O’CONNOR BACK AT IT
WHEN James Horan accused Mayo players of ‘showboating’ in Mullingar, it is safe to assume that Cillian O’Connor wasn’t one of those he had in mind.
Entering the play after 45 minutes for what was his first taste of competitive action since the All-Ireland f i nal l ast September, O’Connor wasn’t about to play fast and loose. He was simply glad to be there and to do his job.
That desire showed in his play as the two-time Young Player of the Year powered around the forward line, trying to make some sort of impact.
He got onto the score sheet, too, with an important 62nd-minute point from a free that put Mayo six up and all but secured victory after the westerners had earlier, remarkably, coughed up a nine-point lead.
Afterwards, as Horan lamented his team’s ‘naïve’ defending and apparent showboating, he revealed his delight about the full- forward’s
8 points, all frees, for O’Connor in last year’s All-Ireland final.
return, pointing out that O’Connor will ‘ gain match fitness very quickly’.
It is a positive place for O’Connor to find himself, having been left with the dark thought of impending shoulder surgery after his previous game for Mayo, the devastating one-point All-Ireland loss to Dublin.
‘It’s great to be back,’ said O’Connor. ‘It was great just to get a run, to get back in the fray, get a few touches after nearly six months out.
‘You’re going to need a few weeks to get back into it. But I have trained as hard as anyone else in the squad so I’m feeling pretty good.
‘I had a short cameo against Westmeath but it felt brilliant to represent the county again.
‘The most important thing of all is winning and the two points is good, especially when we got them against a team fighting for their Division 1 lives. We can take a lot from the win and also a lot of lessons from the mistakes we made.’
It was those mistakes that occupied manager Horan’s thoughts after the five-point win, Mayo’s second of the campaign.
The back-to-back AllIreland final manager cut a horrified figure as he considered how his team went from a nine- point cushion to trailing by two in the space of 30 minutes.
Horan (below) didn’t take much solace from the fact that Mayo did at least fight back and win. If it was Cork they’d been playing, he noted pointedly, they wouldn’t have been as forgiving as Westmeath. O’Connor appeared to go along with Horan’s thinking as he rejected the suggestion that Mayo must be one of t he country’s mentally strongest teams to have finished off Westmeath. ‘I don’t know about that,’ said O’Connor. ‘I suppose we are three or four years on the road and we have been in situations like Sunday’s before. Last year for example, we lost the first three League games but we didn’t panic and we got into the semis. We lost two this year and we didn’t panic either.
‘But the Westmeath game has definitely given us a lot to learn from. It can be a kick up the backside when you throw away a nine-point lead. We wouldn’t be happy with that. Happy we came back into it, but not happy with having to do that.
‘We need to look at what happened and see how we can improve on that. The first half gave us plenty to think about. We will do that when we get back to training on Tuesday night.’
The result keeps Mayo in with a fighting chance of reaching the League semi-finals. They host table-toppers Cork in Castlebar on Sunday.
O’Connor admitted he would prefer a more low-key half-time discussion this weekend having suffered a 10-point turnaround before the break in Mullingar.
‘What was said? “It’s time to refocus”,’ recalled O’Connor. ‘“Just to get back to playing the way we did at the start of the match”, and not to panic, to stay calm. Seamie [ O’Shea] and Aidan [O’Shea] won plenty of primary possession around the middle and that gave us a base to thankfully push on.’
Veteran forward Andy Moran missed the Westmeath win with a minor AC-joint injury but should be back for the Rebels date.