Mayo’s Andy Moran is closed down by London’s David McGreevy during last Sunday’s Connacht SFC quarter-final at Ruislip.?Pic: Sportsfile
Moran: ‘It’s back to basics’
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Edwin McGreal
MAYO players aren’t working hard enough and they must face up to their shortcomings in the coming weeks if they are to improve. That was the forthright view of the team’s vice-captain, Andy Moran, in the aftermath of Sunday’s close shave.
Speaking to The Mayo News shortly after Mayo came within a whisker of being the first team to lose to London in the championship for 34 years, the Ballaghaderreen forward admitted that big question marks now hang over the county squad again.
“Of course the question marks are going to be there, especially when you come down to London and you draw with them,” he began.
“It’s proper order that the question marks should be there and the question marks are there in our heads. We’ve to sort out these problems ourselves within our camp.
“I think, as players, myself and Alan [Dillon] need to pull lads together and we need to get this thing sorted. At the minute we’re not doing what we want to do and we’re not playing the way we want to play so we need to get it sorted.
“I don’t think we’re doing the work we should be doing,” he added. “At training it’s alright doing it but away from training you need to be looking after yourself.
“I think we need to be in the pitch shooting, like Maurice Sheridan, out at night yourself, taking your strikes. When you get a chance, be it from a free or from play, against better teams and you don’t take it, you’re in trouble.”
One of the issues being pondered on Sunday evening as the sun set on Ruislip was whether this was better or worse than last year’s defeats to Sligo and Longford?
In terms of the result, obviously better, but Moran conceded that the fact that London had only won one game in Division 4 of the National League (against Kilkenny), certainly helped Mayo get over the line.
“It looked like Longford all over again really,” he said. “Last year at this stage we got Sligo and they are a better team, a Division 2 team, than London who are a Division 4 team.
“They [Sligo] killed us off whereas this year we got a few cracks and breaks and it helped us. Fair play to Trevor Mortimer and Aidan O’Shea and Kevin McLoughlin, they really helped out when they came in and they’re the reason we’re still in the Connacht championship really.”
The straight-talking Moran also confessed that defeat on Sunday could have ended his inter-county career, and that of a few others, but argued that this performance didn’t make Mayo a bad side, merely an inconsistent one.
“You saw us in the league against some of the best teams, the Downs, Corks, Kerrys. . .
“I think we can compete with the best of them, we just need to start doing the basics right, get our skill-sets right, start winning hard ball and just pushing on, playing championship football.
“At the minute we’re too inconsistent. We can’t slip to levels like we slipped to today. We need to be clinical in front of goal, we need to be the best we can be every day we go on the field. Today we weren’t but we got away with it, thank God.
“Going out on the field myself I don’t worry about results, it’s performance and we didn’t perform. We didn’t perform against Monaghan, we performed against Antrim in a challenge and didn’t perform against Offaly. There’s definitely something wrong there and we need to get it right.
“I suppose when you’re going from a base level of today there’s only one way and it’s up. That’s the way we’ll be looking at it.”
