Three defeats in a row can be hard to take for a player. But Andy Moran has always been one of the most positive characters in the game on and off the field. It wasn't any different on Sunday after seeing a five point lead turned into a one point defeat at the final whistle, but it was heartbreaking he admitted amongst the positives he saw in the game. “Seven days is a long time in football and we can take a lot of positives out of it. If we can improve like that in seven days again, we'll have come a long way. But it's heartbreaking to be honest, it's a big defeat and hopefully we'll respond in the right way.”
Two games in a row, Mayo have failed to put away opponents after the were leading and half time and had a man advantage. But Moran thinks that people need to look further past that one issue.
“I think it's a lot of issues, people need to look at it a lot deeper than that. This is the first week we've been able to train together as a unit. The first week, we've been able to get a 15 on 15 game in training and I know that it was very disappointing for the u21s on Wednesday but it's actually very good for our team here because we have them back in training and we've 12 guys in Dublin. We couldn't be bringing them down from January on, we had to time it right so we got them down Tuesday and we had a full session on Friday. I think you could see the difference from last week to there today.”
While there was a marked improvement form the Donegal game seven days previously, Moran admits that a lot more will need to be improved on ahead of the visit of Dublin next Saturday night.
“We're not fooling ourselves,we know we've got the two best teams in the country left coming up. But if we can improve again today, we'll be challenging them and that's encouraging. We should have beat Cork today, we didn't close it out, maybe we need to look a few small things, maybe in terms of against 14 men, but these things happen and Cork are a good side.”
