Old failings rearing its head for Mayo

As Peter Harte fizzed a long ball into the Tyrone full-forward line, there was still relatively little danger from a Mayo perspective. Darragh Canavan had his back to goal as he collected the ball and, more to the point, he was moving away from the square.

But the 24-year-old is a special talent, that rare find that can produce a block of gold from a speck of dirt. He can manoeuvre in ways that would leave most other players without a working ligament left in their ankles. Whatever about defending him, he can be discombobulating to watch. Sam Callinan may be one of the best young defenders in the country, and the heir apparent to Lee Keegan, but Twinkle Toes Canavan is the son of a deity in these parts. And on Saturday night in Omagh, Callinan was put to work for his supper. The Mayo man would be forgiven for slumping into an armchair after the game and not getting back up until Monday morning. It was that type of night.

The Ballina Stephenites man had already been dragged across every inch of the Healy Park turf when his man raced on to Harte's pass. And although he had made himself big, Canavan jived both to the right and to the left, before leaving his man in knots and piercing the ball past Robbie Hennelly at the near post. Darren McCurry may have scored eight points as Tyrone registered their second win of the league campaign, but Canavan was his side's head chef.

Even when Tyrone set up defensively during the opening 35 minutes, their star forward was able to cook on his own up front. He was a troublemaker from the outset, pulling Callinan around like a petulant child hanging out of his mother at the supermarket. And he did so without much support, with the rest of his side banked in their own half in the hope of suffocating Mayo and playing on the break.

There hadn't been defending like this since the first Siege of Ceuta. Back then, it took the Moroccans 26 years to take the city from the Spaniards - and you got the sense that it would take Mayo just as long to threaten Niall Morgan's goal. Even points were proving difficult to come by, with Stephen Coen eventually popping forward to score the type of point from a narrow angle that would've gone viral if had come from David Clifford's left peg.

But a penalty arrived out of nowhere after Cormac McQuinn was adjudged to have cynically tripped Jordan Flynn as he raced down the neck of Tyrone's defence. Cillian O'Connor stepped up to the spot and dispatched it high to Morgan's right. Top bins. A second goal almost arrived soon after but Conor McStay took the safe option and tapped over. The Tyrone walls were beginning to show gaps.

That bright spell could've been a catalyst for a better functioning Mayo forward unit, particularly if it compelled Tyrone to push out the field a little. But while the home side were indeed more attacking after the break, Mayo's forwards struggled to find the form that has been missing since last season.

Meanwhile, Canavan was still keeping Mayo's defence alert, buzzing about with a variety of unpredictable runs and dazzling footwork. As it turned out, he had only been serving hors d'oeuvres in the first break. After the interval, he really started cooking. And it didn't help that Mayo were beginning to panic defensively during the opening minutes of the half as they attempted to get back up to the tempo of the game. Canavan was always going to excel in that environment.

If he wasn't on the end of a score, he was securing a handy free for McCurry or laying the ball off to menacing Tyrone runners. He was the affliction for which there was no antidote - even if Callinan never gave up on the cause. But to help their scorer-in-chief, Tyrone had injected a sense of urgency into the game that had filtered out of Mayo's. Any time the visitors decided to travel down the sidelines, Tyrone jumped on lone attackers like a group of hoodlums in a back alley. Outside of Fergal Boland, Mayo lacked creativity. And unforced errors were endemic, with Mayo playing like they had smeared their gloves in grease at half-time.

On one occasion, two Tyrone players swarmed a Mayo man from behind as he attempted to break out of defence a little too casually. Within seconds, Canavan was popping over yet another score. It was excruciatingly predictable for Mayo.

Ryan O'Donoghue was eventually called from the bench and scored a brace of impressive points. It was the type of mercurial presence that was missing from Mayo's game all night. But it was also asking too much of the most overworked man in Mayo to launch a comeback on his own. And he cannot be expected to do all the heavy lifting during the latter games of the league and into the championship.

Of the starting forwards at the weekend, only Fergal Boland and McStay scored from play. This time last year, Mayo were trying to figure out how to accommodate five players - O'Donoghue, O'Connor, Aidan O'Shea, Tommy Conroy and James Carr - in one full-forward line. After four games in last year's league campaign, those five players had scored 5-10 from play between them. After four games in this year's campaign, those five players have scored only 0-6 from play. More worrying for Kevin McStay is the fact that all of those scores came from the boot of O'Donoghue - although Carr has yet to see game time this year.

Even this early in the season, the lack of needle in Mayo's attack is a cause of concern. While Boland has given the side much-needed creativity on the half-forward line, Mayo need to find more support - from either a new or old face - to supplement O’Donoghue’s efforts on the inside line. And in the shape of Canavan, Mayo was cruelly exposed to exactly what they need to unearth within the coming weeks. A monumental ask, to say the least.