Gilroy fury as ‘lazy’ Dubs almost caught on the hop

WHERE to start?

There will be bigger games played at Croke Park this year. There will certainly be games where defending is not treated as an optional extra. But none will surpass this for sheer entertainment.

Seven goals and 28 points tell only half the story. At one stage in the first-half, Pat Gilroy’s side were 14 points to the good and yet it took Mayo just 23 minutes to reel their hosts back to level terms.

As happens so often, the team playing catch-up hit a wall at that point and it allowed Dublin to claim seven of the last nine points, make it five wins from five and stay on course for a league final.

It was all great fun, if hardly the type of afternoon to help a manager sleep at night and Mayo’s James Horan summed it up perfectly for both himself and Pat Gilroy by labelling the day as something of a mixed bag.

“You would have to be very happy with the scoring,” said the Dublin boss who had to make do without scorer-in-chief Bernard Brogan whose flight back from the USA after his meeting with President Obama was delayed by 12 hours.

“The clinical finishing was exceptional at times but the other stuff was awful and it was through sheer lack of effort. We just let them come on to us when we went that far ahead.

“That’s what happens. You get your answer from inter-county teams. When you get your chance to keep them down you should keep them down and we’re lucky to have won now after being 14 points up.”

Gilroy went on to admonish his players for the “pure laziness” which allowed Mayo back into the tie and Horan was equally perturbed by his side’s risible attempts at defending.

“We just didn’t work hard enough in the first-half and Pat Gilroy said pretty much the same thing: if you don’t track runners or push up on guys top-class teams will just run through you. That’s what Dublin did for a while until we got to grips with it.

“It would have been very easy to put the head down, shut up shop and just wait for the whistle to go but we didn’t do that and the guys out there showed huge courage and kept at it no matter what.”

In fairness, Mayo had previous in that regard. The last time these sides met at HQ was in an All-Ireland semi-final five years ago when the Connacht side turned around a second-half seven-point deficit to win by one.

That was the same day Mayo invaded Dublin’s Hill 16 patch for the warm-up and Paul Caffrey ‘bumped’ John Morrisson in the back but time has moved on and there were no such heated incidents this time.

Far from it in that opening quarter. The pace of the early exchanges resembled that of a challenge match and any hope of a more competitive edge seemed to disappear as Dublin tore through the Mayo rearguard.

Their first goal came courtesy of Tomás Quinn after just seven minutes but a Diarmuid Connolly hat-trick inside six minutes midway through the half threatened to turn the occasion into a non-event for the 19,960 watching.

Paul Flynn and Alan Brogan had their fingerprints over most of them but the pick of the bunch was the last with Quinn flicking a long ball on to the overlapping Darren Daly whose diagonal ball was punched home by Connolly.

“We probably caught them on the hop a little bit,” said Quinn.

“That’s our third game in Croke Park now and it does take a bit of getting used to. By the time they got to the pitch of it we had already scored a couple of goals.”

Connolly’s third left it 4-4 to 0-2 with almost 50 minutes still to go and all this against a Mayo rearguard that was supposed to have been reinforced by the presence of Peadar Gardiner as a sweeper.

And then, everything changed. Dublin pulled up to admire their handiwork and Mayo, still haunted by the spectre of relegation, took that as their cue to claw their way back from the precipice of embarrassment.

Between then and half-time they outscored Dublin by 1-6 to 0-3. Jason Doherty claimed the goal, added another — his fifth of the campaign — after the restart and then Alan Freeman got in on the same act.

Suddenly, the unthinkable was about to happen and it did when Andy Moran’s second point brought Mayo level. Between Connolly’s last goal and then they had claimed 3-8 to Dublin’s measly three points.

The uncharacteristic sight of the normally stoic Gilroy shouting and gesticulating at his players from the sideline said it all. Dublin may have won but their training sessions will surely come with added pain this week.

Scorers for Dublin: D Connolly 3-3, T Quinn 1-7 (0-7f), K McManamon 0-2, MD MacAuley, A Brogan, D Nelson 0-1 each.

Scorers for Mayo: J Doherty 2-0, A Freeman 1-3, A Campbell 0-3 (2f), A Dillon (2f), A Moran, R Feeney 0-2 each, P Gardiner 0-1.

Subs for Dublin: P McMahon for Daly (35), B Cullen for MacAuley (43), K Nolan for Casey (48), P Andrews for Flynn (60), P Burke for A Brogan (69).

Subs for Mayo: J Kilcullen for Parsons (43), A Kilcoyne for Campbell (54), C Hallinan for Cafferkey (57).

Referee: Maurice Deegan (Laois).