Tom Semple’s field in Thurles has seen many the classic encounter down the years, mostly of the small ball variety; but on Saturday Mayo will head to the home of hurling looking to book a spot in the All Ireland Senior Football Championship final for the first time in six years.
Standing in their way are Kerry. Once upon a time the Kingdom were the queens of the game with 11 All Ireland titles to their name between 1976 and 1993 but since then it has been a fallow period for them.
But things are on the up in the Kerry and they are real contenders once again - they reached the All Ireland final last year, where they were defeated by Meath in Croke Park. They managed to reverse that result in the quarter-final a fortnight ago and will be looking to turn over Mayo for the second year in a row at the semi-final stage of the competition tomorrow evening.
Mayo manager Michael Moyles, is in his third year in charge of the the senior side and in each of those three seasons they have made it to the last four in the competition ; this time around he is looking for his side to go a step further and make it back to the big show in Croke Park.
Speaking to the Mayo Advertiser last week Moyles said it is not getting any easier, "the first year was Dublin, the second year was Kerry and it’s Kerry again this year; and probably everybody’s favourite for the All Ireland. But we are delighted to be there and we’ll have a good crack at Kerry.”
Looking back on last year's semi-final clash against Kerry there was plenty that Mayo learned from that clash and a few regrets too that a few bits of bad luck went against them early on in the contest, he explained.
“You’ll always look for the positives, score for score we kept with them and plugging away, but it was the early goals that kind of killed us and a lot of them were down to luck, a half-blocked ball that looped over and into the net another was straight down he line that took a deflection, so in that regard we are kinda disappointed with that bit of luck, but they could have scored two or three more goals too at other points in the game.
“They are very strong and physical team and we had come off a brilliant win against Cork, from which we were delighted it was probably our second win against Cork in about 15 years in championship football and we had to try and get back down to come back up again in a week, this time we have two weeks.”
When it comes to championship football it’s about winning games and sometimes it doesn’t matter how well you do it as long as you get the job done and you learn from it, and Moyles was keen to point that out about Mayo’s win over Galway in the All Ireland quarter-final a few weeks back.
“Even the way we won the game in Galway we didn’t play well at all, it was a very poor performance but we managed to get over the line - but for a team that had a hoodoo over us for eight or nine years, we’ve beaten them twice this year in the championship; and they beat us by a point in the league when we had a 14 yard free we missed - so that is pleasing that you can play poorly and still win a game, especially against a quality side like Galway.
“Even against the breeze we has the opportunity to sit and try and hold out, but we are a pressing team and that is what we do - is go out there and try and press it is probably some of the lessons we learned in the league. When the opportunity arose, we drifted out and got them in the middle and pressed and got up the field to get the score. It was a great game to win, and a horrible one to loose and it could have gone either way.”
This year was the first season post-Covid that saw a return to the full run of National Football League fixtures with seven games in Division One for Mayo to get their teeth into at the start of the year.
Results might not have gone their way in a lot of those games, but the learning and development opportunities were something that Mayo used to the fullest, Moyles added.
“The league this year was back to seven games, in the two years before that it was three games, so it was important to get to a semi-final and a final if you could just to try out players. But this year we approached it a small bit differently, now we didn’t go out to lose any game of course - we went out to win all those games, but if you look at our score difference across the entire league it was very narrow, we didn’t take a beating from any team - I know Dublin went to Kerry and they took an awful hammering; that seemed to happen all teams but us it didn’t and what it did was progressed us to where we want back and had a management meeting on a Monday night to try and review what had happened and where we could get better and the players would do the same.
“We used it, we had a really good win on the road against Meath that kinda started things off after our first three or four games, Cork beat us by three or four points, Kerry by a point - so they were narrow losses but there was massive learning’s in them and it was the girls who kept it afloat - they kept their heads and kept moving on and those lessons came to fruition in Galway in the quarter-final, especially when the chips were down to keep going and moving.”
But once the league was wrapped up, there was a nice break to the Connacht final against Galway and then again until the group stages of the All Ireland series got going and that is something that you just have to deal with and Mayo did to the best of their abilities the Crossmolina native explained.
“The Connacht final this year was a week closer than usual when it was doubled up with the mens game, and that helped us we were coming off the Donegal game and we played some good stuff in that final. Then you had a six week break to the All Ireland series, it didn’t help we were one of the first teams in the provincial and one the last teams out in All Ireland series which didn’t really help. But we could have won that game up in Armagh, frustratingly it was lessons we learned in the league that we didn’t apply in that Armagh game.
“In the Laois game we had a chance to rectify it and look at new girls again. We had Saoirse Delaney come in, very smart on the football and you’d see her after the Galway game, she could have been very disappointed to not get game time. She was the first one up hugging the players and that is just the manner of the panel we have, they are great people, some of them are newer into the panel, some of them have been there for a while, they are a great group.”
Having had a full proper season this year for the first time has also brought it’s own challenges for the management team, but one that they have enjoyed facing especially in the early months of the year going game on game Moyles told us.
“It’s a full time job, it really is. This year three and this year I felt it because we went from the shortened league we had the two years before to the full run of seven games and you were constantly going from one game to another trying to take it apart and put it together again for the next game. Look at what we did here and how can we do it better the next time, we did well there and here.”
Regaining the Connacht title was vital for the development of the game in the county Moyles felt and a win on Saturday will be another big step to continue the upward curve he believes.
"We talked about it at the start of the year, for this group to progress Mayo Ladies Football, silverware was a big thing and we got the Connacht title and then to progress to the next step in the All Ireland series and we are still on track for that and hopefully on Saturday it will be another step.”
As for how they will do that? He wasn’t going to reveal his hand, but there are plenty of ways they can play it when it comes to the crunch on the field he says.
“Yah, there is a few ways we can play, we have a very strong panel I would feel and there is a few ways we can play and switch players around and it is just about what suits us on the day and we’ll be ready for it," he said.
One thing is for sure, it’s not going to be easy, but Mayo will leave everything they have out there trying to make sure they don’t walk off the field wondering.
