Reaction
Daniel Carey
THE ringtone from a mobile phone was one of the few upbeat aspects of John O’Mahony’s post-match press conference. The sound of ‘Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him’ also introduced an unexpected element into a question-and-answer that had gone largely along anticipated lines.
“We would be quite pleased with the league; we’d be desperately disappointed with today’s result and today’s performance,” said O’Mahony, asked whether the defeat in Croke Park was the result of psychological factors. “We’ll put our hands up, and the lads will put their hands up, for today’s performance. But they won’t put their hands up for the last 40 years or 50 years of performances here.”
Cork goalkeeper Patrick O’Shea admitted that Cork’s training session last Tuesday night was more intense than Sunday’s game.
O’Mahony said that Mayo agreed that it was up to them to set the tone, and they took ‘total responsibility’ for the lack of intensity. Asked why his team didn’t get out of the blocks, the Ballaghaderreen clubman replied: “That’s why we have five weeks between now and the championship ... that’s what we have to address.”
Insisting that Mayo ‘have to take the positives out of our league performances over the last seven or eight weeks’, the manager admitted that they ‘couldn’t take a huge amount’ out of Sunday’s defeat. “A number of players individually did well,” he noted, citing Donal Vaughan and Kevin McLoughlin. “But overall, you can hit me with all those statistics and there’s nothing I can say [based] on today’s [performance].”
Asked if he would worry that the good work of recent weeks will be wiped away by the memories of Sunday’s performance, O’Mahony said: “You’ll always worry, but I’d be confident that we will reach championship intensity, and that we will now look to defend our Connacht Championship. We have to do that. We’re going to have to do that the hard way. But there’ll be all kinds of worries, and we know that we’re going to be hit within and without with this, and it’s going to be linked – whether we like it or not – with every [Mayo] performance that has been here [Croke Park]. That’s the reality of it, that’s the nature of it, and that’s what’s adding to the burden. But so be it.”
The Kilmovee native is accustomed to accentuating the positive, though he introduced an element of obligation to that mindset in the wake of Sunday’s defeat.
“Football and winning things is about positivity, and it’s not comfortable to have to be positive, but you have to be,” he said. “We don’t have a choice. The public at large or supporters do have a choice; we don’t have a choice. … That is the challenge facing everybody in the management, everybody on the team and in the panel.”
As for the game itself, Mayo had ‘four of five chances’ in the first ten minutes but didn’t score, while Cork scored ‘each time’. The Rebels ‘were able to up it a gear at most stages when it was crucial’, said O’Mahony.
Mayo will resume training on Thursday night and will pick a championship panel ‘in the next couple of days’. “We’ve to go back under cover and go again,” he concluded.
Among the Cork camp, there seemed to be a mixture of pity and irritation at Mayo’s performance. “They just didn’t turn up,” said goalscorer Daniel Goulding. “I don’t think Mayo really came out in the second half, to be honest,” added goalkeeper O’Shea. And the poor display made Conor Counihan reluctant to read too much into his side’s performance.
“In fairness to Mayo, it wouldn’t have been their best performance by a long shot,” said the Cork manager. “We know only too well [what it’s like] to come here and fail to perform. That’s very disappointing. It does happen though.”
Don’t we know it.
