Search Results for 'Barry Moran'

Mervue United have began their preparations for life in the Eircom League first division with the first of four pre-season friendlies.

It will take exactly three hours to cover the 122 miles it is between Castlebar and Letterkenny according to the AA on its website. So to make the 2.30pm throw in in comfortable time Mayo supporters will be leaving home from the county town not long after 10.30am on a Saturday. While Saturday evening games have become the norm for the National League, this weekend Mayo have the unusual fixture of a Saturday afternoon game against Donegal. The change in the fixture is something that the Mayo manager, while not overly happy with, will have to deal with. “It’s a strange one all right, when we heard that the game was not going to be played under lights we assumed it would be switched to a Sunday. But as far as I know it’s to do with TV rights that the game has to be on Saturday. It’s far from an ideal time for supporters to make a trip to Donegal and we need all the supporters we can at the games, and the people of Mayo want to come out and support us. We also believed that the game would then be played in Ballyshannon, but it was moved further away to Letterkenny, and this was all only decided last week, which was very late.”

Mayo and Westmeath come face to face this Sunday in Fr O’Hara Park Charlestown in a game from which both sides badly need to get something.

Mayo and Westmeath come face to face this Sunday in Fr O’Hara Park Charlestown in a game that both sides badly need to get something out of.

It was Sigerson Cup last weekend so senior inter-county football teams had an opportunity to regroup and conduct a ‘where are we now’ review of their opening two games of the National Football League. In Mayo’s case the review might have involved the use of a ‘head doctor’ in order to establish how the team can mix the brilliance of the extraordinary second half comeback against Donegal, with the ordinariness of their performance in the first half.

Spoils shared on the final day

After the pre-season warm up session on the far side of the Atlantic it’s back to more traditional fare, albeit on a Saturday evening for Mayo. And with McHale Park getting the go ahead, it’s all systems go for the welcoming of Roscommon to Castlebar for the first time in five years, and four years after the sides last met in the Connacht Championship.

I am confused as to the real potential of this Mayo team. I can’t honestly say how good this team is, as I doubt they have ever played an easier inter-county match in their lives, nor will they play an easier one ever again. I suggested here in this paper last week that I fully expected Roscommon to put it up to Mayo for 40 minutes or so but that ultimately Mayo’s greater fitness, ability, and general know how, would surface and they would pull away from Roscommon in the last 30 minutes possibly winning by 5/6 points. As you now know we won by 20! I had alluded to Roscommon’s morale-boosting victory over Leitrim a few weeks earlier that would have seen them arrive in Castlebar full of hope and brimming with confidence. I met a few of their supporters before the match in the Sportlann who had the audacity to suggest that they were in fact well capable of beating this particular Mayo team, and for me not to be one bit surprised if they pulled off a famous victory. Oh how wrong they were. This was arguably the worst performance from a senior Roscommon team in a championship encounter that I or many others have ever witnessed. Fergal O’Donnell, the messiah who had guided the county to their historic minor All Ireland victory in 2006, was in charge and their supporters were giddy with excitement and expectancy. Eleven of that minor squad were involved in one way or another last Saturday and they appeared to be relaxed and in confident mood as I watched them go through their paces in the warm up on the back pitch a half hour before the game.

Mayo 2-12

I paid a visit to Anthony Finnerty’s hostelry in lower Salthill before the game last Sunday. There was a great buzz about the place with plenty of Mayo supporters popping in for the crack and banter before the short hop over to Pearse Stadium. One of the first people I met on arrival was PJ Kelly from Moygownagh. He is a great passionate football man and was eagerly seeking everyone’s opinion as to who they thought would win the game. “Would we win it? Are we good enough to win it”? I got the impression that PJ was happy with the answers coming from the gathering and would have left for the stadium pretty confident that Mayo would win their first provincial title since 1967 at the city venue. If I am to be perfectly honest here I have to admit that I found it very difficult to predict the outcome in advance of Sunday’s game. I know from experience that Galway v Mayo encounters take on a life of their own and the form book goes out the window when these two sides meet. Irrespective of form coming into a championship encounter, there is rarely more than a point or two separating these two great rivals. Galway looked so ordinary against Sligo a few weeks ago that punters could have been forgiven for believing that this would be a relatively ‘handy’ match for the Mayo boys. Mayo, on the other hand, looking hugely impressive when carrying out a demolition job on Roscommon in the semi-final. I suggested, prior to the game, that our poor run of results in Pearse Stadium in recent decades would be a factor. Because of that I felt we would have to be five or six points a better team than Galway to beat them in a venue where we hadn’t won a provincial championship since 1967.