An indifferent league campaign leaves Mayo with plenty to prove this summer

Three wins and three losses in six games just about sums up Mayo’s indifferent National League form. We have done enough to survive in Division One but not nearly enough to suggest we are All-Ireland contenders.

In many ways, the positions of the teams in Division One and Division Two offer a fairly good indicator of the summer to come. Dublin, Derry and Kerry are top of Division One with Mayo, Tyrone and Galway in the chasing pack, along with Armagh and Donegal at the top of Division Two. The already-relegated Monaghan and the endangered Roscommon have had poor campaigns in Division One but are still capable of taking a serious scalp in Ulster and Connacht respectively. It is hard to see anyone else featuring in the race for Sam.

If Dublin, Kerry and Derry have broken away from the peloton, then you get a sense that Mayo are having to work harder and harder just to stay with the chasing group. We have been missing some key players during the League campaign but we are still struggling to fill key positions and last Sunday’s erratic display against Derry has only added to the doubts.

For example, the position of goalkeeper, which had seemed decided upon up to now, is up for debate again after Colm Reape suffered his poorest outing in the Green and Red. It is hard not to have sympathy for the Knockmore man, especially when he trying to execute a short kickout strategy in such a pressure-cooker environment. It’s easy to blame the ‘keeper when kickouts go astray – as one did for Derry’s second goal – but he is only as good as the players in front of him and there weren’t too many Mayo players making themselves available in easy-to-reach positions.

The Mayo defence as a unit had a pretty dismal afternoon on Sunday. Even before the concession of the first goal there were warning signs we were in for a difficult afternoon, and when that first goal came in the 8th minute we survived one scare – when Niall Loughlin blazed a ball across the Mayo goalmouth – before the excellent Shane McGuigan attempted to kick the ball over the bar only for Loughlin to fist to the Mayo net.

Mayo’s response was immediate through Jordan Flynn but we continued to offer up vast amounts of space to the Derry attackers and Loughlin would have had a second goal were it not for a last-ditch tackle from Bob Tuohy.

To be fair to Mayo, there were some marginal refereeing calls at critical moments in the first-half, including a free against Aidan O’Shea for overcarrying in the 26th minute that McGuigan converted and, of course, the short kickout decision against Reape in the 31st minute that led to another Derry point from a free. On another day, those decisions might have gone the other way, but there is no getting away from the fact that we really struggled when Derry pressed our kickout in that first-half, culminating in McGuigan’s goal in the 31st minute, which left Mayo with a mountain to climb in the second-half.

Derry’s third goal in the 43rd minute was the nadir for a Mayo defence that looked as porous as it has done for a long, long time – certainly, the most open it has been in this league campaign. Conor McCluskey waltzed through the Mayo defence with worrying ease – in fact, only the grand marshal for the St Patrick’s Day Parade had an easier passage through Castlebar on Sunday.

It is to Mayo’s credit that they staged a stirring fightback between the 50th and 62nd minutes, reducing Derry’s nine-point advantage to just two points with the excellent Paul Towey contributing 1-1 after coming on a substitute. But it is equally worth remembering that Derry struck two bad wides mid-way through that Mayo revival – Cormac Murphy send a mark wide in the 56th minute, and when Mayo conceded their own kickout, Niall Toner had another bad miss. Had those shots gone over it would have stopped the Mayo momentum and brought the Derry advantage back to six points.

As it was, Derry stopped the rot in the 63rd minute when Conor Glass struck their first in over a quarter of an hour and they eased to victory by outscoring Mayo by three points to one in the final five minutes. Much of the commentary after the game suggested that Mayo had “pushed Derry all the way” but that seems like a very optimistic interpretation of events in MacHale Park on Sunday. Derry were, by far, the better team and were well worth their five-point winning margin.

The Mayo defence will improve once David McBrien and Paddy Durcan return but we are still short of big players in key positions. The goalkeeping position remains problematic as does centre-back where several players have been tried but none have made it their own. Midfield is improving and Mattie Ruane showed signs of the kind of form that made him one of the best players in the country in 2021 but we’re still very inconsistent in that area – and that’s the way it has been for a few seasons now.

Up front, Ryan O’Donoghue offers a lot at centre-forward and can really pick out a pass to unlock a defence, but we also need him closer to goal so we’re really robbing Peter to pay Paul by moving him out to the ‘40’. Tommy Conroy produced his best game since his return from injury but still lacks the clinical finishing of a player like Shane McGuigan, who was just a joy to watch. His opening point was worth the admission fee alone.

At the start of the league, this writer was of the opinion that a good 2024 for Mayo would be the retention of our Division One status and a place in the last four in the championship. I’ve seen nothing in the last six games to change my point of view. Two of our three wins came against teams now threatened with relegation and we were lucky to get out of MacHale Park with two points against Dublin. We might have got a point in Tralee but we were beaten fair and square by Tyrone and Derry. We haven’t had a bad league campaign but we have hardly blazed a trail either and we haven’t unearthed too many new players, especially up front where we need them most.

It is worth remembering that the championship today is a lot harder to win than it was a couple of years ago when a provincial title and a handy quarter-final could set a team up for a big semi-final showdown with one of the top sides. Mayo will have to beat a lot of quality teams later in the summer if we are to advance to the last four and it remains to be seen whether we have the depth in our squad to sustain a serious challenge through June and July.

Our first priority should be victory over Monaghan in our final league game next Sunday and then the focus turns to the Connacht championship. The return of key players will help but it is hard to see at this juncture where we are going to get the scores to win big games. We have scored six goals in six League games – two from defenders (Eoghan MacLaughlin and Stephen Coen), two from penalties (Cillian O’Connor v Galway and Tyrone respectively) and one each from Jordan Flynn and Paul Towey last Sunday. Derry, on the other hand, have scored 11 goals in six matches, with eight different scorers, including four of the six forwards who started last Sunday. Their top goalscorer with three is corner-back Conor McCluskey, which just shows how much the game has changed in recent years.

Mayo have struggled to find the opposition net since the new management took over and this year’s league campaign is following a similar pattern to last year’s championship when our forwards scored one goal in six games. That will need to change – and change fast – if we are to advance beyond the All-Ireland quarter-finals this year.