It was an afternoon where nothing changed, or where everything changed. Mayo went to Dublin full of hope and expectation and once again headed west with a lot more questions than answers in their pocket. Is it Croke Park? Are Mayo just not good enough? Is it history? These are all questions that John O'Mahony will hope to have the right answers for come the end of the year. But for now, the only way is forward as he sees it, and what's done is done and it's now about the next challenge.
After Conor Counihan waxed lyrical about the virtues of winning the league and what Cork have ahead of them come summer, John O'Mahony was up to face the music after another disappointing Mayo performance in Croke Park.
It is all about moving on and being positive, because that is all you can do with bigger battles looming, even if it hard to be positive after a game like that, was his message. “Winning is linked to positivity, it's not comfortable to be positive now, but we have to be, we don't have a choice. The public at large do have a choice, but we don't have a choice. I'm long enough in the game to know that is the challenge facing everybody in the management and everybody on the team. We're back in training Thursday night and we have to pick a championship panel in the next few days and take it from there and that's what we do.”
O'Mahony has been around the game long enough to know that the vultures can descend very quickly on a side after a poor performance and that it is likely to happen to his side after Cork cantered to victory with ease on Sunday, but he is ready for it and is not giving up. “We know we will be hit from within and outside and it's going to be linked with every other performance here, whether we like it or not, but that's the reality of it and that's what's adding to the burden.” The weight of history is a heavy burden to carry, and one that O'Mahony thinks is not fair for this side to have to bear, but they will not be shirking the responsibility for Sunday's performance. “We will put our hands up and the lads will put their hands up (for the performance in this game ), but the lads won't put their hands up for the last 40 or 50 years of performances here.”
As a whole the league has been a success for Mayo, six wins from eight games, wins away to Tyrone, Derry, Kerry, and Cork yet the big day in Croke Park saw them come unstuck despite having chances to lay down a marker early in the game, which O’Mahony knows could have changed the course of the contest. “The reflection I'd have on it, is the first 10 minutes we had four or five chances and didn't score, when they did they scored. We had it back to two points immediately after half time, they pulled away again and the goal effectively finished it. We'd be quite pleased with the league but we'd be desperately disappointed with today and today's performance, that's the reality of it.”
Reality can be a hard pill to swallow, but if Mayo can take any positive from this game and put it to good use, along with rectifying the negatives then maybe come summer everything will have changed forever and for the better.
