Mayo intermediate football final preview: Will lightning strike twice?

It was a game of Mayo football that defied analysis. This writer is no purveyor of poetry, so we’re not even going to go there.

All we can say is that it was sheer, utter pandemonium, the likes of which the intermediate championship hasn’t produced for a long time and won’t for a long time to come.

Seven goals, five from Moy Davitts in fifteen minutes, and a seven-point second half lead turned into a five-point defeat after 60-odd enthralling, orgasmic minutes of football and had the blood pumping, sweat pouring, skin and hair flying and jerseys ripping.

Crossmolina had it won. The gleeful finger wag and glowing smirk on Fionán Duffy’s face said as much after their chief marksmen put them 2-12 to 0-9 up three minutes into the second half on that hot, clammy day by the Deel River when next weekend’s finalists clashed in a group stage match.

Then, all they had achieved in 33 minutes was undone in a quarter-hour as the guests outgunned them 5-4 to 0-5 before the game ended in fracas that spoiled an otherwise manly, sporting and noble affair.

Those five goals took Moy Davitts to victory after they veered from being aloof to downright brilliant in that game. How, then, did they manage to unleash a water cannon of goals to quench the maroon and white inferno? By ‘sticking to the plan’ according to their selector, Ronan Gilmore.

“To be quite honest, the plan is quite simple: pass the ball to the players that should be on the ball, keep working and get up forward and score,” Gilmore told The Mayo News.

“We kind of work as a unit defending- and attacking-wise. We try not to have everyone behind the ball. We try to have our scoring threats upstairs with our forwards, that’s where they have to be up at the top end of the pitch. It worked for us in the second half.

“In the first half our lads were doing what they’ve always been asked to do. Crossmolina were just doing it better, simple as.

The comformatives see no repeat of that seven-goal thirty-point thriller in the Hastings on Sunday. There were certainly no contrarians in MacHale Park at the recent county final press night. “It’s going to be a tight affair,” said Gilmore.

Veteran defender Oisín Quinn - who’ll miss the final through injury - went one step further: “I don’t see it being as free flowing as our group game. I don’t think there’ll be as much space,” the 36-year-old told The Mayo News.

Even with it being in wide-open MacHale Park? “I suppose when you get to a final you probably steady the ship a bit and try and minimise the mistakes that you make, and I think the next day that the team that makes the least mistakes will probably get across the line and the least amount of turnovers.”

The Crossmolina contingent could hardly agree more when it comes to minimising mistakes: “Five goals obviously is something that you cannot concede at any level, let alone five goals at an adult level of football,” a frank Jordan Flynn told The Mayo News at the county final press night in Hastings Insurance MacHale Park.

“That was something that we had to look at. If we concede a goal the next day how are we going to ensure that we don’t concede one on the next play like we did?”

However, there was no banging of tables or kicking of water bottles after Crossmolina doffed their torn garments: “I would say the post-mortem of that game wasn’t what people think it was. It was more: ‘You go home now and look at yourself, see what you could have done better in that game and see what you could have done different.’ No shouting or roaring or nobody blamed. It was more of an individual thing,” Flynn revealed.

“Management would go home and have a look at themselves, yee go home and have a look at yourselves. We’ll all come back.” That they surely did, by taking Lahardane and Louisburgh’s scalps in the group, trundling past The Neale in the quarters and outlasting Ballinrobe in an epic semi-final.

Probably a good thing that the tables were left intact after the Moy Davitts game so?

“I think it was,” says Flynn. “Because it put a bit of trust in the players. Management said: ‘It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t our fault, it’s just something that happened, and let’s not make a big deal out of it. Let’s just try and rectify the problem and go again’.”

Flynn’s team captain, Mikie Loftus, said it’s no secret that Crossmolina were a bit open that day, particularly in the second half.

“I think we’ll try and be that bit more solid defensively the next day,” Loftus told The Mayo News.

“I don’t think it’s any secret to say we were a lot more solid against Louisburgh and The Neale. To win big championship games you have to be solid defensively, so I think that will be the big learning. We’ll still try and go out and play as much fast football as we can and move the ball quickly and hopefully the MacHale Park pitch will suit us.

“It will be a bit of a different game to what we saw in Crossmolina,” added the grandson of the former President of the GAA. “That was both teams going at it, and unfortunately we got caught and that’s the way it went.”

Nobody can predict anything when it comes to these two teams but rule absolutely nothing out.

READ: Moy Davitts blitz Crossmolina in seven-goal thriller