Search Results for 'Cillian O'Connor'

After Mayo's superb victory over Tyrone I have to pinch myself to comprehend that Mayo are playing Tipperary in an All-Ireland semifinal on Sunday. It sounds bizarre. If we go back to June 18 and after watching Mayo's poor performance against Galway, we firstly did not see Mayo getting to a semifinal and if they did we certainly did not expect the opposition to be from the premier county. Clare and Tipperary have both been very successful examples of the qualifiers in 2016 but Tipp's trouncing of Connacht champions Galway by nine points has certainly made them the number one success story.

Now that was more like it. We asked for a performance,we wanted passion,we got them both in abundance. Mayo produced their best display in 12 months to send Ulster champions and hot favourites Tyrone packing out of this year's championship. The game was not the best advertisement for Gaelic football but it was intriguing, intense, and tactical and had everybody on the edge of their seats right until the final whistle.

For the first time since the year before Mayo claimed their first All Ireland senior title, Mayo will take on Kildare in a senior championship match. That meeting, in the All Ireland semifinal back in 1935, saw the Leinster men win 2-6 to 0-7; tomorrow evening the Mayo faithful will be hoping for a different result when the sides clash in MacHale Park.

Sunday will be the last time the public get to see Mayo in action on their home patch until June 18 at the earliest, when their Connacht semi-final against Galway is scheduled to take place, providing of course that Mayo get over London in Ruislip at the tail end of May. The last time a new Mayo manager faced into a game against London on their own patch it nearly derailed the James Horan project before it even got going.

Mayo are on the look out for a new senior football manager after the inevitable resigning of joint managers Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly last Friday night. It was a somewhat embarrassing saga in the Mayo GAA family that such an event occurred. By the time Noel and Pat resigned I had simply had enough. I was so drained from talking about it and anxiously waiting for any developments that I was relieved there was closure.

In this week’s column I expected to be wallowing about the glorious weather and plethora of club games in Mayo last weekend, that is as much of a mention it will get unfortunately. Just when we thought the dust had settled on our 2015 Championship we were greeted with the earth shattering news on Tuesday morning that there were major problems in the Mayo GAA family. The first murmur I heard was when the principal of St Attracta’s NS in Charlestown (Brian McDermott, an avid Mayo supporter) mentioned it to me in the school assembly yard at 9am. I walked back to work receiving texts saying “turn on the radio”. One message from England said “what the hell has happened”, I had no idea what was going on. For the rest of Tuesday my phone hopped as I spoke to countless journalists, radio stations, and even did a piece with Marty Morrissey for the Six One News. The media world was gone crazy looking for the story. The Mayo players had issued a vote of “no confidence” in the management.

As in every game between two evenly matched sides a number of factors will be decisive in sorting out where the winning and the losing of this game will be. We will look at a few of those factors here.

Traditionally, once the starting 15 was announced all talk would move towards the various match-ups that would occur on the field. But even with Mayo announcing their starting 15 on Wednesday night for Sunday's big game, most of the talk was shifted towards "is that how they will actually line out". Since Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly threw the curve ball of dropping Barry Moran into the starting 15 for Mayo's win over Donegal in the quarter final win over the Ulster men, the chances of their doing the same for Dublin became a more real possability.