Mayo joint manager Pat Holmes was happy with his sides performance on Sunday in their win over Monaghan, but there's still plenty room of improvement he said: “We created loads of chances, we have a bit of work to do yet and things to improve on, but we were looking for an improvement on our performance the last day, we would have been disappointed with that but we knew that we were better than we showed the last day and in fairness to the boys they came out and played very, very well.”
When asked have the done anything different over the past three weeks since their loss to Tyrone, there was nothing special done he explained: “Not really we, just went out and put in a performance, that's what we always ask. You go out and try and improve your skills and our fitness levels are improving. But we approached the game the same (way ), we wanted to play as close to the maximum of our ability and we did well today. But we have an awful lot of things to work on. At the end of the day we're not unrealistic to realise that we know that we played against 13 men for a long time of that game, which had a big impact on the scoreboard. We're not naive to think that it's all solved. “
As for the physicality of the game which saw two red cards, a brace of yellow cards and splash of yellows shown out, the physicality is something you expect in top level games he said:“It was a physical encounter, but that's what you expect at this time of year and that's also what you expect when you're playing in division one of the National Football League. We knew coming in here it was going to be a tough, tough battle and it turned out to be that way.”
As for the referee's performance Holmes went on to say that it's not for him to be commenting on it saying: “I didn't see the incident with Seamus O'Shea, he got sent off (with a black card ) we just have to deal with it as it happens. There's no point in wondering was it or wasn't it. At the end of the day the referee is the boss and you have to go by his decisions, we can leave commenting on the referees performances to other people.”
The goal chances that his team missed in the first half were an examples of areas where his side will have to improve on going on. “In the first half we created three or four goal scoring chances, which we didn't take. The encouraging thing from our point of view was that we were creating them. We didn't create them three weeks ago, but we created them today. That was encouraging, it was disappointing that we didn't take them, but they are things we to work on. Things aren't going to go smoothly every day and there's going to opportunities you're not going to take, we'd love if we did and it would have made it easier, but all in all we're happy we've two league points.”
