Liam McHale: We have an advantage because we are fresh and hungry

Liam McHale didn’t leave Croke Park a winner on Sunday evening but he did head for home a relatively happy man.

Like his manager Kevin McStay, the Roscommon coach was of a mind that the All-Ireland quarter-final draw with Mayo was a result to embrace rather than rue and he offered a variety of reasons for his positive outlook ahead of the replay at HQ next Monday.

“Happy, happy with the draw. It could have gone either way. We weren’t six down, came back and got a draw against the run of play. I thought it was a great ad for football, Connacht football in particular. We made a lot of rookie mistakes at the end that I thought would hurt us. Fortunately for us it didn’t.”

His observation on the quality of the fare aside, he had a point.

Only captain Sean McDermott had previously played a championship game on Jones’ Road. This, he said, would bring on a youthful team no end, but for an older and more battle-weary Mayo team, it is just the latest in a long line of extended turf wars.

“It’s a tough draw for Mayo,” said McHale who played down any perceived difficulties he may have had in plotting his county’s downfall.

“They have had a long, long, hard haul the last six weeks and we feel that we have an advantage now going into the replay, simply because we are fresh and we are hungry. We are young and that Mayo team has had to put up with a lot this year, now. I am sure they are really disappointed that they didn’t beat us by a point or two and get the two or three weeks’ rest that they need going into a semi-final, so we are really delighted with the draw.”

There’s an element of agenda-setting whenever any player or coach speaks to the media, particularly so ahead of a replay, and McHale’s assertion that a draw with Mayo stood favourably against recent “spankings” certainly doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. This stalemate may have brought a run of three derby defeats — between FBD League and Allianz League — to an end, but the margins in those meetings were one point, eight points, and four points, with the largest of those deficits telling a revealing story. Eight points without reply before half-time in their NFL tie in Castlebar allowed Mayo to peel away for an easy victory five months ago, but the concession of seven of the last eight first-half scores two days ago resulted only in the Rossies digging deeper and making a game of it.

A first championship win in Croke Park since 1980 remains within their grasp, but only if they can repeat the bold and adventurous approach that delivered 2-2 inside the first 12 minutes in the drawn tie and not the approach that fed a 22-minute barren spell thereafter.

“We are trying to be aggressive,” said McHale. “We are trying to play the way we believe is the right way to play. We believe, even if we get beaten by teams like Mayo, it’s about a learning curve and in two or three years’ time we’ll have the power and the pace and the strength to maybe deal with the Mayos and the Dublins and the Kerrys of this world. We are trying to get better all the time and we feel we are not going to do that playing passively and playing defensively and trying to hold top teams to a low score. We are going out to try and win the games and we’ll do the same on Monday.”