I’m back home again after my latest sojourn away and there are a few things to update on so here goes.

The first is that the venue and time for the Connacht junior football final has now been set and, lo and behold, the powers-that-be have indeed decided to keep the action in East Mayo.  The provincial decider between our lads and reigning All-Ireland champs Sligo is set to go ahead on Friday, 3rd June at Fr. O’Hara Park in Charlestown where throw-in is set for 7.30 pm.  The ref will be Leitrim’s Eamon O’Grady.

Ahead of this final, junior manager John Kelly has said that the door is still open for players who want to help progress the county’s push for honours at this level. In this respect, it’s interesting to see that ex-senior player David Kilcullen – who made two senior championship appearances for us in the 2007 qualifiers –  has joined the junior panel since the win over the Rossies, where he’ll be rubbing shoulders with others such as Colm Boyle and Michael Conroy who have appeared at senior level in recent years.

Back to the seniors where our final challenge match ahead of the trip to Ruislip is set to take place tomorrow evening at Ballintubber, where Offaly provide the opposition.  Mike Finnerty had a report earlier in the week in the Mayo News on who is and isn’t likely to feature in this run-out, while in the same paper, Sean Rice gave his view on the battle for midfield places ahead of the Ruislip trip.

The match in Ballintubber gets underway at around 4 pm tomorrow evening and I’ll be on the lookout for Twitter updates to RT while the action is underway there.

That’s it – back tomorrow with my own preview of the upcoming championship.  I hadn’t really intended on doing one but five hours is a long time to have to spend in an aeroplane and I wasn’t in the mood to sleep so I ended up belting out something on the laptop.  It still needs a bit of buffing but I’ll stick it up here at some point tomorrow. ‘Till then.