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The distraction of Wednesday’s news that Conor Mortimer has decided to leave the Mayo senior panel is the last thing that Mayo manager James Horan will have wanted ahead of Sunday’s Connacht final showdown with Sligo in Hyde Park. Horan’s side had only just been announced by the county board online and through traditional methods a matter of hours when news broke of Mortimer’s decision to leave the panel, bringing the eye of the national and local media on Mayo ahead of Sunday for reasons other than what happens on the field. Mortimer being the second member of the panel to make themselves unavailable for Mayo in a matter of weeks, following Robert Hennelly’s decision leave the panel due to work commitments a few weeks ago.

Mayo 4-20

In recent decades there have been a number of inter-county teams that have made real eye catching progress. Dublin, Tyrone, Armagh, Kerry and Cork are the obvious selection in this regard and they, more than most, have brought a new dimension to the whole area of team sacrifice and all year round physical preparation. In fairness, Mayo football has also moved up a gear or two and if nothing else we are a team that few will ever take for granted. But I get the impression that we are just about hanging on to the coat tails of the top three or four teams in the country right now. On the evidence of the matches I have witnessed so far this year, I need some convincing from Sundays encounter with Leitrim that we deserve to be talked about in the same breath as Dublin, Cork and, believe it or not, Donegal. I watched the Ulster champions play Derry last Saturday and those of you who saw Derry’s inept performance will agree that they (Derry) are a team in serious decline. But it was the performance of Donegal that was the main talking point of the encounter. They played a terrific brand of open flowing football that suggests they have stepped up a level from last year. It should be a fascinating Ulster semi-final between themselves and Tyrone in a week’s time. But I am digressing!

The Mayo Senior Football team to face Leitrim in the Connacht Senior Football Championship semi-final this Sunday June 24 at 3.30pm in Elverys MacHale Park is as follows:

The defending champions Ballintubber laid down a marker for the rest of the sides in the county that they will not be giving up their championship easy this year when they blitzed their way through what looked like a potentially tricky opening round encounter against local rivals Breaffy with a 1-14 to 0-3 win. Breaffy were always going to be up against it facing the defending champions on their own patch in the opening round, but having to go into the game without both Seamus and Aidan O'Shea it was going to need a huge effort from them if they were going to take anything from the game.

In the 11 years since Mayo claimed their last national senior title, they have gone to Croke Park on four occasions in national finals only to return home empty handed and more often than not on the end of a bit of a beating. All Ireland finals in 2004 and 2006 along with league finals in 2007 and 2010 have all seen Mayo come up short on final day.

“A week is a long time in .....” you’ve heard and read it all before. But truly the last seven days have seen quite a swing in the fortunes of Mayo football. This time last week James Horan’s side were staring down the barrel of a gun and relegation to division two was staring back at them in the face. Move forward seven days and it’s a place in the semi-finals that Mayo are playing for on Sunday in Tralee rather than just mere survival.

It's been a tough couple of weeks for James Horan. Three defeats on the bounce, two of those when Mayo were leading at half time and had a man advantage, had the annual questioning of the direction that Mayo football was going in; kick in a earlier than normal this year. But a 12 point win over the All Ireland champions in front of a healthy crowd on a glorious evening has washed all those doubts away. Right? Well it's not exactly that simple is it. Mayo were good on Saturday night and at some points very good. But there is always a caveat, while Mayo were good, Dublin were poor and looked disinterested at times and after the game while James Horan knew his side had done well, he was also conscious of the fact that Dublin weren't fully at the races. “It was a good display, we played well today. We did a lot of good stuff and we might have caught the Dubs a bit cold today so we took advantage of it and played our game and played well. So we're delighted with the performance.” Horan went on to say that he didn't know why Dublin were a bit off the boil, but it wasn't his concern “It could have been the travel down whatever I don't know. But we had the intensity to win the game. We've seen Dublin do it in the past, they might not have played as well today as they could, but that's not for me to worry about, we did our stuff.”

Cork 0-14

Roscommon 1-11