Green and Red push champs all the way in Carrick
Mayo’s Ella Brennan, Fiona McHale and Tara Needham block the path of Galway’s Louise Ward during last Sunday's TG4 Connacht LGFA senior football championship final at Carrick-on-Shannon. Pictures: David Farrell Photography
The same result but different.
Mayo might have lost another Connacht senior final to their biggest rivals but green shoots were all the talk after this one.
The record book will forever show that Galway completed a three-in-a-row on Sunday and yes, it’s their thirteenth time in sixteen seasons to have been crowned provincial champions, but their credentials were sternly tested in Carrick-on-Shannon.
22 years after lifting the Brendan Martin Cup for the only time in their history, the Tribeswomen are priced as the favourites to win this year’s All-Ireland Championship. But Mayo, despite unable to gain promotion from NFL Division 2, had their neighbours on the rack coming down the home straight, outscoring the Maroon and White by 0-8 to 0-1 between the 33rd minute and full-time but also having a goal disallowed, to end up beaten by three points.
Ultimately, Diane O’Hora’s side paid the price for a very conservative approach to the first-half, one that had ended with Galway six points in front. In fact, Mayo had scored just a single point from play up until the fifth minute of the second-half after which they exploded into life. Their new found intensity and aggression was something Galway looked unprepared for and struggled greatly to contend with.
Had the game gone on any longer it seemed inevitable that Mayo would get a result out of it. But a game is 60 minutes and Galway are the champions, again, and that deserves acknowledgement too, particularly after they had to bounce back from the disappointment of losing last month’s Division 1 final against a Cork side they had led by four points with 10 minutes left to play.
Allowing teams come back at them is an area that manager Daniel Moynihan may well want to address considering they led this one 1-10 to 0-3 with two minutes of the second-half played but only managed to score one more point from thereon.
For Mayo, it was a major improvement on losing last year’s final by 0-16 to 1-4 to the same opposition.
A goal and three points by Galway’s Kate Slevin either side of half-time had been central to Galway building their 10 points lead on Sunday, with Player of the Match Leanne Coen having already fired over four points from play inside the game’s opening 20 minutes.
Mayo might have been short on scores but they had not been short of possession in the first-half, only failing to make greater use of the copious amounts of time they had spent in the Galway half, much of which they spent traversing the 45-metre line laterally, looking devoid of the ambition or ideas at how to pick holes in the opposition’s compact defence.
Coen had kicked three of her side’s first points, Eva Noone the other, before a foul on Lisa Cafferky saw her sister Sinead take a tap and go and feed the ball back to Lisa who slotted over Mayo’s opening point in the 12th minute.
Mayo free-taker Sinead Walsh twice traded points with Noone, a free, and Leanne Coen, in the 19th and 22nd minutes, before Galway carved out the game’s first goal chance. Nicola Ward supplied centre-forward Kate Slevin who smashed the ball against Laura Brennan’s crossbar, with Lynsey Noone alert to the rebound and recovering a point from the situation.
Slevin, from a free and play, nailed her first points of the match and by half-time, the defending champions were 0-9 to 0-3 ahead, with Mayo regretting three shots – two of them two-point attempts – that had dropped into the arms of Galway goalkeeper Leah O’Halloran, and a couple of scorable wides also.
But beginning the second-half believing they should probably have been closer on the scoreboard to Galway, O’Hora’s side was soon taking on yet more water. Only 40 seconds had elapsed when Kate Slevin fired over a third point on the trot, and the day was about to get even better for the Claregalway girl as a minute later she arrowed a shot towards the bottom left corner that unfortunate Mayo corner-back Lucy Wallace, in the act of trying to get back and protect her goal, could only deflect into her own net.
Maybe it was that they had nothing left to lose but Mayo, at this point, rid themselves of their shackles. The half-time introduction of Clodagh Keane was also a help, as the full-forward from Knockmore offered her side the opportunity to be more direct in their play and bypass the well-organised Galway defence.
Sinead Walsh also led by example, hitting back with three points, including Mayo’s first from play in 25 minutes, within six minutes of Mayo conceding the goal. Then came three more, two from the Aoifes of Westport, Staunton and Geraghty, and Walsh with another free, reducing Mayo’s deficit to just four points, with 42 minutes on the clock.
The Green and Red’s in-your-face approach was unnerving Galway whose display was now littered with uncharacteristic mistakes and overturns, and while Leanne Coen did round off a move involving Louise Ward and the Noone sisters, Eva and Lynsey, that first Galway point in 16 minutes was also their last in a game that still had plenty to run.
Mayo thought they had bagged themselves a crucial 54th minute goal when Tara Needham and the newly-introduced Maria Reilly combined to set-up Clodagh Keane who palmed the ball to the net. Referee Aaron Clogher moved in to consult with his umpires and the decision was made to disallow the score, with conflicting reports afterwards about whether Clogher had called a square ball or a foul.
What it didn’t do, however, was deter Mayo from keep battling until full-time.
Staunton slipped in Sinead Walsh who still had plenty to do before dropping the leather onto her left boot and guiding over Mayo’s tenth point while there was a minute left to play when midfielder Hannah Reape was set-up by Walsh and sub Kayla Doherty to split the posts and narrow the gap to a goal.
But time ran out and amidst Mayo’s frustrations, Reape was to receive a straight red card from Clogher after full-time following an altercation with a Galway opponent. That could have ramifications when Mayo enter the All-Ireland Series but one thing is for sure, they will enter that competition in a more positive mindset than many thought might be the case.
