HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU Mayo manager Stephen Rochford shakes hands with Dublin manager Jim Gavin after last Saturday night’s game at Croke Park. Pic: Sportsfile
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Rob Murphy
THE Croke Park media room underneath the Hogan Stand resembles a mini lecture hall, tiered seating for about 40 people facing down at a huge space where there’s one large table full of microphones.
Stephen Rochford arrived into the room some thirty minutes after the full-time whistle on Saturday evening. Jim Gavin had done his duty and all the print media crew sat waiting.
The words and phrases used throughout the four and a half minute debrief painted a broad picture as opposed to a clear-cut message. The word ‘disappointed’ cropped up over and over again, as did Rochford’s feeling that his side ‘underperformed’ and made “wrong decisions”. Dublin, he said, ‘pushed us off the ball’ and ‘worked harder’.
But peak frustration for the Mayo manager it seemed centered around his impression that Dublin were on top in terms of graft and toil. He was extremely disappointed with the failure to win ‘most of the 50/50 ball’ and the sight of men running by his players and ‘running directly at goal’ once they had turned Mayo defenders.
“We just didn’t have the answers,” he surmised.
Overall, considering how the game had unfolded, Rochford was calm and measured in his responses, having initially looked dejected and detached when he sat down in his seat, head down working on setting his stopwatch while the assembled press got their voice recorders in place in front of him.
“When you concede 1-2 in the opening eight minutes against a team like Dublin you’re going to put yourself on the back foot,” he began. “We really underperformed and that’s the disappointing part. We put ourselves in good positions in the first half but made wrong decisions and did not test Stephen Cluxton in a way that we would have liked to.”
That led into a little more of the detail outlined already, the lost one-on-one battles and the sense that all of it was a reflection of how hard Dublin were working in the game.
But he quickly aligned it all with a bigger picture.
“We shipped two points in the league as a competition, we wouldn’t be happy with the margin, we created goal chances ourselves that could have kept the deficit a little bit tighter, but I think Dublin’s ruthlessness was evident there.”
Perhaps the key question came in relation to that stat that is becoming a real story now — eleven games in a row for Mayo against Dublin now without a win and the possibility of it becoming a mental hurdle.
Rochford simply dismissed that idea and immediately talked about a wider focus.
“We’re a better team than what we showed here tonight. A week is a long time in football, we didn’t feel we were as good as we made ourselves look last week, we’re certainly not as bad as we have made ourselves look this week. We know we will improve over the next number of weeks, whether we play Dublin or not later in the summer, we know that is something we’ll address when we get to that point.”
The last word was on injuries and a general summation that he expects to have an update next weekend and a number of players back for the Cavan game. As he left, we were told that no Mayo players would be speaking to the media so that was that.
We’re six months and three weeks away from All Ireland-Final Sunday where the bookmakers will give you very short odds on Dublin being in attendance, as ever.
Mayo’s future seems a lot more uncertain just now.
Stephen Rochford plays it straight in Croke Park
