Monday morning. And all around you is normality, one child protesting about the overly generous smearing of butter on their school lunch sandwich while another complains about not having enough. Nobody seems to care about turnovers or kickout percentages, because somebody forgot to pack a towel for swimming lessons. Probably you. A lovely ordinariness to it all. But inside, just pain.
The morning after losing a championship game is a lonely place for an intercounty manager. I’ve lived through enough of them to know. Several results over the last two weekends got me thinking about those experiences.
Andy Moran will be hurting. So too will Jim McGuinness. Just as Robbie Brennan was last week. Because the grand plans they had hatched in Castlebar and Convoy and Dunganny last November have come undone, unravelled before the May bank holiday.
But while everybody else around the county is laying blame, as manager, your job now is to try lay a new way forward. Because if the manager isn’t seen to believe in the group, they’re dead in the water.
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And it can be difficult to find those green shoots because you sluggishly get out of bed on those mornings after a defeat. You hardly got a wink of sleep the night before, replaying the game in your head – could we have done that, should we have done this? Your head is a fog of questions and regrets.
I remember talking with Tony McEntee in the days after the 2017 All-Ireland final, a cloud of darkness still hanging overhead and I didn’t really want to see anybody. Tony said the grieving process after a big championship defeat is almost like a death. Okay, it’s not as profound or tragic, but when you commit so much of your time and so much of your family’s time, if it doesn’t hurt deep in your soul, then you weren’t invested enough.
So, when normal life is milling around you on Monday morning, it can be hard to focus. You’re distracted. But you simply have to plot a way forward. The alternative is to throw your hat at it.
Firstly, it’s important to recognise Roscommon were full value for their victory and I will revisit their progress under Mark Dowd later in the summer, because I believe they are capable of making a significant impact in the All-Ireland SFC.
Andy said on Sunday evening that a Connacht title wasn’t a target. Look, I don’t believe that. You’re telling me that dressingroom prepared for this championship and the Connacht title wasn’t a tangible goal they set themselves?
The thought of being unable to derail Galway’s five-in-a-row bid will sting the Mayo players. Trying to manage the narrative that Connacht wasn’t a goal is futile. Plus, you’ve got way bigger things to be dealing with.
Much of the post-game analysis focused on the kickout battle. And while it certainly had a big impact, it was only one factor of several that contributed to the outcome.
Mayo led by three points at half-time. But in the first 10 minutes of the second-half, Roscommon kicked nine points from eight shots, so their attack completion was exemplary.
Mayo had seven kickouts during that period and only lost two, retaining the other five. But they turned over the ball four times and Roscommon were able to capitalise.
It took until Kobe McDonald’s brilliant score in the 42nd minute for Mayo to even have a shot on goal in the second half. By the time Diarmuid Murtagh was kicking a two-pointer in the 46th minute, Mayo had managed just three shots and two points in the second half.
If they had managed five attack completions from their five retained kickouts, maybe they’d have had four scores and the game would have had a different complexion.
And the concession of 2-25 needs to be looked at from a Mayo perspective.
This idea of chaos is often thrown about when it comes to how Mayo like to play. I don’t believe that is how you build a consistent, sustainable level of performance, because good teams will simply disrupt that and impose their sense of control. You must be process-driven to build cohesion. None of that tallies with chaos.
But you can create momentum shifters from moments of great defensive actions, be it a diving block or an interception or one of those plays when Keith Higgins used to burst out from within a forest of bodies with the ball in his hands. Those moments can help swing the pendulum, but chaos by its very nature does not lend itself to control.
Mayo people will find it hard to pluck positives from Sunday’s performance but I believe they can find positives in the calibre of people inside that dressingroom.
Mayo’s defence last season conceded the least number of opposition shots per game in the entire country – an average of just 24.
That was with the likes of Jack Coyne and Rory Brickenden and Paddy Durcan on the team, so we know those players have the capability to shore up the defence.
Mayo have to go back to strong defending where players aren’t left isolated.
Take the role of the domestique in cycling, a rider who sacrifices personal glory for the greater good of the team. They empty themselves so that somebody else can shine. It’s often unseen work. But absolutely vital to the success of the team.
As is true when a guy out the field puts pressure on a kick-pass inside, because that makes the defender’s job of vying for possession or making an interception a lot easier. And those things don’t just happen, you must work on that in training to instil good team defensive principles.
Defeats are never just because of one issue. There are always lots of contributing factors – so it’s about understanding what they were and addressing them.
Kickouts, breaking ball, they are all factors – but so too is not making a block or getting a hand in or maybe even being prepared to take a yellow with a late tackle when a game is threatening to slip away from you. None of that happened with Mayo on Sunday; they were too passive when not in possession.
They need to find the solutions within the dressingroom and knowing the characters in there, they will have the answers. Then it’s up to management to enable them to solve those problems.
With April still having a few days to run, this is not where Mayo, Donegal or Meath planned to be – the purgatory of waiting for the All-Ireland series to begin while the business end of the provincial championships approaches. A football limbo.
But that is their lot for now. And they all must plan a new pathway forward. It is said you learn more in defeat than victory, so perhaps you really can only treat every day like a school day.
