O'Neill rues 'cheap goals' but says it is no time for panic
Mayo manager Anthony O'Neill says his side need to stop conceding 'cheap goals' after their defeat to TU Dublin last Saturday in the FAI National League. Picture: Paul Phelan/Sportsfile
Mayo are ‘shooting themselves in the foot’ and need to stop giving away ‘cheap goals’ if they are avoid further defeats like they did against TU Dublin last Saturday evening.
That was the view of head coach Anthony O’Neill, who watched his side surrender a two-goal lead at half-time to lose late on.
The first-half was as impressive as Mayo have been since the beginning of the league, but a failure to finish off more chances, combined with poor defending at the other end, is costing the club dearly.
“Very much an old cliché, a game of two halves,” said O’Neill. “I thought our first-half performance was really, really good. I thought a lot of the work we've done during the week, especially after the difficult game last week in Letterkenny, we created enough chances in Letterkenny to get a result.
“Today, obviously, our finishing was much better in the first-half. We created plenty of chances again. We went in two-nil up at half-time. I thought some of our build-up play against their high press, they came out with a really aggressive high press, which we knew they would. We thought we very composed. The back-played some really good football. We were by far the better team in the first-half.
The game changed in the second half. They changed formation, and I didn’t think the intensity of our play was the same in the second half. We dropped off, which was disappointing from our perspective, and then we gave away a couple of very poor goals. We’re going through a process at the moment; we’re giving away bad goals and shooting ourselves in the foot really.
“The points we’re dropping are our own making. We know that and we own that. We had a good chat about it in the dressing room afterwards, but we’re not going to change too much about how we’re playing because, you know, people will look at the result and the collapse in the second-half, but a lot of what we're doing, we're happy with.” That happiness means O’Neill will resist any calls to alter the team’s style of play going forward.
“The lads said it there, it's not structurally, it's not anything systematic. It's really individual errors. We've got to own it, we've got to live with it, we've got to take the heat at the moment and just stick together and we will.
“There's good characters in that dressing room and we've a massive game against Salthill next Saturday and think that will show the real character of the team, and this is the great thing about this short season is that we're learning a lot about ourselves and it's a new team.
“So many new players have never played together before and we're going to learn so much about ourselves as a team over these couple of months, which is going to make a stronger go into the first full season.” O’Neill added: “That's the good thing about the short season; you have this time to figure things out. We're going to learn a lot more about ourselves over the next coming weeks but we're not going to panic. We said it there in the dressing room, we're actually going to double down on what we're doing, and the lads all want to do that.
“They don't want to change what we're doing. They're happy with the way we're training, the way we're progressing, and the way we're playing. I think if we cut out the silly mistakes, we'll be fine.” With final 20 minutes of game seeing TU Dublin seize control, there was little activity on the Mayo bench, with Aron Heaney the only substitute made. But O’Neill said he was happy enough with the chances they were making to ring wholesale changes.
“We wouldn't be making any changes to the back four, there was no need to. We're missing Oisin O'Reilly today at centre-back, but there's no need to make any changes to the back four,” offered O’Neill.
“I thought Ben and Darragh and Connor were doing pretty well. They were probably tired towards the end, the last 10-15 minutes, we brought on Aaron Heaney for Darragh Forde, but we're still creating chances in the second half, and we didn't take them.
“We just felt with the lads we had on the pitch, we could still create chances, which we did. Maybe by the last five, ten minutes, we went out of it a bit, but yeah, we just didn't feel like we had any need to make too many changes today.”
