Mayo v Galway, 18/06/16, McHale Park

[UpMeeyo]

I think we mentioned this before the match, we're very weak on cover for the FB line.

Keane, Harrison, Higgins and Barrett are our only out and out full back line men. Vaughan, Hall and Coen can probably do a job there but after that, you're struggling

without caff back there, I'd be very weary of the 'higgins in attack' experiment. He is now desperately needed in that full back line.

[moysider]

I think we mentioned this before the match, we're very weak on cover for the FB line.

Keane, Harrison, Higgins and Barrett are our only out and out full back line men. Vaughan, Hall and Coen can probably do a job there but after that, you're struggling

Big time!!

[seafoid]

That loss really took the wind out of the Mayo lads. Nobody cares what happens in June if the team has the right attitude. If mayo were dumped out of the qualifiers it would be a sad end to a great Project.

[larryin89]

That loss really took the wind out of the Mayo lads. Nobody cares what happens in June if the team has the right attitude. If mayo were dumped out of the qualifiers it would be a sad end to a great Project.

It's a fickle aul world as supporters , sure in a few weeks time it could be Mayo heading to the quarters and Galway at home wondering what the hell they were thinking . Early days buck early days

[oliverkelly]

That loss really took the wind out of the Mayo lads. Nobody cares what happens in June if the team has the right attitude. If mayo were dumped out of the qualifiers it would be a sad end to a great Project.

Mayo will be back they are still best team in Connacht but the gap is closing, They were caught cold the other night but it might be best thing ever happen them. Let them regroup and bring down a few fella's egos and they will still be around come August and next year. Time for them to blood in a few their successful u21s and it makes for very competitive Connacht championship next few years.
Caff is a massive loss though I have my doubts about Keane and should he get injured I don't see any other cover. Even in league game against Roscommon Mayo were out of sight until Caff went off. Coen didn't look comfortably in full back line that day

[larryin89]

That loss really took the wind out of the Mayo lads. Nobody cares what happens in June if the team has the right attitude. If mayo were dumped out of the qualifiers it would be a sad end to a great Project.

Mayo will be back they are still best team in Connacht but the gap is closing, They were caught cold the other night but it might be best thing ever happen them. Let them regroup and bring down a few fella's egos and they will still be around come August and next year. Time for them to blood in a few their successful u21s and it makes for very competitive Connacht championship next few years.
Caff is a massive loss though I have my doubts about Keane and should he get injured I don't see any other cover. Even in league game against Roscommon Mayo were out of sight until Caff went off. Coen didn't look comfortably in full back line that day

Hopefully it's a chance to blood O donoghue . Cunnife would be an option too but he's in the states with a few more. (Don't blame them either )

[GalwayBayBoy]

Darragh O'Sé has his spake in the IT today.

Everything goes in cycles. Galway beating Mayo on Saturday night was obviously a shock but we probably shouldn't be too surprised that it happened. Mayo were never going to dominate Connacht forever. Believe it or not, the Dubs aren't going to win every Leinster title from now until the end of time either. Meath probably won't beat them on Sunday but it will happen eventually. These things come around and go around.

It isn't all that long since Meath, Galway and Kerry were the only three teams in the country who could win All-Irelands. In the early-to-middle part of my career, Meath and Galway were the big rivals for us. For six straight seasons between 1996 and 2001, we won two All-Irelands apiece and very often we had to go through each other to get them. After that, the northern teams took their place and Galway and Meath fell away.

There's no disgrace in that. Famines happen very easily. When I started playing for Kerry in 1993, we were way down in the depths of a famine. I came on board not long after Kerry had lost to Clare in the '92 Munster final. To Clare! That was only six years after the last All-Ireland of the golden years team. It can happen nearly without people noticing.

It's very simple, actually. The one downside of having a great team is that most counties cling on to them longer than they should. Players build up a bank of credit that they still get to use a fair while after they're good for it. And when you have players who are over the hill getting picked, you also have guys who are up-and-coming getting impatient at having to wait their turn.

Straight away, you have not one, not two but three problems. First, you have players in the team who aren't as effective as they were or as you need them to be. Second, you have young players who aren't developing at the rate you'd like them to because they aren't getting games. And third, you inevitably lose some of those younger guys because they get fed up waiting. So you're suffering in the present and sowing seeds for suffering in the future.

But what's a manager going to do? Ditch the guys who got him up the steps of the Hogan Stand? Go with a 20-year-old who might be a crucial player in three or four years ahead of a 33-year-old former All Star and take a world of flak from the media and the public if it doesn't work out? Brian Cody does it but there aren't a lot of Brian Codys out there.

Of course, some guys are irreplaceable. John McDermott retired at 31 and Meath never really recovered. Without him, Meath were a different animal. They weren't as good at bullying you. They had no enforcer so you got away with things against them that you wouldn't have chanced before.

Meath were always more than just bullies who could play a bit but when you took away that aspect of them, you took away a piece of their identity. When Sean Boylan left a couple of years later, that was another bit of it gone. What replaced it? Maybe a bit of apathy, maybe a bit of confusion, probably a bit of both. Counties can lose direction so easily in those circumstances.

Things that were unthinkable become acceptable. I was playing intercounty football for four years before we beat Cork in Munster and yet I remember a couple of those years running into fellas in the street after we got knocked and them saying, "It wasn't a bad year".

That's what it meant to be in the middle of a famine – expectations were lowered and there was a sense of stagnation about the whole thing. The worst of it was that people started taking moral victories and holding them up as something half-positive. Not to be proud of, exactly. Just not the end of the world.

I'd say there's been plenty of that in Galway and Meath over the past 15 years or so. Lots of talk of resetting and going back to the drawing board and starting again. But for anything to change, there needs to be a build up of anger that becomes impossible to ignore. And to be very honest about it, I never heard a lot of that coming out of either county through those years.

We played Galway in an All-Ireland quarter-final in 2008 and Meath in a semi-final the following year and our main focus going into those games was to not get caught. All our talk was about not being complacent, about taking them seriously and doing a professional job. That's how much they had diminished in our minds since that period around the turn of the millennium. It was a huge change in emphasis.

There were plenty of reasons why we kicked on and they fell back. Some of it was about age profile – we were coming into the start of a really good cycle whereas Galway were probably somewhere in the middle of one and Meath were nearing the end. When we got a hammering from Meath in 2001, the likes of Colm Cooper, Declan O'Sullivan, Paul Galvin, Marc Ó Sé, Aidan O'Mahony and Kieran Donaghy were all either still in school or not long out of it and none of them had played senior for Kerry.

Galway and Meath either just didn't have that sort of talent coming through or they didn't make use of what they did have. In Meath's case, it was probably the former. But for Galway, you'd have always wondered why they weren't getting more out of the under-21 teams they had.

Galway won four under-21 All-Irelands since 2002 – the same as Dublin. But Dublin have converted those titles into becoming the best team in the country. Galway haven't even won Connacht since 2008. You can talk about population and money and whatever you want – Galway have had the raw materials but just haven't got the best out of them.

Again, that can happen. All it takes is for enough people to accept it. Eventually, a couple of mediocre years go by and then a couple of genuinely bad ones and without anybody making a big fuss about it, a half a decade has slid by and nobody has done anything about it. By that stage, you're starting at the bottom again and you're overhauling structures and investing in coaching and all those things that you should have been doing when times were good.

For anything to change, there has to be anger. You could see it in Kevin Walsh when he was giving out during the league that his Galway players were being ridiculed for having no backbone. There's a man who didn't win his All-Irelands by accident. He wasn't going to let Mayo stroll to a sixth Connacht title in a row. Anger was a starting point.

Anyone who was around Kerry in the mid- to late-90s would recognise that. The local papers at the time were vicious enough but local radio was worse. People would ring in on a Monday night and absolutely decorate the players. It wasn't much fun at the time but it meant the thing reached a tipping point.

I remember getting phonecalls from people saying, "Are you listening to what they're saying on the radio?" And I wouldn't have been – deliberately. Like, what use was it going to be do me to hear any of it? There was no escaping it anyway in the heel of the hunt. The call would always come on a Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Friend: "Well, how are you holding up?"

Me: "I'm grand, why wouldn't I be?"

Friend: "Ah Jesus, you got absolutely pulverised on the radio. You're as well off not hearing it."

Me: "Well sure, what use is it telling me then?"

Friend: "Oh. Yeah. Sorry."

Me: "How bad was it?"

Friend: "Aw, they tore you asunder. Said you could catch, couldn't kick, couldn't run."

Me: "Well, I'm glad we had this little chat. I feel so much better. Feel free never to ring me again."

But at the back of it all, you'd have to say that it was that sort of environment and attitude in the county that ended the famine. The barren years became unacceptable. It meant that everyone really had to focus in on how this was all going to get turned around.

We don't know yet if this is the start of something for Galway. One win can't be expected to turn everything on its head. But we do know tradition counts for something. Once people in a county that has known success start sniffing more of it, the thing can grow quickly. If people in the county start rallying to the cause, then there could be a way back.

Tradition is like dry hay – it doesn't take much of a spark to set the whole place on fire.

[Maroon Manc]

https://dontfoul.wordpress.com/ Its clear to see from his charts that Galway were shooting from better positions than Mayo were hence why Galway returned more scores from less shots. Galway have clearly worked hard on restricting space in certain areas and it led to Mayo taking shots from more difficult angles than Galway did.

I realise its natural Mayo are attracting all the attention for their failings but Galway & KW haven't got the credit they deserve for winning the tactical battle. BJ Padden claims Galway were better last year which is nonsense, it was probably a better display then most gave Galway credit for last year but they've obviously very hard on their defensive structure and it should have received more praise. Mayo were poor but they weren't allowed to play well by an opposition who were more drilled then they were last year and whom showed more discipline in the tackle then Galway did last year when they conceded 8 points from frees to this years 6 points; It still needs more work but its going in the right direction.

[GalwayBayBoy]

I realise its natural Mayo are attracting all the attention for their failings but Galway & KW haven't got the credit they deserve for winning the tactical battle. BJ Padden claims Galway were better last year which is nonsense

Heard that on Newstalk last night alright and thought he was off his rocker. Galway were competitive last year and it was a tough physical game but only for Hanley dragging down AOS numerous times in dangerous positions we could have conceded a scatter of goals. There was chaos almost every time Mayo kicked the ball in there. Mayo didn't have a single goal opportunity on Saturday unless I'm forgetting one. Now you could argue that Mayo didn't play as well this year but no way Galway played better last year in Pearse Stadium than they did last Saturday. I think we only very briefly held the lead last year immediately after Sice's goal.

[From the Bunker]

Dara likes Galway, in the same way as he (sorta) likes Mayo! Galway play nice non threatening football. Mayo used to play the same way (and still do to a point). Dara has no bad memories of either teams and would like to see either win an AI especially if they played them ruffians from the North. Them Northern Counties played threatening football. And Dara has bad memories of the northern counties.

Galway offer Kerry classic games to win. Games that the media can ogle at. Mayo just offered easy landslides. Kerry got more credit for their Galway wins because of the football played and Kerry always won. All was well in paradise. Playing Mayo held no weight. Even though Galway always lost to Kerry, the performance was always remembered and the result and scoreline were ignored. Galway were a nice team to beat. Mayo were an easy team to beat.

(BTW Cork at AI stage offered the same weight as Mayo!)

Count the the recent AI's finals won by Kerry against teams other than Galway, Mayo and Cork.

Northern teams offered neither, only defeat. The Kerry media created labels such as 'Puke' and 'Blanket' to discredit such achievements. Streetwise and sc**bag are the new clever labels for recent threats to their Monopoly.

[AZOffaly]

On O'Shea, I see he's back in the papers today, talking about the match. I think this is a time for going to ground, regrouping, spending time with teammates and management, and focusing the minds on the job ahead, not standing in the glare of the camera and getting into a discussion with the media about what went wrong. That's a discussion for their own dressing room. Why isn't management insisting on this?

Kelloggs paid him a few quid to promote something, so he's well entitled to take them up on it. Not going to make even the smallest iota of a difference to how Mayo play the next day.
Some people will begrudge him his few quid or somehow make out that it impacted his performance, but that's their lookout.

The American Football ruined him!!!

[Dire Ear]

Good summary,  From The Bunker !!

[Maroon Manc]

I realise its natural Mayo are attracting all the attention for their failings but Galway & KW haven't got the credit they deserve for winning the tactical battle. BJ Padden claims Galway were better last year which is nonsense

Heard that on Newstalk last night alright and thought he was off his rocker. Galway were competitive last year and it was a tough physical game but only for Hanley dragging down AOS numerous times in dangerous positions we could have conceded a scatter of goals. There was chaos almost every time Mayo kicked the ball in there. Mayo didn't have a single goal opportunity on Saturday unless I'm forgetting one. Now you could argue that Mayo didn't play as well this year but no way Galway played better last year in Pearse Stadium than they did last Saturday. I think we only very briefly held the lead last year immediately after Sice's goal.

Agreed, matching Mayo physically as we did last year was a start but this year KW has added an extra dimension to the defence; As for Power he did very well but he will certainly have sterner tests to follow when we meet a team who are more positive on Galway's kickout then Mayo. Kickouts were a huge issue last year with Mayo getting so many scores from applying pressure to Galway's own kickout, Power certainly is able to control the ball a lot better then Breathnach has done in the past.

[blast05]

That loss really took the wind out of the Mayo lads. Nobody cares what happens in June if the team has the right attitude. If mayo were dumped out of the qualifiers it would be a sad end to a great Project.

The loss didn't ..... but news on the extent of Ger Cafferkys injury certainly has. We can get to Croke Park but the ultimate is no longer possible in my view

[Maroon Manc]

Mayo need a bit of luck with the draw, if they can avoid Cork or the losers of Donegal/Monaghan in round 3 and then draw whoever Dublin beats in Leinster in round 4 although dependent on what happens in Ulster they might end been forced to play the losers of Ulster as teams can't meet again. Then there's the issue of the 7 day turnaround to the quarter final so its hard to make a case for any of the qualifiers making the semi's if they had a tough game in round 4.