THERE’LL BE NO REPEAT OF REPLAY DRUBBING
Mchale: Rossies have learned so much since 11 point hammering
ROSCOMMON selector Liam Mchale insists their defence won’t be cut open as easily as it was 12 months ago.
Galway netted three times in last year’s Connacht final replay win and won by 11 points as the Rossies caved in.
It’s been all downhill since then for the Kevin Mcstay managed side who lost to Clare in the qualifiers and were relegated from Division One of this year’s league.
But Mayo legend Mchale is adamant that they’ve actually improved their defence and said they’ve learned from competing with Division One teams throughout spring.
He was buoyed by the huge tally they put up on Leitrim in the Connacht semi-finals too.
Mchale said: “To score 2-23 against Leitrim was great. We missed a lot of good chances but we liked the way we played overall. What we were working on while on the practice pitch came to fruition a lot of the time.
“What we’re trying to achieve, down the road, is to break down these very difficult defences, the likes of the Galway defence.
“They get a lot of men back, soak up a lot of pressure and then have the athleticism and skill to counter and hurt you on break and we’ve done a lot of work on that.
“A lot of that, we could see that the guys were getting and they understand what we’re trying to do. “I think that gives the boys belief and it gives us belief going into this match that what happened last year will not happen this year. “The first game last year was tight, the second game the three horrendous goals that we gave away were the difference. “We gave two very bad goals away in the first half and one in the second half and that just busted the game on us.” The Rossies have been without key players this year like Cathal Cregg (inset), Neil Collins and David Keenan who have made themselves unavailable. They crashed out of Division 1 during spring with six defeats and leaked 2-29 to Dublin at Croke Park.
But Mchale says the reality is that they were learning from the very best all the time.
He said: “We actually learned a lot from the league. Even though we took some bad beatings, at least we were getting beaten by the best teams in the country.
“Dublin gave us an awful hammering but we created a lot of chances that night seven goal chances - and it could possibly have been a lot closer than we ended up.
“I think we recovered from that league campaign but I suppose the simple fact of the matter is that we’re trying to build up a team
“A team that really, really believes that they can win a game like this going into it, that they can beat Galway in a Connacht final.”