THE UPPER HAND Dublin’s Michael Darragh MacAuley beats Mayo’s Tom Parsons in the air during Saturday night’s National League game at Croke Park. Pic: Sportsfile
Talking Tactics
Billy Joe Padden
WE won’t know how last Saturday’s defeat is going to affect the Mayo players mentally until later in the season. There could be irreparable damage done; we don’t know.
I think it’s going to be very difficult for the players to go into a game against Dublin later in the summer and actually have real belief that they can turn them over.
They’ve been knocked so many times against Dublin. The ultimate goal of this Mayo team is to win the All-Ireland. After Saturday night, are they thinking ‘Now we can’t win the All-Ireland ... we just can’t get through Dublin’? Is that what they’re thinking?
Whether or not we can beat Dublin, I think Stephen Rochford has to get the players in and say ‘OK, let’s just forget about them. If we’re going to see them, it’ll be much later in the summer. Let’s just get a game-plan that suits us to win another Connacht Championship and see where it goes from there.’
The only chance Mayo have of beating Dublin in the future involves playing a certain brand of football, probably with a couple of sweepers, counter-attacking out of the half-back line. You can see why Donegal and Tyrone set up the way they did against the Dubs.
For now, Mayo just need to park Dublin. Install a game-plan similar to what we did at the end of last year’s championship, and just try and work away at that for the rest of the league and the Connacht Championship, and then address the Dublin issue again if we’re lucky enough to be playing them again later in the year.
Saturday’s display in Croke Park was very disappointing. All the good work of recent weeks has been undone.
The Mayo players will be asking themselves why there didn’t seem to be any sort of performance. They never seemed to front up physically. Their energy levels didn’t seem to come anywhere close to Dublin’s. And that’s before you discuss everything else that went wrong tactically.
I expected – and probably encouraged – Mayo to play an open game.
Hindsight is 20/20 vision, but in retrospect, we went out with the wrong game-plan.
The one thing Saturday night proves is that against Dublin, you have to play a very deep blanket defence and take your opportunities when they arrive; try to constrain and limit Dublin rather than take them on.
I think last Saturday has proven once and for all that if you play open football against Dublin, they’ll cut you to shreds. So that is no longer an option. Besides, our forward play was so poor that we don’t seem capable of winning a shoot-out against them.
Though David Clarke and Paddy Durcan were okay, we didn’t seem to have any stand-out individual performances either, which is a worry.
Realistically, the game was probably over after we conceded that early goal. Because when you’re five points down, if you go to force the game, Dublin become even more effective, because you’re leaving yourself even more open to their attacking.
To get back in that game, Mayo probably needed to get everyone behind the ball and hope that they could chip away at the gap. But even in the second half, Dublin answered every score Mayo got with ease, and they were totally demoralised by that stage.
Reasons to be cheerful are few and far between. But at least we now have clarity on the approach we have to take. There’s no ifs, buts or maybes. If we’re to beat Dublin any time in the future, it’s going to come from a solid blanket defence and a couple of effective counter-attacks where we get the key scores at the right time.
Everyone now (me included) should know this is the only option we have.
Lack of cutting edge a real cause for concern
HE’S got plenty of praise in recent weeks, and rightly so, but I think David Clarke restarted much too quickly before Dublin’s goal; the Dubs had just created a goal chance, and we were at sixes and sevens. He left the ball hang, and they got in for the goal.
Clarke probably should have taken 20 or 30 seconds here, waited for things to organise and settle down, and booted it out the middle of the field.
But I think one of the biggest reasons we struggled on our own kick-out is that the conditioning of some of our players didn’t look as good as it normally would.
Lee Keegan, Tom Parsons and Diarmuid O’Connor are big targets for us to win kick-outs, but they didn’t get the ball. They never found space. They just didn’t seem to have the energy to go and make themselves available for that next ball.
When you’re playing man on man against Dublin, you have to spend so much time and energy tracking their runners, that you don’t really have the energy to go and make yourself available for the next kick-out.
Our forward play was non-existent. There’s no hiding behind that. Andy Moran ended up having to do much work: win the ball out near the sideline, when surrounded by two or three Dublin players, and Mayo just couldn’t get any support to him.
Their forward play would have been better served if they had four or five bodies across the half-back line, and when they won the ball, counter-attack with three or four people running off the shoulder. Lee Keegan, Patrick Durcan and Tom Parsons are all good at that. And then you try and get the forwards involved that way, when you’ve made a couple of ‘line breaks’.
Younger players like Stephen Coen, Paddy Durcan, Fergal Boland tried hard, and Brendan Harrison looked pretty sharp when he came in.
We badly need him back in to nail down a corner back position.
I don’t think Lee Keegan should have been playing football these last couple of weeks, and it wasn’t fair to put him in corner back in Croke Park. Ideally, you wouldn’t play Keith Higgins at full-back either. We need to get the likes of Harrison, Chris Barrett and Ger Cafferkey back, players who are comfortable in the full-back line. That might free up Paddy Durcan for the half-back line and give Keegan a rest.
And the sooner Aidan O’Shea gets back, the better – for him and for the squad.
Billy Joe Padden: It’s a big ask for Mayo to bounce back
