Having scanned the online horizon, I see there’s bugger all to report back on about Saturday’s match. A few sensitive souls could, I guess, have been a bit put out by Johnno’s interview with the Mayo News, where, for the umpteenth time, the dreaded “p” word was used but if you look carefully at what he said, it’s clear that he’s not exhorting us to be patient about how we fare against Tyrone:
We knew when we took on this job eighteen months ago that we were heading into a period where everyone, collectively in Mayo, needed to be patient. The pressure is on the collective county to do that, to not show panic. I’m long enough on the road at this stage to know that. We’d love to win this game and we’ll be doing everything we can to win it. All of us, the players and management, will give every ounce we have and everything will be done to try and win it.
So there you have it: the Deputy wants us not to show panic. We can be as impatient as we want but we don’t want to show the world that we’re panicking. That’s fair enough, I think. NOW DON’T FUCKING START PANICKING, ALRIGHT?
In that same interview, Johnno quite rightly pooh-paws all that talk about us not liking the qualifiers, saying that if anyone within the camp had said that they had a liking for that route, the journos would have been “after us like greyhounds”. Well, some of them anyway – I’m not sure The Voice of Experience could ever be confused with a greyhound. I see that Alan Dillon is also making the same point – apropos the qualifiers, not greyhounds – by insisting that the team is up for this one. Good man, Alan, that’s the spirit.
Apart from that, the cupboard is fairly bare. I hear that the print version of the Western has some quote about Ronan not being out of the running for a starting place on Saturday (so says one of the ever-informative lads on gaaboard.com) but I’m not sure what that means in practice. I guess at this stage we’ll have to just wait and see who is named in the team – the starting fifteen could well be announced later tonight so I’ll be keeping an online vigil later on just in case.
There is some news from the enemy camp, which is that Colm Cavanagh’s injury has been confirmed as a break to his collarbone. That’s not a surprise – he looked well pissed off leaving the field the last day and while he’s not a first fifteen man for the O’Neill County, he’s yet another casualty they could have done without. His big brother is, however, supposed to be okay though the way he same down head first just prior to Westmeath’s goal on Saturday looked anything but okay.
Finally, the Paul Galvin soap opera looks to be nearing its utterly predictable end, with reports already suggesting that the player is unlikely to appeal his nice new and far more digestible 12-week ban. So if the Kingdom reach the All-Ireland, he’ll be able to come on with a few minutes left, thus allowing him to go up at collect the Sam, which, in turn, will provide his mammy and the wider Kerry diaspora with no end of joy. Well, that’s unless he goes and does something like this again, the bollix.
If anybody other than John O Mahoney were making the remarks about rebuilding, patience and long haul they would be ran out of the county long ago. Perhaps we will win on Saturday, however up to now and into the second year we have one Connacht championship victory, against Sligo who a few weeks later were dumped from the Tommy Murphy by London. Crossmolina would hammer London. Apart from Cunniffe and Parsons we are reheating old beans from ’04 and ’06. Maybe, just maybe, thats the best we can do and having a hundred O Mhoneys would make no difference. Still having reached u21 finals in ’04 and ’06, along with the minor final of ’05 we should be in better shape. Lets not forget we got to senior finals twice in the last four years as well so the whole thing baffles me. We have a good record v Tyrone and who knows. Had Alex Ferguson lost to Notts Forest back in 1990 or so in the F,A cup he would never been left to build the empire he created.