At half-time, everybody outside of Dublin had what they wanted... hope

You don’t have to be an anti-Dub to have left Croke Park on Saturday evening feeling utterly deflated at what you had just witnessed. This was the showdown we were waiting for with Mayo providing the litmus test for Jim Gavin’s charges.

This was the team who had been the most competitive against Dublin in the past decade and they were the side coming off a run of games, battle-hardened, tested, confident.