Mayo captain Keith Higgins was happy to have the two points in the bag after his sides comprehensive win over Monaghan on Sunday, but he was realistic enough to know that the dismissal of two Farney men had a lot to do with the large gap on the scoreboard.
“It’s two points and it’s nice to get a win. You want to be winning your home games at least and that’s what we got today. They were down to 13 men for a good bit of the game and it made it a bit more difficult on them. From our point of view it’s a win and we put up a decent score, but again there’s a lot to work on.” he said.
The victory was backboned on not making the simple mistakes they did in the previous game against Tyrone not any major change of how the approached the game the Mayo captain said: “ “A small bit (change of approach ), but after the Tyrone game we said that we made simple mistakes and we need to rectify that and get back to basics and get the simple things right and everything else will lead on from that.”
The stop start nature of the game is a long way from the kind of contest that the Ballyhaunis man expects to face in summer time he explained: “You have games like that, which are kinda stop start and I suppose conditions were never going to lead to a fast, free flowing game of football. You have to adapt when you’re out there, it’s different than what it will be in the summer and go out there and play.”
As for the reason for all the fouls and stoppages, getting a consistency right in the way the game is officiated is something that Higgins wants to see. “Consistency is the word that’s being throw around the last 18 months at this stage, again depending on things like the conditions it can make things difficult for the ref. I didn’t see Seamus’ one, I thought the one over the far side when Aido was taken out could have been a black card. I didn’t see the first red card, the second one he’d no choice. Sometimes the referee’s have a hard enough job, getting the consistency the whole time. We’ll look back at it and see what’s the story”
When asked did he have sympathy with refs and the job the have to do Higgins said that he did saying: “Yah, even if I’d be the first one out there giving out to him if he gave something against us. You do, you look at other sports where the rule book is more defined or the tackle is more defined and that’s the one area that keeps coming under scrutiny and you do. How the rectify I don’t know. You try to work on the tackle, but you don’t know what you’ve to work on sometimes.”
Despite hitting a big score, Mayo missed a number of scoring chances in the game, but Higgins said he’d be more worried if they weren’t creating them. “I think you’d have to worry if we weren’t creating them and you’d have to look at them from that point of view, the lads movement was good, we were getting in the right places but the lads execution was just a bit off. But you have to look on the positive side of things, because if you start thinking about it, it could come back to haunt you.”
This month is a time when Higgins said he expects teams to start showing their real hand as they start to move through the gears, he said: “Most teams are in the same boat I think. You’ve two games in February and then you’ve a few weeks off and get some hard training done that’s the nature of it. March is a big month, you’ve three games in it. A lot of teams will come on and progress fitness wise, it’s the nature of the league the more it goes on the tougher it gets.”
Making the semi-finals of the league would be an added bonus he said, with the long lay-off that Mayo have from the end of the league to the start of the championship in summer he said: “It’s at least one more big game and a competitive one, there is a big gap between the league and championship, there’s only so many training’s and challenge matches you can do so the more games the merrier as far as I’m concerned.”
As for the deployment of Aidan O’Shea in at full forward it worked out on Sunday, but it all depends on the type of ball going into him he said: “It worked out well today, he’s a big lump in there all right . He’s a handful, but it comes down to the fact he’s no good in there if the ball isn’t right. You can be lumping ball in there all day, but if they have defenders back or it’s not going straight to him he’s not going to be effective. But today he got a few good scores and goal it worked out for him.”
