It could have been much tighter - McHale

SCORING 1-15 would beat many teams, but not a team that has Emma Duggan.

Reflecting on a ‘disappointing’ end to his first game as the Mayo senior ladies manager, Liam McHale maintained that none of the flaws in his team's performance were insurmountable.

“It’s a very young team and they'll be very very dissappointed. We said to them there, good effort, nobody dropped their heads, nobody let go on their own. We were beaten by a better side,” McHale told The Mayo News.

“They really took advantage of our mistakes, they really put our midfield under pressure with our kickouts and they really punished our turnovers. When you play at this level and you make those unforced errors, that’s what’s going to happen.”

One can only image how this might have played out if the game had taken place outdoors (in normal weather conditions of course).

While you can only take so much away from a game in an environment with a carpet-like surface and no wind, McHale believed the conditions suited the two-time All-Ireland senior champions ‘a little bit better’.

“We scored 1-15, which is a big score. We kicked about I’d say seven or eight wides where Meath kicked two or three, so they were very efficient in front of goal.”

It didn’t take long for ‘one of the best players in the country’ to come up in converstaion.

“Emma Duggan was running the show, she’s a class player, one of the best players in the country. Once they got that goal and got ahead of us we were struggling to compete,” said McHale.

A legend in both Gaelic football and basketball circles, McHale’s on-court brain was etched all over his post-match reaction, right down to his use of the words ‘practice’ and focus off-the-ball play and turnovers.

“We, especially in the first half, we turned the ball over a little bit too much but we tried to do the right thing and turn the ball and then we were a little bit soft in the pass defensively in around the D. We have to sort those things out, but I don’t think it’s going to be too hard to fix them,” he said.

“We need to be a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more positive and a little bit more assured in ourselves when we haven't got the ball. We'll work hard on that during the week.”

What else will the new boss be looking to work on?

“Tackling. We’ve done a fair bit of work on that but obviously we need to do more,” he replied.

“Our decision making with the ball in the middle of the field, I thought it was better in the second half but I thought we tried to do the right thing, we tried to get into the full-forward line early with the kickpass but we just forced it and we were giving it in a little bit too early.

“Little things went against us there today. It could have been a much tighter game,” McHale added.

“We gave away too many bad balls, we had numbers back when we should have got tackles in. Little things like that would have made it a much different game for sure.”