Workrate the key, says Dillon

Alan Dillon believes Mayo are a match for any team in the country —providing they keep their work-rate high.

Last year’s captain is mindful not to get too carried away with Sunday’s Division 1 semi-final victory over Kerry. However, he took great encouragement for the manner in which his team fought back twice to win the game.

“Lads have started to understand what it takes to reach the level that the likes of the Tyrones, Corks, Kerrys and Dublins [are playing at] and I suppose we have to keep emphasising that if the work-rate isn’t there, we don’t have a chance.

“If we can match them for work-rate I think we’ve equally good footballers in Mayo.”

Less than a month after they were fearing the worst following defeats to Donegal and Cork, Mayo supporters are believing again. But Dillon knows how few from the county felt they had a chance of beating Kerry.

“The feeling was not many would travel up from Mayo. Expectation was very, very, very low. We know ourselves how we’ve been performing the last couple of weeks and gradually we’ve an upward curve.

“Hopefully we can improve again in two weeks’ time against Cork. It’s going to be very difficult. Coming after a performance like that, it’s difficult to raise it again in order to win it.

“But we’ve lost our last two league title visits to Croke Park so we’ll be looking to bring home the league title.”

The Ballintubber man couldn’t believe his luck when Kieran Donaghy miss-kicked the ball his direction in the lead-up to Pat Harte’s penalty goal.

“He screwed it with the outside of the boot and I couldn’t believe it myself. I just bore down on goal and luckily enough I was brought down.”

Mayo’s other goalscorer Colm Boyle put his own score down to luck more than anything else. The wing-back’s strike past Brendan Kealy levelled things up in the second period of extra-time before Richie Feeney kicked the winning point.

“I suppose it was one of those that was hit-and-hope but thank God it went in.”

With two wins and a draw in their last three games, Boyle puts the recent good form down to the full panel finally being able to train together fully.

“A couple of weeks there, we hadn’t everyone around between U21s, boys in Dublin and we had small crowds at training for a few weeks and maybe that would affect us then at the weekends.

“Since we’ve got everyone together the last couple of weeks we’ve worked hard, we got a good performance in against Dublin, another good performance in last week [v Kerry] and we built on it.”