Aidan O'Shea: Man of Destiny

Take a quick glance through the bullet points of Aidan O'Shea's football career to date, and you realise pretty quickly that it was always going to be this way.

The 22-year-old will line out in his first All-Ireland senior football final for Mayo this Sunday, and that date with destiny is one which always looked like it was going to come his way.

Go back nine years. The Breaffy minors are playing Knockmore in Charlestown, and the 13-year-old O'Shea comes off the bench to play for his club's U18s.

There are always wunderkinds in the GAA. But very few make the step up to minor football when they are still in their first year of teenage life.

"I was actually talking to my Dad about this recently," O'Shea told GAA.ie. "He was a selector or advisor on the team at the time. He wasn't officially the manager. But I reckon I should have been playing, should have been starting that day. I suppose that was youth for you."

Even for some of the country's most gifted underage footballers, the thought of seeing a 13-year-old line out at minor level is a scary prospect. Looking at O'Shea today, the most striking thing about him is his sheer size. He is a huge man. So you assume that this explains how he could have been so far ahead at his age.

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"I wasn't very big but I was very long. I hadn't filled out an awful lot, and I get slagged a lot at home for being very skinny when I was younger. But I was a tall fella."

Go back a little further, to a time before Aidan was born. His parents are both from Kerry, from the Laune Rangers club in Killorglin. His father Jim was a Kerry minor, but he broke his leg in his early 20s, and found himself working away from Kerry with the bank, first in Mullingar, then in Galway, before finally settling in Breaffy in Mayo.

Aidan, along with his brother Seamus, another key member of the Mayo team, was born in Mullingar and spent the first couple of years of his life there. His father won Westmeath county titles with Mullingar Shamrocks in that period, which was during their spell of dominance in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

When the family eventually settled in Breaffy, after a brief spell in Galway, Seamus and Aidan were still only little kids, and they had recently been joined by a third boy, Conor. So began the O'Shea football dynasty in Mayo. A house of Kerry football, but with Mayo football the ultimate beneficiary.

"I remember myself and Seamie probably started off together an awful lot and then Conor was getting there too, maybe a couple of years after us, joining in. We were always out the back, goalposts up and everything, and obviously living so close to the pitch, we were always up there kicking around. It's just something that was normal.

"Da and Mam were mad into football as well, coming from Kerry, so it was just kind of a natural progression that we were going to be big into Gaelic football. And I suppose now it helps when we're all around the place, that we can go practicing together and go training together and go to the gym and stuff like that, which is great."

Conor is now a much vaunted prospect with the Mayo U21s, and the day when all three O'Shea brothers line out for Mayo is surely not too far away.

At the same time, Kerry football remains a major part of Aidan's life. He has only missed one All-Ireland final since 2000, and has had the chance to cheer the Kingdom on in the many finals they appeared in in that time.

"Kerry football was a huge part of my childhood," he says. "We spent a lot of summers in Kerry, and I would have looked up a lot to Mike Frank Russell with him being from Laune Rangers and stuff."

Aidan first came to national prominence in the summer of 2008. Mayo reached the All-Ireland minor final that year and drew with Tyrone in a thrilling game in Croke Park. They lost the replay, but O'Shea looks back on that summer as a crucial one of learning and development on his path to being a Mayo senior footballer.

"That was a great summer. We had a great panel of players and obviously we were unlucky not to win that game. But I think we gave a great performance that day and it's not something I look back on with regret."

Kevin Keane and Shane McHale were both on that minor team with O'Shea, and all three are now looking to make up for that defeat with victory in the senior final on Sunday. Along with other young players like Lee Keegan and Cillian O'Connor, they represent the wave of youth which has breathed new life into Mayo over the past few years.

It didn't take O'Shea long after moving out of the minor grade to become a key man on the senior team. He made his championship debut as a forward against New York in 2009, scoring 1-3, and then scored a fine goal against Roscommon in the Connacht semi-final. Mayo were beaten in the All-Ireland quarter-final by Meath later than year.

O'Shea remained a consistent presence for Mayo over the next two seasons, during the lows of 2010, when Mayo lost to Sligo and then Longford, as well as the highs of 2011, when he picked up his second Connacht medal and helped the team to the All-Ireland semi-final, where they were beaten by Kerry.

His season this year was seriously interrupted by injury at the end of the regulation stage of the league, when he was forced out for a number of months due to being forced into having a long-standing problem fixed.

"It was osteitis pubis - inflammation of the pubic bone," he explains.

"It was something I had been carrying for about a year, from the previous championship. I carried it from last year's league. It got to the stage where I just had to do something about it or I was going to be out for a long time.

"I remember being down in Kerry after the last league game, and I couldn't get off the ground after the game. Barry Moran had to come over and lift me up off the ground. I physically was in bad shape, so I came home and just said to myself, 'you have to do something here, you have to sort it out.'"

After getting surgery, O'Shea made a much quicker than usual recovery. He explains that he has teammates and friends who were out for more than a year with the injury, so when he came back in the Connacht final win against Sligo, he was delighted to be back on the field after such a relatively short space of time.

"When you're going to training and you're doing rehab, it can be very difficult, and it was the first time as well in my career that I had been injured for a period of time. And I found it difficult to be honest. But it was great to get back in for the Connacht final and make a difference."

Since making that comeback against Sligo, O'Shea has been a crucial presence around the middle for Mayo. His introduction that day turned the day decisively for the team, while his ability to win primary possession, as well as his rapidly improving defensive role in breaking up attacks and winning back possession, was at the heart of Mayo's victories over Down and Dublin.

This evolution in his game, having often been the leader of the attack in his minor days and early days playing senior, is something which he always expected to happen.

"I think I was always going to end up around the middle. That was where I was probably suited to best, even as an underage player in Mayo.

"So that was always going to happen. But I'm in there to do a job. James has asked me to do it and whether it's to attack forward or cover defensively, it depends on the game."

All eyes now move to Sunday, the challenge of Donegal and the chance to end a 61-year wait for the Sam Maguire Cup in a county that lives for football.

The final year Logistics and Supply Chain Management student says the build-up to the final has been muted around the county, and that he has been sticking to his usual routine ahead of the game.

Aidan O'Shea genuinely doesn't seem fazed or nervous ahead of what is by far the biggest game of his life so far. There's a sense that it's something he has been preparing for his entire life.