Search Results for 'Richie Feeney'

It will be another 15 days before Mayo get back out on the field in competitive action when they take on Dublin in Croke Park on Saturday, March 2. In the coming 15 days and in the five days since they lost at the death a game they really had no right to hold the upper hand in at all, Mayo will have had plenty of time to ponder last Sunday’s events against Tyrone.

Mayo will be looking to make it two wins out of two on Sunday when Mickey Harte’s Tyrone men come visiting McHale Park in the second of Mayo’s four home games in this year’s National Football League.

Mayo 0-10

The thousand or so souls who turned out in Flanagan Park in Ballinrobe on Wednesday evening will have left the south Mayo venue none the wiser as to what 2013 will hold in store for the Mayo senior footballers.

Donegal 2-11

Mayo 4-20

All eyes will be on McHale Park on Sunday for the repeat of last year’s senior championship final, last year it was Ballintubber who were the last men left standing. While both groups of players are still more or less the same, on the sideline two new men will have been busy for the past few weeks plotting and planning each other’s downfall. When James Horan left Ballintubber to rejuvenate the standing of Mayo football on a national level, Anthony McGarry was the man left with the task of filling his boots. For the Mitchels, when Peter Ford stepped aside his banisteoir’s bib was handed to former Mayo senior and u21 manager Pat Holmes, and one target was given him, bring the Moclair cup back to the county town.

With a sell out crowd of 30,000 expected to head to Hyde Park on Sunday, there will be nowhere to hide for Mayo as they aim to dethrone Fergal O’Donnell’s defending Connacht champions on their home patch. Ten years ago O’Donnell was the man who lifted the Nestor Cup in the same venue on a sweltering Sunday evening when a late, late Gerry Lohan goal had primrose and blue ribbons hanging from the old trophy for the year at the end of one of the games of the ages.

Last week I suggested that home advantage might prove decisive in deciding who would advance to play Roscommon in the Connacht final on July 17. I was wrong. Having witnessed the display from Galway last Sunday I am now of the opinion that if Mayo had played the first half of last Sunday’s encounter in Pearse Stadium and the second half in Tuam we still would have won in a canter. I have never in my lifetime witnessed such an inept performance from a Galway senior side. They were spiritless and soft when it came to putting up any sort of a challenge to Mayo last Sunday. In fact the game, particularly the first half, ranks as one of the worst of this year’s championship. (I would rank the first game played in this year’s championship, Donegal v Antrim as the worst.) I accept that the second half did improve but that improvement came from Mayo as a single point from play by Galway in the entire second half tells its own story. At no point did Galway radiate the belief that they had the measure of Mayo. When a team plays without any semblance of a pattern as Galway did last weekend, it suggests that there is little synchronisation between management and players.

Mayo manager James Horan has named six players who will make their championship debut on Sunday in London. The game against the exiles will be Horan’s maiden championship contest in the Bainisteoir’s bib. The half dozen who will make their first championship starts are Robert Hennelly in goal, full back Alan Feeney, and his brother Richie Feeney at wing back. The midfield pairing of Jason Gibbons and James Kilcullen will also be making their first championship start, while Jason Doherty, whose goal-getting ability lit up Mayo’s National Football League campaign, has unsurprisingly been given the number 15 shirt for the championship opener.