THE MURR THE MERRIER

DAVID MURRAY isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when he reflects on Roscommon’s 2017 Championship campaign.

He may have collected his first Connacht title with a surprise win over Galway, but they let what would have been an extremely rare victory over Mayo slip through their fingers at the All-ireland quarter-final.

They got a draw in the end but lost the replay by 22 points.

“You are stuck between two, to be honest,” says Murray (left) of the elation of beating Galway and the desolation of the Mayo loss.

“You are looking back at the Connacht final as the pinnacle of your career really and then you are looking at the replay against Mayo which is something you are always going to look back on with so many thoughts.

“There was so many things that went not as we planned.

“It is a bit of both, you can look at the positives from the Connacht final or the stuff that needs to be improved on after the replay. It is hard to pick out an outstanding memory.”

The defender said that the Mayo defeat has had more of a motivational than demoralising effect.

“The winning motivates you because you want to taste that again and then you are motivated by the way we failed to perform against Mayo because we are better than that. That definitely motivates because we know we can account for ourselves a lot better than that.

“There was a couple of things. We probably didn’t match them physically.

“When you look at the drawn game, you are not going to change that much in size over the course of a week but we were a lot more aggressive, a lot more physical the first day whereas the second day we weren’t.”