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It’s do or die for Mayo.
Stephen Rochford takes the Connacht champions into their first qualifier game since 2010 and last season’s big success from the backdoor wait in the long grass.
Fermanagh head for Castlebar on Saturday (throw-in 3.30pm) planning an ambush in the same fashion that dumped Roscommon out on their ears last summer and there’s a nervousness around Mayo.
After their shock one-goal loss to Galway in the provincial semi-final, questions are being asked about whether Stephen Rochford can mobilise a team that has been in the last five All-Ireland semi-finals.
Is this the end of the road for Mayo?
Conor Heneghan says: NO
There’s been quite a lot of soul-searching done in Mayo in recent weeks.
From approaching a Connacht semi-final with a confidence bordering on arrogance (certainly as far as the fans were concerned), Mayo people are now genuinely concerned that Fermanagh will dump them out of the Championship before a ball has been kicked in the Connacht final.
But the concerns of Mayo fans run much deeper than that.
It’s a topic that wasn’t even considered before the Galway defeat and some have nearly been afraid to address it since, but the elephant in the room is becoming all the more conspicuous.
Are we about to bear witness to the permanent demise of the greatest Mayo team in living memory? After all, how many times can a team go to the well and come up dry? The decline of great teams often comes when they’re not expecting it; is this to be Mayo’s turn?
That is an extreme reaction, of course, but such was the level of shock and bewilderment at Mayo’s non-performance in defeat to Galway that people are wondering whether there are fundamental problems with the squad, as opposed to minor concerns that are easily addressed.
If there are, it won’t be long until they are exposed at some point during the qualifiers, possibly in a far more brutal fashion than Galway managed at McHale Park.
But Mayo have earned enough credit in the last five years to be given the benefit of the doubt and there’s certainly a positive aspect to going through the back door if they are prepared to embrace it.
The qualifiers is not a route that has been kind to Mayo, but this Mayo is a different animal to the teams that have had a second bite of the cherry in the past.
Instead of coasting through the provincial Championship and rocking up in Croke Park at the beginning of August, Mayo will need to win three games in four weeks, at venues they are largely unfamiliar with, if they are to reach the quarter-finals.
The front door route has suited Mayo, but much like Tyrone in 2008 or Kerry in 2009, the alternative could prove to be the making of them.
Nothing builds momentum like consecutive games and the experience of having to grind out victories on the road can do wonders for a team’s spirt and character.
If they happen to get a few scares along the way, including against Fermanagh this weekend, then all the better.
Not only could it be the making of Mayo as a team, going down a different route could prove to be the making of some individuals within the squad.
Mayo have been blighted by injuries this season and with Ger Cafferkey and Jason Gibbons out for the season and Chris Barrett set to miss out against Fermanagh, there’s an opportunity for others to step up and make their mark.
Barring the odd change here and there, the core of Mayo’s team has been pretty much the same for the last few years and having to freshen it up, by necessity, could be a blessing in disguise.
Can Evan Regan establish himself as the man to take some of the pressure off Cillian O’Connor up front?
Stephen Coen has captained a Mayo minor and an under-21 team to All-Ireland titles within the space of three years. He’ll likely be a mainstay in the county team for the next decade, but his time to establish himself as a leader may have arrived sooner than he expected.
Diarmuid O’Connor lit up the Championship last year. Can his under-21 team-mate Conor Loftus, the scorer of a brace of goals in the All-Ireland under-21 final against Cork, repeat the trick in 2016?
One or all of them are going to have to step up because Mayo’s frontline soldiers – Higgins, Keegan, Boyle, the O’Shea brothers and Cillian O’Connor – aren’t going to be able to do it on their own forever.
But let’s not forget what they have achieved.
Five Connacht titles on the trot. Five consecutive All-Ireland semi-finals since 2011. Two All-Ireland finals and two epic semi-final replays where they brought the eventual champions to the brink.
Surely, with a record like that, they were due the bad performance they delivered against Galway three weeks ago?
Good or bad, we’re likely to find out a lot about what this Mayo team are made of in the coming weeks.
I’m confident they’ll prove that they’re far from done yet.
Conán Doherty says: YES
Well, not exactly, because they’re going to win on Saturday.
The question isn’t really if this is the end of the road for Mayo, it’s more a question of whether or not they’re on the right road.
Writing them off after they were beaten by their fiercest rivals is stupid.
This is football, this is knockout football and it happens. It’s also completely undermining the progress of Galway and Kevin Walsh. This is a side who made it to the last round of the qualifiers last year and this is a proud county who have had it with suggestions that Mayo are being gifted handy Connacht titles every year.
Losing one game before the All-Ireland semi-final in six seasons isn’t a fair representation of form either. That’s a blip but it’s forced the westerners to self-analyse.
Stephen Rochford has inherited a team that’s been flirting with September and its third Sunday for half a decade without ever being proposed to.
The amount of players still involved from the starting 15 that went down to Longford in their qualifier in 2010 is an eye-opener.
David Clarke; Chris Barrett, Ger Cafferkey, Keith Higgins; Donal Vaughan, Trevor Howley, Kevin McLoughlin; Seamus O’Shea, Pat Harte; Andy Moran, Aidan O’Shea, Alan Freeman; Conor Mortimer, Barry Moran, Alan Dillion. (Via Mayo GAA Blog)
Tom Parsons came off the bench that day too and, after so many near-misses that we needn’t go into, bigger questions have to be asked if this team is capable of getting over the line.
Stephen Rochford has gotten off to an unfortunate start to life in the inter-county championship but it was clear as far back as February when Mayo welcomed Dublin to town that the new manager was trying to ready them for later in the year – where the only problems ever used to lie.
At the minute though, the problem is they seem to be going back down that road with the same army after being beaten at the end of it time and time again.
There’s younger talent there, there’s success there and, if nothing else, they just need to try something different. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Other counties have overtaken them meanwhile because they’ve learned that it’s adapt or die in this business.
Sure, some of the beauty of this Mayo team is that they are insane and they just won’t quit. And, whilst this might not be the end of the road because they’ll always refuse to stop anyway, you have to ask if it is the right road.
They need something different to get back on track. Otherwise, they’ll run out of gas before they even reach the end.
