WE’LL KEEP

ATNDY MORAN wants you to know something; don’t go wasting your pity on him. He has heard all the soft words, has got a whiff of all those burning church candles and felt the entire football nation pat his head. ‘There they go again, Mayo, God help us…’

He struggles to see why the team he leads, the most successful to emerge from his county in over 60 years; the one that last weekend started their charge for a fourth Connacht title in a row and a third successive appearance in an All-Ireland final, have somehow made it into the nation’s prayerbook as one of the sorrowful mysteries.

He has an idea, mind. He has played in three losing All-Ireland finals, and missed another as captain in 2012 when he ruptured his cruciate in an All-Ireland quarter-final against Down, but your pity is not wanted because it is not needed.

‘“Have I been tested more than anyone?” People love saying that to me, but there were two teams in an All-Ireland final last year and Mayo were one of them. There were 30 other counties looking in, who would love to be in that position,’ reasons Moran.

‘Look, I sat with my tickets [in 2012], the ones that we got every year because we e had failed to make it there in the first place, e, up in my place in the upper tier of the Canal End dying to be out there on that pitch.

‘If people think that we are suffering they really should look at the 30 other counties that had it much worse.’

Moran is not in denial, he wears last September’s defeat by Dublin with all the comfort of a hair-shirt but that is s that the wardrobe of choice.

‘I don’t think you ever get over it. How can you if it is always there in the back of your mind?

‘I lost county finals as a young fella and d I am not sure if I have still got over them. m I was very successful in the Sigerson Cup, I won three and yet the one that at really irks me is the one that we didn’t ’t win because I felt we should have won.

‘So I don’t think that you ever get over er losing All-Ireland finals. You always have ve them in the back of your mind, but giving ng up is the biggest failure of all and this his team is not going to give up.

‘We are going to keep fighting. I have ve 100 per cent faith that we can win any ny Championship we enter and I don’t see ee why this year should be any different.’

The danger, though, is that this could become a self-defeating prophecy.

The spring unnerved Mayo fans. There was little evidence that the annual trawl for talent has left them any richer, there is even less sense that manager James Horan has settled on his best team, and their capacity to think their way through tight games still does not convince. WICE, against Dublin – a game in which they produced their best football since last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final mauling of Donegal – and Derry, they held match-winning second-half leads against teams reduced to 14 players and still ended up losing. It prompted their former player and coach Liam McHale to question their ability as a group to have the smarts to close out games.

Moran takes that hit on the chin, but calls for a little perspective.

‘Yeah, I can’t but agree with him [McHale]. We made mistakes against the 14 men and the only thing I can guarantee is that it won’t happen again,’ he stresses.

‘Moving forward is all you can do. We have worked on it and we will be fine next time that happens.

‘Were we disappointed with the Derry game? You better believe it. We were disgusted, we felt we left it behind us.

‘That is the way it is, but we played Dublin two weeks before that and people were saying it was the best game in the League and then two weeks after we get beaten by Derry and they are saying we are rubbish. There has to be a bit of balance.’

That could also extend to his own form, which dipped in late summer last year to the degree that speculation was rife suggesting he was going to be dropped for last September’s final.

‘I think it genuinely takes 18 months to come back from a cruciate,’ he admits.

‘The big difference with a professional sport is that when you come back you have games week on week to fit back into it, whereas last year when I came straight into the Galway game after nine-ten months out I had to wait another month to play another game.

‘I felt I was really getting into form and then I tweaked my hamstring before the Tyrone game.

‘What happens then is that you don’t have the base of work done that everyone else has done, so that week is massive and I probably wasn’t 100

There are 30 other counties looking in who would have loved to have been in our position last season