter account alone. Heaven only knows how many people saw it in total.
On Argentinian ESPN, where once his goal held court, the message now reads ‘pagina no encontrada’. Page not found.
This was Ardagh’s equivalent of the little boy from Rosario.
A tiny collection of 300 houses that wouldn’t swear allegiance to any of their neighbouring powerhouses of Ballina, Crossmolina and Knockmore, the club as it exists now was formed in 1978 with his maternal grandfather Jeremiah O’Mara as one of its founders and its first secretary.
They’ve been junior their whole history, never won a championship or even reached a final.
This will be the first year they’ve had unfettered access to Carr. He went in with Mayo under Stephen Rochford as an eighteen-year-old.
As he surveyed the broken dressing room in 2017 after perhaps the most agonising of all their defeats to Dublin, it was as if he was tending to those whose hurt it was.
“I was just a kid, looking around at all the characters, walking around that losing dressing room thinking it was the worst I was ever in.
“I couldn’t get over it, I’d never seen it before, how down people were. I never took football that seriously until then. It’s the old story, the young lads seeing the old dogs get whipped and the bit of anger in you to go out and redeem it.”
When he scored the goal against Galway, he had only found out late he was starting. Picked up a dead leg and missed most of the warm-up. Barring the headline moment, he felt it bypassed him a bit.
That was what occupied his thoughts in the changing room afterwards.
“To be honest, that day, bar the goals was probably one of my worst performances. The second one, I remember it as much as you from the view you see, I don’t remember actually scoring it.
“There’s probably a narrative out there that ‘that went to that fella’s head, he’s never the same since’ but you don’t realise how little that impacted.
“I had no real impact on the game after that. I remember coming off and Andy Moran came in, I was chatting to him and Cillian [O’Connor], and there was no chat of the goal, I was trying to get out of them ‘what do you think I did wrong?’
“I remember saying to Cillian ‘the game got away from me, what do you do when the game gets away from you?’ The lads were muttering away in the background saying Jimmy’s goal is going everywhere, the news have it or whatever, but it didn’t really impact me at all. I was back feeding my cattle the following day.”
On November 1 last year, he married Danielle. They’re expecting their first child in summer.
As busy as it was in the lead-up to the wedding, his Mayo future took up joint occupancy in his mind. To go back or not?
He spoke to Rochford, spoke to Kevin McStay, and in the end he did what he admits he probably should have done twelve months ago.
The twelve games he’d played in 2023 was comfortably his best return. He scored 3-11, all but a single point of it from play. In eight years on the panel, it was his only uninterrupted league campaign.
A hernia in 2017. Both hips scoped out and grinded down in 2018.
A rolled ankle set him back in the middle of the Connacht championship in 2019.
That became the theme.
He’d damaged the meniscus in his knee out with the club at the end of 2023. It took him out for the whole of last year’s league.
Call it impatience or the fear of losing his place, but he rushed himself back for the last league game against Monaghan.
Played for 21 minutes. Went out on the Tuesday night and suffered the exact same injury in the other knee. Year over.
In eight years with Mayo, he never once played a full 70 minutes. His total game time amounted to the equivalent of 21 full games.
“Maybe once in that whole time I’ve put 15 training sessions together.” When he got his chance in 2023 he ostensibly took it.
That viral 2019 goal against Galway, in just his second start for his county, wasn’t even his best goal against their rivals.
The first night of the league two years ago, he smashes one in off the underside of the bar from 20 yards. There was a greater sense of satisfaction about that one because he and Jordan Flynn had rehearsed the move exactly as it panned out, except for the finish itself.
“I never tried to put it under the bar, I tried to hit the bottom left-hand corner. Don’t put that in any article!” he laughs.
But that whole year he’d arrive to training, sit in the van, inhale and ask himself why he was there.
“I just hated every minute of the 2023 season, didn’t enjoy it. Didn’t enjoy the games. And I was scoring heavy, playing well, but I wasn’t enjoying training and the games.
“I found myself at training wondering ‘what am I doing here?’ I just didn’t want to be there. I spoke with psychologists and tried to iron out the different things, but it was weighing heavy on me.
“I don’t mean to sound like some kind of charity case here, it’s a first world problem. But that’s how I was feeling at the time. I was going well and training well but thinking I don’t even want to be here, I’d rather be at home with the missus or out on the farm or doing something.”
It’s not a pity party he’s hosting. The opposite. Those that shared a changing room with him see him the way he sees himself, bubbly and chatty and friends with everyone in there. He never allowed that to change. But it was time to get out.
He had the residue removed from both knees last season.
But it is the residue of losing to Tyrone in 2021 that plagues Mayo football to this day.
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THURSDAY night before the All-Ireland final. From top of bottom of the county, life is being lived at a frenzied pace.
After all the times they’d walked out of Croke Park wondering how they’d ever crack the Dublin code, they’d done it in the semi-final again, nine years after the last time.
Then it was Donegal who denied them. This time, Tyrone lay in wait.
But surely after everything the world owed Mayo a good turn?
Except for James Carr, it became another nightmare.
He’s one of those fellas that could turn his hand to anything. From the age of 14 he was working in the family restaurant in Ballina, ended up doing the cooking until football came to dominate every conversation, every day and he had to limit himself to the office instead.
He fell in love with farming a decade ago, but his day job is as a woodwork and construction teacher in St Muredach’s College in Ballina.
That summer, he was out flooring with a local carpenter when the knee started to bother him.
“Next thing I got some sort of infection that was travelling up the inside of my leg, my knee went bright red and swelled up.
“Went into hospital, antibiotic, came out, tried to start training again, didn’t work, had to go back in. Tablets didn’t work.
“For four or five days after the Dublin game, I was on 24 tablets a day. Eight tablets, three times a day. Didn’t work. Had to go back in, IV drip for seven or eight days, trying to get something, some sort of swelling down, some sort of movement in the race for an All-Ireland final.”
That he spent the Thursday night before the All-Ireland just walking around the place yet James Horan still thought to include him in the 26-man squad for the Sunday, bringing him on in 74th minute desperation, tells you what he was capable of.
It was gone by then.
Far from underestimating Tyrone, they drilled deep down into their opponents. Too far, almost.
They’d watched Niall Morgan repeatedly boom the ball out to midfield in the semi-final. When Tyrone won it, they did harm and when they lost it, sure it was 80 yards away. It proved effective.
Mayo prepared for a repeat but expected that Tyrone would expect them to expect it. They anticipated a bit more subtlety built in.
Morgan just hammered the hammer. Eventually, it led to a breakaway goal set up off a Conn Kilpatrick fetch by the marauding Conor McKenna, finished by Darren McCurry.
“We knew the long kickout was coming to [Conor] McKenna but we couldn’t stop it. We knew what Morgan would be like but we didn’t expect him to be as obvious.
“It was so obvious in the semi-final that we thought he’d keep it hidden, but he went straight down the middle, caught us out.
“That game was tough. We came off the back of beating Dublin and people thought ‘they thought that’s it, it’s their All-Ireland, they took Tyrone too lightly’ and all that. When in truth, we knew we had Dublin’s number. We thought we were going to beat them going in.
“Once we did we were adamant Tyrone were gonna be our toughest test. What was tough was that we believed we had the team and the gameplan, and we couldn’t execute it ourselves. That was the toughest. That hit us hard.”
Personally it had been another injury-disrupted season topped off by the infection.
He started one league game, scored 2-1 against Meath and won man of the match.
His five championship appearances amounted to 60 minutes in total, just over half of them against the Dubs.
They don’t subscribe to the outside theories that they went in thinking the hard work had been done in the semi-final, yet the sense that this was this generation’s Meath ‘96 moment is inescapable.
“It lingers around but to be honest, you never really talk about it or think about it until somebody mentions it to you. But I think it was the hardest loss I had. Yeah… that is still lingering a little bit. You can’t really let it hamper you. You keep plugging away.”
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THERE are two schools in Ardagh parish, with just over 100 children between them.
But even they don’t all belong to the club. A lot of the kids in Knockanillo NS come from just the other side of the land divide between Ardagh and Ballina.
James Carr went to school in Rathnamagh National School, where he met his good friend James Gough.
The Goughs are neighbours and family friends, steeped in the club as well. Elder brother Darragh still plays, sister Grainne is PRO, their father Sean lines the field with Martin Carr snr every Saturday.
Everywhere James Carr went with Mayo, James Gough went too.
“James is my number one fan. We get on mighty. He comes to all the games. James is a good friend of ours and a good friend of mine.
“It’s mighty for him, he’s a great interest in it and he’s followed me up and down the country.”
The parish’s pride in him representing them in a Mayo jersey was never lost on Carr.
For the last two years, it was pretty much the sole reason he was there.
With 30 seconds to play in the Hyde last summer, they had one foot in a quarter-final. Ciaran Kilkenny rises, Cormac Costello equalises, they’re sent down a different path that walks them into an angry Derry team in Castlebar. Beaten on penalties, year over, just like that.
“I didn’t want to see another football. I’d have left it all there after it, with the season I had.”
He was togged out both days but the knee wasn’t ready.
A year that for him began and ended with 25 minutes of football against Monaghan, the side against whom he’d finally made his Mayo debut on the last day of the league in 2019.
It had taken him two-and-a-half years of grinding patience to get to that point, but over the years that followed his body would just continually let him down.
Being the only Ardagh man ever to have played for the county created in his head this sense that he owed it to them to keep on playing, that they’d be annoyed if he stopped.
“Young lads from a junior club in Mayo don’t often get those opportunities and I thought ‘who am I to be turning down playing for Mayo?’”
But it was all in his head. When he broke the news to family and friends that he was considering stepping away, they were happy to have him back.
The build-up of injuries finally broke his spirit last year.
At 27, he’s not saying he’s retired. But he’s not saying he’s not either.
“I always said it’s very hard to say no to the call when it comes, to play for Mayo. But last year kind of…not broke me, but broke me spirit a bit. I thought maybe if I come back refreshed in 2026, that could be the best thing.
“And maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get to October now and think d’you know what, I’m happy. I could get to October and say I’ve made peace with my Mayo career, and I’d be happy with that if that’s a decision I come to.
“I could have went through another season in and out, I don’t know if I’d have lasted it. I might have given the people who have left the panel and the gaps in the forward line that are opening out, people injured and people away, that I could have played a good bit with Mayo.
“But you really have to want it if you’re going to get the best out of yourself and I didn’t see myself wanting it 100 per cent.
“I needed a break and I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t take it.”
Not ending that break next year might be a greater disservice still.