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Our Mayo side was once again placed under the whitest of lights in Croke Park and we all once again waited for coronations. Then the seemingly inevitable uncorked the vitriol. It started in the stands with several around me shaking their heads and leaving long before the final whistle. It is not a nice thing, from a player’s point of view, to see ‘your’ supporters walking out before the game has finished. It is their (the supporters) signal to the players that, for them at least, the show is over.

In his time as a Mayo player Andy Moran has been involved in some incredible highs, such as the 2006 All Ireland semi-final where he came off the bench and scored the goal that turned that game back in Mayo's favour and lows, like the that day in June in Pearse Park, Longford two years ago. Through it all he's always been looking forward to the next challenge, not looking back. A couple of minutes after coming off the field on Saturday night, he was asked was it nights like this he played football for and he responded saying, “I play for just for playing all the time, nights like tonight is great, but it was great going back on to the training pitch on Tuesday trying to fix what went wrong last week and I think in the second half we did that there tonight.” While he enjoyed the win, there's not many other players about who would say that they equally enjoyed getting back on the training field as much as beating the All Ireland champions in front of 10,000 of your own fans.

At the tail end of last September, James Horan took on the challenge of rebuilding and renewing the Mayo team. In the first flush of his tenure, only a couple of minutes after being approved by the county board delegates in fact, he faced the press and gave a very simple promise that his side kept up last Sunday to the very end. “I know a lot of Mayo supporters are down in the dumps with how things finished last year, but what we will insist on is that any time a Mayo player goes out he will give it absolutely everything he has.”

I recall watching the Irish rugby team playing a Triple Crown match in 1985 against England. The match was very much in the balance with minutes left on the clock. It was at a critical juncture in the game that team captain Ciaran Fitzgerald demanded his team step up to the plate with his by now (in) famous line “where’s your f***ing pride?” The team responded and delivered a magnificent final few minutes to beat England on that day. I have no doubt that Fitzgerald’s leadership was crucial to that victory. Mayo football is, to some extent, at a similar juncture right now. We need leadership both on and off the field and, more than anything else, we need to display a bit of f***ing pride and heart. After last year’s championship defeats to Sligo and Longford we need to resurrect our reputation before we slip into a downward spiral of mediocrity that could prove difficult to shake off were it to continue. Mayo looked very sluggish and tired last year and some critics even suggested that they did not appear to be playing for one another. This season, however, we retained our division one status with some credible gutsy performances but appeared to hit a dip again a few weeks before the London match.

With the Mayo club championships now put to bed following Ballintubber’s victory over Castlebar Mitchels last weekend, all eyes will now be drawn to the Connacht club championship. The action gets underway on Sunday for the winners of both the Mayo Junior and Intermediate championships, when both Tourmakeady and Parke face Galway opposition. The men from the Gaeltacht will have Mayo advantage when they host St James from Galway city on Sunday, in McHale Park. The Galway champions overcame An Spidéal in the Galway final by a single point a fortnight ago, winning out on a score of 0-9 to 0-8. Midfielder Paul Conroy was the top scorer for the St James men in the final kicking four points of their nine point total.

Former Mayo manager John Maughan ruled himself out of the running for the vacant Mayo senior managers job late on Thursday evening. The Crossmolina native who three times guided Mayo the All Ireland senior final confirmed to the Mayo Advertiser that he would not be going forward to the interview stage of the process, he told the Advertiser that he was very interest in the job, but following a discussion with chairman of the county board on Thursday he decided not to pursue his interest in the position any further.

I travelled to Pearse Park, Longford, last Saturday, not quite sure what to expect. It was awful stuff, arguably as bad as I have witnessed from any Mayo team at this level. It is difficult to apportion blame to any single individual. There is a collective responsibility on everyone involved to shoulder some blame for the embarrassing display. The team definitely looked demoralised, in some cases disinterested, with a few others clearly not physically fit enough to play and win at this level. However despite this I did send a text to a number of people at half time suggesting that Mayo would probably win the match, not because we were playing any better than our opposition, but because Longford were dreadful.

Rumour has it that there will be a raft of changes for our match v Longford tomorrow in Pearse Park. I expect that management have examined every available option for this encounter. I would say it has been a tough couple of weeks for everyone involved since the championship defeat. Management will be fully aware of Mayo’s poor ‘back door ’record in years past. Both Westmeath and Fermanagh have shortened our summer on two occasions. In fact we have only managed to secure back to back victories when going through the back door on a single occasion, in 2002, when we saw off three teams in a row, beating Roscommon, Limerick, and Tipperary on that occasion.

Sligo 0-15

In Kerry last weekend, a wise man said that it only matters what happens on the third Sunday in September and seeing that his county has more All Ireland titles than most could dream of, it’s very sage advice. Mayo had just picked up their fourth win in this year’s national football league which left them top of the pile with two rounds of the competition to go, but in the grand scheme of things what does making it to the latter stages of the competition really effect in the long run? In 2007, Mayo reached the final against Donegal only to bow out of the Connacht championship a month later in the preliminary round to Galway. The last time that Mayo won the national league back in 2001 under Pat Holmes they bowed out of the Connacht championship to Roscommon in a nail biting encounter. Mayo have been one of the best league sides over the past decade or so reaching semi finals in 2002, 2005, and 2006 along with the finals in 2001 and 2007, but it has failed to see them push on to the biggest prize. Only in 2006 did they go on reach the All Ireland final where Kerry ended the dream once again.