Momentum key to Mayo strategy
Six days previous, Mayo had beaten Derry in Celtic Park by two points. Thirteen days prior to hosting Dublin, they had thrashed Monaghan by 13 points in Elverys McHale Park.
How could anyone explain the 27-point turnaround? Afterwards, a journalist put it to Pat Holmes that his players may have trained excessively in the build-up. That suggestion couldn’t be further from the truth. Mayo fumbled and foostered their way through 70 plus minutes of football because they had been doing relatively little in sessions.
“Well, we didn’t legislate for what happened that night,” recalls Holmes’ co-manager Noel Connelly. “We had got two points in Derry and had a six-day turnaround. We didn’t train particularly hard in the league, given that they boys had been on the road for four extremely tough years.
“Now, Dublin came to Castlebar that night wanting and needing two points and came with a huge intensity and we just weren’t up for it on the night and they blew us away.
“We are not going to dwell on that too much. We are looking at it from the point of view that we hadn’t really trained that hard and would hope to be in a much better place (for Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final).” Similar to the stance taken by Rory Gallagher in Donegal, Connelly and Holmes rationalised that Mayo needed a literal break from the old routine. Their late start in the Connacht championship may have also coloured their thinking. What was the point in raising themselves for a Division 1 campaign when any momentum would be lost in the gap between the competition and the semi-final against Galway?
“Mentally, players need to recover as much as from the physical side of it,” says Connelly. “They needed a little rest. We did train but not as hard as other counties did in the league and we feel they are probably benefiting from that now at this stage in the championship.” Making the last four of the Division 1 semi-finals was never really a target. “I suppose we got a bit of slack in the papers after the Dublin result and the Donegal result and maybe not winning the final round game. But we used it as a breeding ground for maybe bringing younger players in. We wanted to stay in Division 1 but we weren’t too disappointed when we didn’t make the semi-final. We wanted to be in full health coming into the championship and that is the way it has turned out.”
Giving a rest to such a self-motivated group as this Mayo panel was never going to win over the players but that wasn’t Connelly and Holmes’ plan. Reinvigoration was a goal.
“There is a bit of that in it,” Connelly acknowledges. “We looked at it and felt that even though they had four or five years, the age profile was still good. We had worked with most of them at U21 level and knew the calibre of guys that was there.
“We didn’t feel these guys were torn to shreds from the four years. We believed in them and we still believe in them. They are winners and want more success and if they want that, we can only be happy with that.” The new management appreciated the rich legacy they inherited from James Horan. “We weren’t going out to reinvent the wheel. We just thought if we could introduce a few new players to the squad that, if they were called upon, could do a job for us — the likes of Patrick Durcan who has come into defence this year.
“Tom Parsons is doing well and Mark Ronaldson did really well in the Connacht championship. So we knew the body of players that were there and we thought if we could add a few to help the squad, it would be great.”
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