Thumbs down for O’Malley

Thumbs down for O’Malley

DANIEL CAREY

FRINGE players are likely to feature in Mayo’s match against Tyrone on Sunday after Mayo qualified for the semi-finals of the Allianz National Football League with a game to spare. Manager John O’Mahony will consider giving ‘game time’ to some squad members who haven’t featured regularly during next Sunday’s match, after victory over Dublin ensured a place in the knockout stages. 
Mayo will be without goalkeeper Kenneth O’Malley for the trip to Omagh. The Ballinrobe man dislocated his thumb while tipping Bernard Brogan’s shot over the crossbar on Sunday, and has been ruled out for up to eight weeks. He will also miss Saturday’s Connacht U-21 final against Roscommon.
David Brady is also likely to be unavailable after pulling a thigh muscle in training on Saturday morning. Having just recovered from a calf muscle injury, the Ballina man was expected to feature agains;t Dublin but had to sit it out. Even more worrying, O’Mahony has described Ciaran McDonald as ‘50/50 at best’ to be fit to start against Galway on May 20. The Crossmolina man has been hampered by a back injury since last year’s All-Ireland final and has only recently returned to light training.
“We’re in a league semi-final, so we’ll be able to rest anyone who’s threatened with injury in the next week,” said O’Mahony, who admitted that securing qualification with a week to spare changes the nature of next Sunday’s game. “At the same time,” he added, “no matter what team or what group you have out there, the only way you can practise for intensive matches is playing intensively, and whether we need the points or we don’t, we’ll be doing that. It’s great to see Ronan McGarrity back in our dressing room here again, and all the injured lads. We’ll battle on.”
Like the rest of us who were there, O’Mahony struggled to make sense of a second half in which Dublin had a player sent off, missed a penalty and were held scoreless, while Mayo kicked no fewer than 11 wides at the other end.
“We didn’t actually play that well, but it was good to get the win anyway,” he told the assembled media. “It was all about keeping calm there in the last 15 or 20 minutes and trying to utilise the extra man as best we could. In the first half I felt we took a few wrong options; in the second half we weren’t as clinical as we’d like to be. But it was all about getting the points here, because it means we’re through to the semi-final with a game to go. We have an awful lot of work to do, but we’re glad just to get across the line.”
As with the Cork game eight days previously, O’Mahony was pleased that in a ‘tight finish’, Mayo ‘closed the deal’ despite ‘chinks in the armour’.
“It will bear no relation to [what might happen] if we meet the Dubs later on in the year,” he concluded, “but it’ll do for today anyway.”

FIXTURE
National Football League
DIVISION 1A
TYRONE V MAYO
SUNDAY, APRIL 8
HEALY PARK, OMAGH at 3.30PM
REFEREE: D FAHY (LONGFORD)