Castlebar Mitchels 'didn't want to be another Mayo stat'
Mayo teams have a notoriously poor record in Croke Park finals and Castlebar, much to everyone’s surprise having entered as considerable favourites, made sure that status quo was preserved.
Another statistic jumped out from the occasion; back in 2014 when Castlebar lost the final to St Vincent’s, they actually led by a point after 43 minutes before succumbing to the majesty of Diarmuid Connolly.
Yesterday, with 43 minutes on the clock, Ballyboden had just completed a mini scoring spree of four points in a row to leave a dozen between the teams.
Joint manager O’Reilly shrugged when asked how he felt about it all, admitting he was simply sorry for the players who had to experience such pain again.
“It’s hugely disappointing,” said O’Reilly. “We came here and we didn’t want to be another Mayo stat, we really didn’t. We didn’t talk that much about that side of things but we knew we had a job to do to take on Ballyboden St Enda’s.
“No doubt about it, we were comprehensively beaten by a much better team. We targeted a good start but they got a much better start. I think that rattled us a bit and I think we lost our composure. We had something like 12 shots in the first half and nine of those were wides.
“We just struggled to recover from that start and the second goal was a killer. I suppose we looked flat and it’ll take a couple of days’ reflection to see why that was. We talked and analysed our preparations, it seemed to be going well. Everyone seemed to be in good nick and in good order and the day itself worked well right up to and including the warm-up and start.
“The last four weeks have been great, we were injury-free and everybody was really champing at the bit. Our challenge games were good, our training sessions were good, but Ballyboden were just a different animal than us. They turned up, we didn’t.”
Ballyboden made three late changes to their team from the published line-out. They set themselves up differently as a result, altering every line of their team.
O’Reilly admitted Castlebar were caught out. “That didn’t help things. In saying that, essentially it was the scores that they got more than anything else. I think after those early ones we just got rattled a bit. We knew about one of their changes and there were two changes that weren’t announced which took us a few minutes to get to grips with. There was a bit of damage done at that stage. I felt we just lost our way a bit at that stage.”
Asked about his fear of being “another Mayo stat”, O’Reilly said he didn’t know if the players were concerned by this beforehand. “It’s hard to know. Certainly, I can guarantee you that it’s something that was never talked about. It wasn’t an issue. We focused solely on ourselves and Ballyboden. We analysed them as best we could, we got our preparation as good as it was going to be and it just didn’t happen for us.”
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