Mayo need extra-time to find their firing range
THEIR comfort at the death could not disguise reality: this Mayo team are now living on borrowed time. They found a way to win here but at a price as they lost Patrick Durcan to a red card, while twin pivots Lee Keegan and Cillian O’Connor hobbled out of the latter stages of extra-time.
Afterwards, manager Stephen Rochford was upbeat about with his A&E bulletin – Keegan took a blow to the shin, while O’Connor, the scorer of 0-12, suffered from cramp.
‘We have no worries about either of them,’ Rochford reassured reporters afterwards.
But then this error-ridden display will have left him with enough worries and will have Mayo folk with even more reason to chomp at what is left of their digits when they tune into tomorrow morning’s thirdround draw.
They looked heading for the kind of exit here that would almost certainly have had widespread and unforgiving consequences, but they somehow found a way.
They trailed by two points (0-12 to 0-10) with three minutes of normal time left but somehow clawed their way back to safety in an actionpacked finale.
Durcan’s last significant act before seeing a straight red in extra time was to kick the point that would launch their recovery with three minutes remaining.
They should have never found themselves in such dire straits with the 17 wides – a number that had climbed to 19 by the end of extratime – going some way to explain the panic which gripped their supporters in the 11,465 attendance in MacHale Park.
It wasn’t just the wides they kicked that will gnaw, but the goal chances that were spurned with alarming frequency.
For all of Derry’s toil and organisation, they gave up five goal chances in normal time and Mayo had spurned four of them before Séamus O’Shea, on as sub, and Cillian O’Connor combined to release Conor Loftus who fired high into the net in the 68th minute.
When Loftus, serving as a reminder that Rochford possesses some finishing quality on his bench, added a point within a minute, Mayo looked home and hosed.
But doing things the easy way remains a foreign concept in these parts and in the 70th minute veteran Mark Lynch was at the end of Carlos McWilliam’s centre to flick it to the net, heralding that extra 20minute period. In truth, Mayo, as horribly as they played, just about deserved that chance if only because of their relentless pressure in the second half as they turned up the heat on McKinless’ restarts, turning over nine of his kick-outs.
That stat should have been decisive but when you can’t score – they managed just one point from those turned over kicks – it really does not matter.
The missed goal chances were down to back luck – Andy Moran saw his blistering drive come back off the post – and the excellence of McKinless, who made point blank saves from O’Connor and Moran.
But that pressure has to tell and it did in extra-time as McKinless turned the ball over yet again in the fourth minute of the opening period to gift another Mayo sub, Jason Doherty, with the kind of gift that was just too rude to turn down.
After that, even despite David Clarke having to save James Kielt’s 77th-minute penalty, it was always going be straightforward for Mayo and so it proved as they “won” extra-time emphatically, 1-9 to 0-1.
If there was a plus-side apart from the result for Rochford, it came in the dice he rolled pre-match in giving Aidan O’Shea his first start since last year’s All-Ireland final replay.
An ankle injury, sustained playing basketball in the pre-season, and a subsequent groin injury left O’Shea creaking with rust in his four offthe-bench appearances this season and he marked his return here with a powerful display.
Sure, there were errors too but he got to the pitch of this game quicker than most of his team-mates.
He drew fouls for three converted Cillian O’Connor frees and came up
with a couple of huge marks when David Clarke was forced to go long.
‘He was superb,’ gushed Rochford afterwards. ‘We have not been able to win a single throw-up ball until today and he won three of them which just showed you the kind of form he was in.’
In truth, although Derry had their chances, not least a high percentage free from Kielt deep in added on time at the end of minutes, Mayo always looked the more likelier to advance not least because of Derry’s lack of ambition as the visitors sought to draw blood with a two-man attack of Danny Tallon and Danny Heavron.
Still, the visitors led by a point at half-time (0-8 to 0-7) but that was mainly down to a misfiring Mayo team that needed to buy that extra period of time to get the job done.
From here on, though, they may find that time is a limited commodity.