A fruitful campaign yet awaits for Mayo

MARTIN CARNEY COLUMN

IT wasn’t meant to end like this. Newly crowned Division 1 league champions playing the opening round of this year’s Connacht senior football championship in their own Hastings Insurance MacHale Park before an expectant 20,000 attendance were fancied by most, myself included, to do enough for victory.

I thought winning would come packaged with a high degree of difficulty but nonetheless felt that the team had matured sufficiently to overcome the Roscommon challenge.

Beating the same opposition a month earlier in Dr. Hyde Park had created its own confidence and the momentum gained from this I expected to see carried forward.

The poet TS Eliot described April being the cruellest month while other sages constantly reminded us of the difference between league and championship, but one way or the other the Rossies came armed with a game plan that they executed to perfection with a winning performance that was at once deserved though unexpected.

To steal the Mayo thunder, it was necessary to play in a manner that kept the ball away from Mayo hands while at the same time sketching a contest that was slow in practice and designed to frustrate.

Facing the elements in the opening half, Roscommon from the off managed to dictate the terms. Playing an opponent, crowned league champions a week earlier and barely grounded after the previous week’s high, they taunted Mayo with a display rich in self-assurance. In possession they were never in a hurry to get the ball forward. Their lateral and backward passing reduced matters to bland at best. Happy to hold on to the ball, Mayo didn’t possess the energy or inspiration to push up on their opponents and force sufficient turnovers. The seven-day time span since the league title victory was simply too short to get the necessary collective recalibration.

After Ryan O’Donoghue’s opening point from a free in the second minute, a bout of mainly featureless football followed. Backed by a significant wind advantage, Mayo in possession became choked by a Roscommon defensive master plan where the previously successful tactic of getting the ball quickly into the full-forward line was thwarted.

Credit is due to the collective work of Conor and Niall Daly, whose tackle count, and that of their team-mates, impressed.

In games like this, an ability to translate opportunities into scores often becomes the difference between winning and losing. During this barren opening quarter, Mayo on two occasions left healthy goal-scoring opportunities behind them. Converting one or both could have changed the course of the game.

One in particular stands out. It had to do with an extremely rare occasion when Aidan O’Shea found himself on the receiving end of a high ball into the heart of the Roscommon defence. This quickly-delivered missile, bypassing their cover, was flicked by the Breaffy man into the path of an in-rushing Stephen Coen whose thunderous shot unluckily, from a Mayo perspective, clattered the Roscommon bar.

Along with a later melee which ended in a converted 45', these opportunities cried out for goal returns on an afternoon where chances were limited.

By way of contrast, Roscommon – with their two goal-scoring chances – did maximum damage. Enda Smith’s penalty was expertly dispatched while his brother’s strike on the cusp of the half-time whistle was a killer. Just at a time when Mayo had answered the Roscommon goal with three successive points, a marvellous strike from Donie Smith did major damage and left four points between the teams at the break.

Throughout the first half Mayo looked laboured and uncertain. The individual and collective excellence that had defined their year to date was just a memory.

That middle-eight, so often the source of all that was good, struggled. The midfield sector, so convincing and dominant all year, reserved this occasion for its poorest performance to date.

When matters are reviewed, one of the glaring weaknesses seemed to be a reluctance of well-positioned players to take on the responsibility of going for scores. That damning stat where four points in total came in the opening 35 minutes is hard to ignore. Two were scored by the goalkeeper, Colm Reape, from frees, one by Ryan O’Donoghue in the same manner, and their single return from play was by defender Patrick Durcan.

Having played during the first half with wind advantage, the Mayo forward line ended up without any return from play!

During the early stages of the second period matters seemed to improve for Mayo. Taking advantage of three poor attempts from Roscommon, the home team narrowed the gap between the teams to two points with scores from Matthew Ruane and Donnacha McHugh.

Every score was hard earned though. By midway through the half, scores from Aidan O’Shea and Tommy Conroy had reduced the margin to the minimum but try as they did, they were never able to draw level or get ahead of their rival.

A brace of late wonder-strikes from the Murtagh brothers, Ciarán and Diarmuid, placed the outcome in Roscommon's hands and they deservedly held on in spite of a score from Cillian O’Connor, who notched a fine point late in the game.

Generally, much of what Mayo tried was rushed and came to nothing. Many of the refereeing decisions seemed to favour the visitors, although to blame the Cavan man, Noel Mooney, for the defeat would be stretching matters.

On the afternoon, Roscommon – with an excellent defensive plan based on a strategy of consistently frustrating Mayo – worked themselves to the bone. Whereas heroes abounded in the Primrose and Blue, the opposite applied with the Green and Red where, on the day, too many played below the standards they had set this year.

And yet the defeat, coupled to the resultant six-week competitive gap, is perhaps what Mayo best need. A brief break from training and the game will, I think, benefit the team and allow it step back and find time to re-discover its hunger for competing. Too often on Sunday the squad looked flat, indecisive and lacking in ideas.

The task of re-focusing all is well within Kevin Mc Stay’s management capacity. A fruitful campaign yet awaits.