Fresh from guiding a new look Mayo see off Joe Kernan's Galway side in McHale Park with ease, John O'Mahony wasn't getting carried away with his side's destruction of the near neighbors.
“It's two point's at the end of the day you won't be asking me about this next September, or October or even July. But we are delighted that we have the two points in the bag and we have four away games in a very tough league.”
O'Mahony was also keen to make sure that nobody was getting carried away with the win as there is a lot of work still to be done over the year saying. “I suppose the thing with Mayo over the years is dispar with defeat and elation with the victory, I'd caution any elation after today. We have to go up to Tyrone next week and there'll be a backlash up there after what happened last night, but the thing that people need to realie about these guys is that they are good footballers they're working very hard and we'll see where that takes them. You take points where you get them, there'll be an awful lot of teams taking points of each other as it progresses.”
Trevor Mortimer's dismissal mid way through the second half was the only controversial incident of the game and O'Mahony went on to say that Mayo would appeal the decision if they thought there was grounds after looking back at the video of the game. “I would have thought it looked harsh, but what we'll do now is we'll study the video and if we feel that there's something in it we'll be looking at an appeal. But I'll be reserving judgement until we go on the slow mo and watch it a few times, but Trevor isn't a dirty player.”
With Mayo's underage teams having a lot of success on both provincial and national level, O'Mahony is looking for those players to make the step up this year and push on. The need for the younger players to take the lead is needed even more now that both James Nallen and David Heaney have decided to call it a day. “Mayo have been in a couple of minor finals and won a under 21 final and won four Connacht u21 finals in a row, there is a lot of good players coming through now. But it's now about finding the guys who really have the ambition to see it through going forward. I have no doubt that Mayo will have a very successful team, but how soon is the question that were all trying to answer as soon as possible.”
After Mayo's collapse against Meath in last years All Ireland quarter final, a lot of questions raised their heads again over Mayo's ability to push on under pressure and they surfaced again in the lead up to the start of the league, but O'Mahony has faith that his side have the ability to go on and win the big prizes. “I heard an assessment of our team yesterday that we had gone back a bit, we hadn't even played in the league at that stage. And if their basing it on the FBD League were in the final of that for the first time of about five or six years. Maybe they should have said we've gone back since the Connacht final. It was a good performance today and if you get a good performance the result will take care of it's self. This will mean nothing though if we meet Galway in a Connacht semi-final if were lucky enough to get past Sligo.”
The Mayo manager also said that a group of players under his tutelage have put in a serious amount of work on the training field since the start of the year and that showed on the field today. “That group of players out there and a whole lot more are putting their head down and we'll see where that takes us. What we did was put in three very hard weeks at the beginning of January and we took a week off, we only met once since last Sunday. We only met on Thursday night so this is only the second time this week we've met, the bit of rest and recovery paid off today.”
