We’ll learn and come back brighter, vows Horan

There were no excuses. No conspiracy theories.

No curses. No pessimism.

No revelations of damaging half-time team talks.

James Horan just took a basic look at his side and accepted core elements of their game had let them down. Nothing else.

But unlike the past, he promised one thing — they would analyse the game and improve.

That simple thing, in itself, is a massive step forward for Mayo football.

After Mayo lost the 2004 All-Ireland final to Kerry, the video from the game was never shown to the players.

The next year they followed the same strategy in an All-Ireland quarter-final. Still no analysis of where it went wrong.

In 2006, they were again facing Kerry and again the video stayed hidden.

The players themselves didn’t want to watch it and a view was taken that a highlights reel of Colm Cooper sticking the ball in the Mayo net might damage their preparations.

But Horan, his backroom team and the players will spend hours watching balls bounce out of hands and soft scores come from it.

And they will strive to make it count next year.

“We’ll keep going. We’ll learn from that as we have done in every single experience we’ve had this year,” he vowed.

“It was the first thing we said when we came into the dressing room, what could we have improved on. We’ll learn from today and the guys will plug it in and come back as better people and better players for it.”

The concession of those early goals brought back memories of those 2004 and 2006 maulings.

As the dark clouds rolled in, they looked like a team on the verge of a wipeout. The fightback to within three points by half-time showed again why Mayo, under Horan, are a different animal but it was also the moment where the game was lost.

“If you give a team like Donegal a seven-point start, the game is going to be very difficult to come back into.

Having said that, we stuck at it and had chances. If we had taken them, it could have been closer.

As regards our play there were a lot of fundamentals that weren’t as strong as usual.

Our first touch inside let us down and the ball was hopping off us quite a bit and Donegal were sweeping up and coming out in waves.

Some of our decision-making today and some of our basic skills let us down. We could have defended better. For the first goal, Michael Murphy got a yard and struck a very good shot but it’s not like us. The second goal was a bit of a lottery, it struck the post and we had it again and dropped it. That was hard to take. That came after we had the ball in the corner-forward spot and dropped it there as well.”

Pressed on the issue of whether or not Maurice Deegan’s call to award a free out, when it appeared as though Cillian O’Connor had been fouled in the build up to that goal, did not get a reaction.

“It didn’t go our way, but I would have thought it was a free.

Maybe we should have been stronger there, they came down and got a goal so that was hard to take and rattled us for a while.

But the team showed and showed all year the character they have and kept plugging away to the final whistle.

We just couldn’t get there but we kept trying.”