Former teammate of Kevin McStay eviscerates Mayo tactics in Cavan loss

He was not pleased.

While the final score was 1-14 to 1-17, a late Aidan O'Shea goal put a gloss on the scoreline for the Connacht side.

Martin Carney represented both Donegal and Mayo in inter-county football, and with the latter he was a teammate of current Mayo boss Kevin McStay.

While on co-commentary duty with Mid West radio, he lamented Mayo's inability to send direct balls into target-man O'Shea.

He said: “I might as well be blue in the face. I might as well be trying to climb Everest in the nude as trying to get a ball in there quickly.

“O’Shea, when he gets an early ball, what does he do? He puts the ball into the net.”

He was also full of praise for Cavan's work rate.

Carney added: “The sign of a team’s enthusiasm, the sign of a team’s ambition, the sign of a team’s wanting to win a game is the willingness to put their faces, heads and hands in, to win dirty ball when dirty ball is there to be won and Cavan were the masters in that area of play repeatedly.

“They won so many of our kickouts, so many of their own kickouts, not from primary possession but from winning dirty ball and nobody epitomised it more than the likes of Pádraig Faulkner.

 “They played like a team, they played wonderfully cohesive football but remember again, if I close my eyes and think of the second half and think of the number of times they broke forward without a Mayo player to challenge them, without a Mayo player… structurally we seemed to be all over the place in the second half.”