Galway boss praises ‘character’ of his dominant troops as
ANY notion that James Horan’s second coming would magically cure Mayo’s football ills was obliterated in Castlebar on Saturday.
On an utterly depressing evening for the home side, they fell to their seventh straight loss to Galway in the last four years.
Tribes boss Kevin Walsh did his level best to chalk it down as just another night at the office.
“Game five of seven. It’s not about having so many (wins) in a row, it’s about us developing our players,” he suggested.
Still, the journey home on the N17 was surely one to savour. Not alone have Galway joined Mayo in second place in the Division 1 table, they have also tightened the vice-grip they now exercise over their next-door neighbours.
Not since Mayo beat them in the 2015 Connacht final, in Walsh’s debut season, have the Tribesmen lost this duel. Since then Galway have chalked up three Championship, two League and two FBD League wins over Mayo on the spin.
In his first stint as Mayo boss Horan never lost to Galway in either Championship or the League, but now he has suffered two losses in quick succession.
“Every defeat is not great, but it all depends on how you interpret it. So we’ll see what are the first couple of things we need to work on and we will just grind away at those,” said Horan, who insisted there was no danger of his side developing a mental block about their meetings against Galway.
Denying Mayo goals has been the single biggest factor in turning this fixture around for Galway. In their five Championship wins over Galway between 2011 and 2015, Mayo scored 11 goals, but have only managed three in their seven games since.
Furthermore, Mayo have never managed to score more than 12 points against them in the last four years. However, they will scarcely have a better chance of winning than they had on Saturday night.
They won more opposition kickouts (13-7); had more shots from open play (18-11); more shots from placed ball (11-9); more attacks (40-30) and more turnovers (26-24).
The two statistics which decided the outcome, though, was Mayo’s tally of 11 wides compared to six for the visitors, whose shot efficiency was 60pc compared to 41pc for Horan’s men.
There were two key pivotal passages in the tie watched by a crowd of 10,675. Backed by a strong wind Galway raced into a 0-4 to 0-1 lead and were 0-5 to 0-3 up when Michael Daly and Barry McHugh were sin-binned within 90 seconds of each other.