The Mayo senior hurlers will be staying in Ballina for their round four clash against Sligo in the Christy Ring Cup tomorrow afternoon.
It was reported this week that the senior hurlers had looked to play their game against the Yeats County in Hastings Insurance MacHale Park but the request was refused by the county board.
The Mayo Advertiser requested a comment from the Mayo GAA County Board through the boards PRO John Walker earlier this week - to which he responded that the board would not be putting out any statement and that the match was going ahead in Ballina as originally fixed.
At last week's monthly meeting of the county board, chairperson of the board Seamus Tuohy did not make any reference to the hurlers making a request to play there but did say that the newly installed pitch "is not open to all teams at this particular time", before adding: "The pitch is still very much in the developmental stage even though it took the game quite well, but we had very favourable weather conditions. We can all be very proud of this pitch but we need to make sure we protect and manage the pitch going forward. We will be putting together a management plan regards its usage."
As for the action on the field, the Mayo senior hurlers have bounced back from a poor start to the competition following on from their relegation in the National Hurling League to put together two impressive back to back wins against Wicklow and London in their past two outings.
On Saturday they will be looking to make it three wins from four when they welcome Sligo to James Stephens Park in Ballina. The visitors have one win from their three games to date in the competition, seeing off Wicklow 4-24 to 1-14 in the third round. Previous to that they were beaten by London in round one 0-26 to 0-21 in Ruislip before Derry beat them 2-20 to 0-11 in round two.
This will be the second meeting of these sides this year, having already clashed in the league where Sligo ran out big winners 4-13 to 0-19 in round four of the league on a day that Gerard O'Kelly-Lynch bagged 1-5 and Tony O'Kelly-Lynch got 2-1 for the Yeats men.
Mayo have turned things around impressively in recent weeks with Derek Walsh's side putting themselves in with a real shot of making the final of the competition if they can pick up a win on Saturday and follow that up with another victory over Derry at home the following weekend.
Mayo hit 1-22 against London in the previous round of the competition and had themselves in a 13 point lead by the half time break in that game.
Keith Higgins, Sean Kenny, Eoghan Delaney and Mark Phillips were all on the scoreboard early for Mayo as they led 0-7 to 0-2 by the quarter of an hour mark. They kept up the pressure with a string of scores before the break with Shane Boland adding four points to their tally along with other scores from Joe Mooney, Joe McManus and Higgins - before Mayo struck their only goal of the day.
That score arrived off the stick of Boland who arrowed the ball to the bottom of the net after some good build-up play involving Higgins, Delaney and Mooney to set him free. That goal combined with the other earlier scores saw Mayo go in leading 1-16 to 0-6 at the short whistle.
London did mount a small fight back early in the second half reeling off a number of points, but a flurry of Mayo points from Mooney, Boland, Delaney and McManus settled the nerves and they were up 1-20 to 0-9 with 55 minutes gone, before London struck two late goals to close the gap on the scoreboard.
