Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
‘Common touch is a problem for Brady and Blues
“Going by us last year, we’re a good bit off it. We could have won it the first day at Croke Park but you could see in the week how much they learned.
“So it just showed really, they are on a different level to where we were last August. We’re not there yet, not at all. They’ve been getting to semi-finals and finals, consistently and we haven’t been anywhere near that.” How far off it are they? “There is no guarantee at all. I don’t know how long it will take.
“For us, we’ve been winning Connacht titles maybe once every 10 years on average.
“The first thing is to try and win more Connacht titles. Not just once every 10 years.”
Having come so close to beating Mayo last year for the first time since 2001, to lose the replay by 22 points was gutwrenching.
“I think the second day was more reflective, yeah. They had a number of games where they might have been tired and might have just came into the game and maybe didn’t expect us to play as well. The second day you can really see how they honed in on certain areas.
“Our flaws were that we didn’t improve, we stayed the same whereas they improved dramatically in a week which just shows how good of a team they are to be able to do that.”
Still though, having been in San Francisco when Roscommon won Connacht in 2010 and then sitting out much of the Evans reign, Devaney cherishes last year’s success having admitted he feared he might never win a provincial title.
“There was times where I thought I’d never win a Connacht title but I got the sense when I came back in that the team had the potential to win a Connacht title and we were building towards that.
“Although we did get hammered by Galway in the replay of the Connacht final the previous year, I still thought that we could win one so there was definitely hope there that we could have and luckily we did last year.”