Quote from: Rossfan on September 03, 2011, 08:51:53 PMQuote from: Syferus on September 02, 2011, 11:58:42 PM
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I don't buy into any team 'needing', or it being all that more helpful, to enter the minefield of the qualifiers. Winning Connacht titles is still hugely important to us and I'd take beating Galway, Mayo, Sligo, whoever, and winning another Nestor Cup over maybe scoring a relatively meaningless victory over a Meath or Laois
We'd have been far better this year playing Laois/Meath or other "meaningless" teams than untested strolls past NY and bloody Laythrum.
At least if we got to Round 4 then we'd have been more up to speed than we were.
Now batin' Mayowestros ,Galway and Sligo .... that's a different story.
That's much more to do with the pace of matches by comparison than the level of competition; Mayo are routinely D1 and are All-Ireland semi-finalists, any meeting with Sligo is sure to be a highly charged affair and our recent record against Galway shows that beating them by any margin will be something notable. If we can put in good performances at the stop-start pace of the Connacht championship then there's little reason to think it'd be any harder to do the same on the week-by-week basis of the qualifiers.
Say we lose a Connacht semi-final to Mayo, and we draw a Cork or Kerry team that lost a Munster quarter-final and have already won a subsequent match - how would that help the team, assuming they don't pull something unbelievable out of the bag? The qualifiers are a second chance lottery for teams that lose; no team should be counting on losing. There's plenty of worthy tests in the province to help further the team, I'd only ever have any eyes for the qualifiers if we lose.