McStay's Mayo project is moving along quite nicely indeed

GOD be with the days when the build-up to the start of the Connacht senior football championship lasted a number of months.

Now, as far as Mayo is concerned, this year it's a case of coming from the high of winning the National Football League Division 1 title against Galway at Croke Park to the back-to-earth reality of facing Roscommon seven days later at Hastings Insurance MacHale Park in Castlebar.

The transition has to be managed very skilfully by manager Kevin McStay and his backroom team to ensure nothing resembling complacency creeps into the squad.

However, those who heard McStay's interview with TG4 Sport after Sunday's success at Croke Park were left with the clear impression that this matter had already been factored into Mayo's preparations a number of weeks ago.

The new Mayo management team, charged with the responsibility of building a new-look team following its appointment last August, cleverly utilised the National League campaign as the route to achieving exactly that.

And while reaching the final and winning it may not have been part of the original plan, it would have been unwise to have allowed momentum to have slipped from their hands, albeit the final league fixture against Monaghan offered the luxury to rest a number of key players.

Now McStay and his selectors more or less know their best starting 15, barring a couple of positions being challenged for by Tommy Conroy and Cillian O'Connor, in particular.

It's positive they have reached such a point in a relatively short period of time but their team, for all of its admirable points, is far from the finished article - and understandably so.

McStay will be forensically examining video footage from last Sunday's performance to figure out, first and foremost, why the Mayo defence was so fundamentally exposed by the Galway attack on quite a number of occasions, assaults that could have yielded goals but for the heroics of goalkeeper Colm Reape.

He will also be looking closely at a lack of fluency and cohesion in the attack, its over-reliance on Ryan O'Donoghue’s scoring boots and its worrying tendency to concede turnovers.

But he will also sit back and enjoy the manner in which his charges displayed a steely character and resolve when Galway began to throw everything at them.

This was evidenced by players punching the air with their fists when being awarded a free out at a time when the pressure was really on them later in the second half, a signal of a collective winning mentality.

While expectations are rising in every parish across Mayo, it is important to note that this project is very much in its infancy.

It's a project, however, that's moving very swiftly in the right direction - and Roscommon would love nothing better than to scuttle it, in the true nature of sport, of course.