Patrick Durcan: Fresh enough to hurt, young enough to recover

Life at the sprawling CityWest Hotel goes on. The last trickle of cars bedecked in green and red is pouring towards the exit and a smattering of Manchester United shirts is settling down in front of the box for the early televised Premiership game.

The world is moving on. The question is: can Mayo move with it? Patrick Durcan takes a seat in the breakfast room as he addresses the future.

“Even this year, there was nothing between us again,” he said. “You couldn’t say we didn’t come back from any of the other finals. It’s small margins again. You need to get those things to go for you. Over the 140 minutes, there was very little to say that we wouldn’t be able to compete with anyone else in Ireland.