Mayo must look to their rookies
THE comfort for Mayo is if they are to salvage their status as the Allianz League’s great survivors they will have to do it on the road.
You have to go back 21 years for the last time that Mayo kicked ball outside the League’s top but after a third successive defeat that record is under threat once more.
It is unlikely, though, to be a source of alarm for any number of reasons.
The most obvious is that this has been a constant of Stephen Rochford’s tenure, having gone into the final round for the last two seasons needing a result to be certain of survival.
They have always managed to close the deal — they won both of last round games at MacHale Park to ensure they stayed up, but this year if it goes to the wire they will be putting their first division lives on the line against Donegal in Ballybofey.
In fact, two of their last three games are on the road — starting with this Sunday’s trip to Newbridge with only Tyrone left to come calling to their Castlebar parlour.
But given Mayo’s home record under Rochford in the spring — they have lost six of the nine games they have played at MacHale Park — they might just find a certain relief in closing the door behind them.
It is baffling that they should struggle at home given their huge support base — evidenced once more here when 15,303 clicked through the turnstiles for the last instalment in their now famed rivalry with this Dublin team — but it may have less to do with venue and more to do with the reality that this is a group that simply can’t afford to go too hard too early.
‘We don’t tend to be at our best in the early rounds of the League. Over the past few years we have had a longer winter period due to our summer exploits so that has an affect and we tend to be slower out of the blocks as a result,’ said Rochford, when pressed on why his team find so little comfort at home.
But apart from becoming accustomed to battling it out at the wrong end of the table, the real reason why Mayo should not be alarmed is that they have so little to lose if one of these days they fall through that trap-door.
Yes, there is that record but preserving something that is someday destined to be broken is hardly worth straining every sinew.
The truth is that of all counties, Mayo is the one who are least in need of the exposure to the elite level football.
Not only have they spent a full decade going full pelt — they have either gone to the All-Ireland semi-final or beyond it for the last seven years — in the last two summers they have played an incredible 19 Championship games.
And they have done all this with one of the tightest panels in the game.
Therein lies the problem — they keep leaning on the same players to pull them out of holes in spring and summer, when their desperate need is to try and develop the depth that will serve them better in the long term.
The League is a testing ground for rookies; something which corner-back Eoin O’Donoghue needed only 80 seconds to find out here when he failed to track Paul Mannion’s end-line run in the second minute which saw Dublin into a lead that they would never lose. But Mayo need O’Donoghue and lots more on top if they are not going to find themselves very soon with a tired team who have all grown old together. It may well be that the stuff is simply not there — not even from that All-Ireland-winning Under 21 team from 2016 —but you suspect that if they were operating at a level lower the likes of the speedy Shairoze Akram would be seeing a lot more game-time than little five-minute windows at the end of matches.
The truth is that Saturday’s night defeat told us nothing that we did not know already.
As ever, it will be deep into the summer before they reveal themselves.
However, someday soon, these Mayo men will have to find the courage to find out what the future holds.
And if relegation allowed for that, it could amount to a mixed blessing.