Galway are waking up this morning as Connacht football champions.
That grinding noise you can hear is the gnashing of teeth from their neighbours to the north.
Mayo had pretty much made the Nestor Cup their personal drinking vessel this decade – winning every Provincial championship between 2011 and 2015.
On Sunday the Tribesmen regained the trophy, at Mayo’s Castlebar lair no less, to move within one title of Mayo.
The evening before Mayo continued to plot a course through the qualifiers – disassembling Kildare with an unaswered nine-point salvo before the break. Saturday week they will again face Leinster opposition as they play Westmeath for a place in the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
Are Mayo really back or are we getting ahead of ourselves? https://t.co/KepzdqBUlA
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) July 17, 2016
A return to the last eight is the bare minimum expected of this group after they engineered the departure of joint managers Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly.
In only Stephen Rochford’s second Championship game in charge Mayo let slip their hold on the Nestor Cup, falling to their bitter rivals Galway – losing 1-12 to 0-12 at MacHale Park.
https://soundcloud.com/user-787320910/keith-higgins-on-the-anger-driving-mayos-run-through-the-qualifiers
A month has passed since that defeat but the hurt is still raw. Speaking to SportsJOE after the Kildare win, Mayo captain Keith Higgins admitted the team are still feeding off that sense of loss.
“Definitely the Galway game, there had to be anger coming from that game. We didn’t do ourselves justice, we didn’t do the county justice that day against Galway,” said Higgins.
“We spoke about it after the game, there had to be anger, there had to be a reaction.”
Listen to this Monday’s GAA Hour in full here and see what you think. Or you can subscribe on iTunes by clicking this link.
https://soundcloud.com/user-787320910/the-gaa-hour-with-colm-parkinson-tyrone-and-galway-are-back-but-these-dubs-are-not-going-away
