MORTIMER: FINAL DEFEATS REALLY HARD TO STOMACH
FORMER All-star attacker Conor Mortimer has opened up about the pain of All-ireland defeat with Mayo.
The county’s all-time top scorer suffered punishing final defeats to Kerry in 2004 and 2006.
Those are among seven finals that Mayo have qualified for, and lost, since they last lifted the Sam Maguire Cup 66 years ago.
They were particularly difficult for Mortimer to take as he was billed as Mayo’s most lethal finisher but performed poorly in both finals.
He came into the 2006 showpiece as a marked man and simply never got going as Mayo slumped badly against a Kieran Donaghy inspired Kerry.
Mortimer said: “It was hard, both in a team sense and personally because we were s **** and I was s **** . It was just one of those things. All-ireland finals in our time, they went as quickly as that, they went so fast.
“If you don’t get the first couple of balls, you start thinking, ‘right, I have to lose my man, I have to go this way or that way’. And you are overthinking it and muddling yourself up and then it all closes in on top of you.
“You have 80,000 people roaring down on top of you, and the ball comes into you, it might only be in your hands for a second and it is gone again.” Mortimer admitted he was cleaned out by Tom O’sullivan of Kerry in that 2006 final but moreso blames himself.
He said: “It is about what I could have done better. I didn’t make runs diagonally, I didn’t work hard enough.
“You go into a final and your confidence is pretty high coming out of a semi-final and those couple of weeks you don’t train that hard, you are just tipping away.
“In reality, you have to do something different in every single game. I did what I’d done in the semi-final and it wasn’t good enough in the final.”
Mortimer reckons the Mayo players are in a different place now than that team of 2006. They’ve beaten Kerry for a start and come into this final with far more belief that they can actually win it.
He reckons the feverish Mayo fans are cutting them a little more slack too and not being so demanding.
Mortimer said: “This current crop have been in two or three finals and it’s another game to them. The hype when we were preparing for finals in ‘04 and ‘06 was mental. Did we get caught in it? Obviously we did. “I just think you can put all the flags up on Monday, put up all the banners you want then.
“We’ve had the hype and we haven’t won it, maybe have a year where we don’t have the hype and see if that changes things.”
It was hard to lose the finals as an individual and as a team