Connacht SFC Q/Final London v Mayo 29.5.11 in Ruislip

[ross4life]

what was the london team?

London: E Byrne; B Comer, M Maloney, D McGreevy; S Doolan, T Gaughan, J Scanlon; D Hagen, S McVeigh; C McCallon, P Geraghty, M Gottsche; K O'Leary, P McGoldrick, E O'Neill. Subs: S Kelly, K Phair, J Collins, C O'Sullivan, N Tuohy, C Connelly, L Gavigan,

[joemamas]

I have observed for the last six months and have not bothered to comment on Mayo during the league, It is a glorified training schedule for the championship. That said thank you to all for the updates and opinions during that period and shame on me for being so lazy.

I do not want to turn this into an obituary for 2001 but will make the following observations.

Like a lot of people on this board, I wanted James Horan to be manager of Mayo, he was a great player in his day, but to be honest, a fair bit that support was due to the fact that I did not want some of the other candidates to be manager for different reasons. I read about and watched a few Ballintubber games and gave him the benefit of the doubt on his tactics, by his own admission, you can only work with what you have and you play accordingly. I think Ballintubber played with four forwards for most of last year.

We are now nine months into his reign and it appears that we are no further along than we were last June, when Longford beat us. In fact looking at today line up and subs used we may very well have taken a step backwards.

1) Today, we had a midfield paring starting their first championship game, granted some of this due to injury, some of it manager selection.
2) We had a corner back who has not played county football for three or four years.
3) We had a player listed to line out at corner forward, who played most of his career at corner back/half back and who in my mind is not county senior material. so in essence we started with five forwards.
4) We had to bring on subs today that are on their last legs from an intercounty career standpoint. JOM was rightly criticised for doing the same in his first year.

I did not have high expectations fro Mayo in 2011 or 2012 for that matter, but as long as I saw some progress, then I could live with the results or the lack thereof. Most realistic fans probably felt the same deep down. What has transpired is that we are admitting from day one that we do not have the confidence in our backs and midfield and not only do we do not possess six forwards in Mayo that are capable of playing intercounty senior football,but do not have a natural scoring forward as a sub on the panel.

This is not meant to be a stinging criticism of James Horan and company, but what have they being doing for the past nine months. Please go back to basics,You still have the guts of three years to get backs you can trust to win 50/50 balls, get a midfield who can get a decent share of possession and please try to develop natural forwards who can score. Use the Kerry/Cork/Meath model and put players in positions where they are capable and comfortable playing Gaelic Football.

[moysider]

Best wait and see what the lads who travelled over think. It s daft drawing conclusions from listening to that crap on the radio.

We knew we would not be great in this one and it looks like we got bogged down against a team that was throwing the kitchen sink at us. And yes, a lot of people had issues with the selection for this one and for good reason as it turned out. I don t think this will have any relevance as to how we will do rest of the summer. In fact having survived it is a good result for us. Beating London easily would only have papereed over cracks. Now is a chance to do real work, starting with sorting out the messing with frees. I expect us to be much better in midfield the next day and we should be able to control the game better. Higgins will be back and the much maligned Cafferkey will improve us as well. The contribution of Trevor and Kevin McLoughlin today would suggest that they will feature from the start and we ll be the better of it too. Galway will also be playing a game we know in a proper championship environment. London was goin to ambush somebody sometime in what is a strange fixture. They nearly did us today but we got away with it. We might yet be the better of that today.

[joemamas]

Moysider, hope you are right, but everybody said the same after last years Galway V New York game and look what happened in the month or two after.

[Zulu]

I don't think you can just dismiss this result as a bad day at the office. If Tervor Mort starts against Galway ye may as well throw yer hats at it. He isn't good enough and has proven this repeatedly, why not see what others can do? Did AOS get a run today?

I posted what I thought of Mayo clubs on the strategic plan thread and this performance only highlights that Mayo's problems are deeper than the capabilities of any manager. This result suggests Mayo are not a top ten team and I'd be concerned as this isn't a once off but follows on from a number of poor performances.

[ross4life]

Jaysus the Mid-West coverage was so bad it made our Willie Hegarty sound like Michael O'Hehir! a small warning to the Mayo folks, we had a similar performance v London in 2005 & never recovered.

[spectator]

Jesus Mary and Holy St Joseph ... fair play to our Andy for pulling the Mayoites through!

Couple of match reports here;

http://www.advertiser.ie/mayo/article/40289/london-push-mayo-to-the-limit

http://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/championship/2011/0529/mayo_london.html

[seafoid]

Jaysus the Mid-West coverage was so bad it made our Willie Hegarty sound like Michael O'Hehir! a small warning to the Mayo folks, we had a similar performance v London in 2005 & never recovered.

didn't you win the minor all-Ireland the year after? 

[seafoid]

I was reading an interview with the manager of the Swiss soccer team today, Ottmar Hitzfeld - he used to manage Bayern. He was very good. Switzerland are in the same sort of place as Mayo at the moment. Their best players are past it and they need a period to rebuild but the supporters have these expectations that aren't being met and then they get very negative. Alex Frei was the top striker and when his performances fell behind he even got death threats.  So it's not that bad in Mayo yet

[ross4life]

Jaysus the Mid-West coverage was so bad it made our Willie Hegarty sound like Michael O'Hehir! a small warning to the Mayo folks, we had a similar performance v London in 2005 & never recovered.

didn't you win the minor all-Ireland the year after?

Clearly i was talking about the senior set up, only now where starting to find our feet.

[moysider]

I don't think you can just dismiss this result as a bad day at the office. If Tervor Mort starts against Galway ye may as well throw yer hats at it. He isn't good enough and has proven this repeatedly, why not see what others can do? Did AOS get a run today?

I posted what I thought of Mayo clubs on the strategic plan thread and this performance only highlights that Mayo's problems are deeper than the capabilities of any manager. This result suggests Mayo are not a top ten team and I'd be concerned as this isn't a once off but follows on from a number of poor performances.

I think Mayo will have to put this game behind them and move on. At least it will be another 6 years before we play there again. I suspect whoever goes over next year wont be looking forward to it. I find myself surprisingly calm about it all. We dodged a large calibre bullet today but I don t think it changes anything going forward much. A few lads might have lost their places and the deployment of the sweeper may need finetuning. But better these things showed up today and we got away with it. If we don t improve then we re no good and that s that.
Anyway our prospects for this Summer were never good anyway - hence my lack of angst. We re starting from a very low base after what has happened last 4 years. I had Galway as likely winners in Castlebar since the begining of the year (our easy win over them in the league didn t change anything). Now I still think if we can win v Galway we might develop if we get a run going. Lose to Galway and we re likely to exit the qualifiers quickly. I think Trevor can be good for us in the half back line. His proper place and crazily only ever deployed there briefly a couple of years ago. But to have any chance against anybody we will need a fit McGarrity back with AOS in midfield and a fit again SOS is needed too.

[Chisel]

Any chance of getting Billy Joe back? Was well up for it last night. He is finally playing in a settled position and I think James Horan needs to start doing this sooner rather than later with the Mayo lads and stop switching and changing

[mannix]

Well I ended up buying the new jedwards album, thank you mayo.  Obviously they just thought it was a matter of turning up and London decided they would give it all up today and not think about the league. Hard luck London, this is one you really should have won. Baffled how a team as bad as London were in the league were able to play so well against a supposedly good division one team.

At least I have  the Waterford hurlers to fall back on.

[muppet]

This will be a very close game in my opinion. Mayo much like Sligo will have big heads going into the game. Both sets of players have inflated opinions of their talents. While its very competitive, teams in Connacht are very poor and all teams are on a similar level. With that in mind I think London will win this by one.

Mayo should be more than capable of skating by London using the second 15,provided of course that they do not think they just need to turn up and even then they should be far too strong. Mayo by 10 points or I"ll buy jedwards new album.

All of the panel should be made to buy it.
Anyone was taken off or forwards who didn't score should be made to learn it.

[stephenite]

I suppose we got out with a win and by the sounds of things we should be very thankful that, however any repeat of that sort of shite will surely see the pressure turned up on Horan.