In his time as a Mayo player Andy Moran has been involved in some incredible highs, such as the 2006 All Ireland semi-final where he came off the bench and scored the goal that turned that game back in Mayo's favour and lows, like the that day in June in Pearse Park, Longford two years ago. Through it all he's always been looking forward to the next challenge, not looking back. A couple of minutes after coming off the field on Saturday night, he was asked was it nights like this he played football for and he responded saying, “I play for just for playing all the time, nights like tonight is great, but it was great going back on to the training pitch on Tuesday trying to fix what went wrong last week and I think in the second half we did that there tonight.” While he enjoyed the win, there's not many other players about who would say that they equally enjoyed getting back on the training field as much as beating the All Ireland champions in front of 10,000 of your own fans.
Getting the squad all together over the past few weeks has been a key thing to changing the fortunes of a Mayo ship that looked to be taking on a lot of water a few weeks ago according to Moran. “Since the start of the year I think we've had one bad performance and I think that bad performance was in Ballyshannon and I don't think that we played at all that day. But as I was saying there for the past two weeks it was the first time we had everyone at training. We've 12 guys in Dublin and six guys on the u21s and we needed to time it right to get them all back together and for the last two to eight sessions we've had everyone at training which made a big difference. The lads are coming down from Dublin (for training Tuesday nights ) which is super. We couldn't have them coming down from January 1, so James had to time it right and we got them down the last two weeks and I think our performance over the last two weeks has shown what the difference it makes.”
While Mayo were very good on Saturday night, Moran also acknowledged that Dublin were down a few players and they will be a different prospect later on in the year. “I think it works both ways, we were probably on top of our game and they were a small bit below, but they have a few big players coming back as we know, like Bernard Brogan and Alan Brogan, they're big players, Dublin will be fine, they don't have to worry about tonight I don't think.”
A win next Sunday along with Saturday nights win and Mayo could sneak into a league semi-final which only a week ago looked to be a very long shot, and Moran would relish the chance of making it into the last four. “It'd be great, that was our aim at the start of the league, we go down to Kerry next, I don't know is it Killarney or Tralee, but it's massive game, you don't get anything easy down in Kerry. We were happy with tonight first, and if we sneak into a semi-final, and if we get a day out in Croke Park we'll work it from there and you never know what could happen.”
