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Roscommon make a welcome return to Dr Hyde Park on Sunday for a crunch Allianz Football League Division One clash against Donegal.

A demanding trip to Healy Park for a clash with Tyrone is first on the Allianz Football League Division One agenda for Roscommon this Sunday.

Summer has arrived and with it comes the new summer lunch menu available at The Connacht Hotel, Renmore.

For the second time in 12 months Roscommon came to Castlebar in the FBD League and went home with a place in the final after beating Mayo on their own patch. How this season will be judged will be seen in the months that come on much sunnier days, but in this encounter the hungrier and more in tune visitors were deserved victors.

I thought I was hearing things when I tuned into Midwest radio last Saturday evening to see how our minors were getting on against our bitter rivals Galway. I did not make it to the game because of the lure of what was on TV as I wanted to see how Roscommon would respond after their embarrassing defeat at the hands of Sligo. Mayo’s defeat to Galway by a whopping 17 points has to go down as one of the darkest days in Mayo football at minor level. I do not recall any Mayo minor team taking a pasting of that magnitude.

At the end of the day, it's just a warm-up competition and on the balance of play Roscommon deserved their win in this Hastings Cup semi-final. But Mayo will feel that this game slipped through their fingers right at the death and denied them a place in the final against Galway next weekend, in what would have been another useful competitive game before their Connacht Championship kicks into gear in mid-March.

When the big questions are asked the big players stand up and that's what happened on Sunday, when Ballintubber battled their way into their first ever Connacht senior championship final. When the Roscommon champions came knocking, Alan Dillon, Cillian O'Connor, Jason Gibbons and Stephen Broderick all stood up and had the answers for the questions put to them and their team-mates and in a few weeks time, they'll be ready to answer those same questions from Corofin in the final.

This time last year Mayo trounced Roscommon by 0-21 to 0-9 in McHale Park in the provincial semi-final.

With all the furore, excitement, and stories from my recent visit to New York for the start of the Connacht championship I did not leave many column inches for the most important part, the match. It was amazing the amount of Mayo supporters who expressed concern to me before the team departed from Dublin for the Big Apple. I was regularly asked if they would win in New York, and the number of times I heard “they’ll hardly mess up, will they?” made me snigger to myself. Supporters were concerned after the performance against Derry in the League semi-final, but you were dealing with three in a row Connacht champions and double All-Ireland finalists here against a bit part team made up of a sprinkling of average county players and mostly of average club players. The result was never in question, but it took until the last kick of the game when Enda Varley goaled to seal my prediction of Mayo winning by at least 20 points. New York’s so called bigger players, Brendan Quigley and Ross Wherity, completely faded into obscurity as they were overwhelmed by Seamus O’Shea, Jason Gibbons, and Donal Vaughan. It was a difficult game to watch and even more difficult to talk about as New York had 13 men in their own half for long periods to basically try to keep the score down.