There’s eating and drinking in Willie’s wisdom

It said something about Roscommon on Saturday night that their best performance came not in front of the posts but behind the microphone.

The highlights of Willie Hegarty’s commentary on Shannonside Radio were doing the rounds on social media on Sunday and it’s fair to say the inimitable Hegarty had delivered the one-liners at a pace to make even Eoghan McLaughlin sweat.

“One of the sides will sleep easy tonight,” said Hegarty about Mayo, “…the other might need a sleeping tablet.” 

The thing is, it looked as though someone had already spiked Roscommon’s half-time refreshments with said tablet, for the visitors sleepwalked their way through a second-half that saw Mayo kick the first seven points in-a-row.

“Roscommon haven’t scored, they’re like men who have been in the bog all day with no dinner,” continued Hegarty. “Conor Cox high… have they got a spud on the table? No they haven’t. Out by the goal, it’s gone wide.” 

Mention of spuds, Wally Brown and his friends were, according to Hegarty, enjoying his coverage of the match from the chipper in downtown Ballinlough.

“They’re having a Diet Coke and a bag of chips. Right now Roscommon could do with vinegar on their chips. Here comes Daire Cregg, Mayo are leading by nine to six, enjoy the snack box lads… I might stop on the way home meself.” 

The result in Castlebar wasn’t going the way of their side but at least Wally and his mates in the takeaway weren’t worrying about who was going to wash the dishes, unlike the poor women of Roscommon.

“Roscommon at the moment are like a cranky housewife who told the husband to do the wash-up,” reckoned Willie Hegarty. “She came home from a hard day’s work and the dishes were still in the sink.” 

It wasn’t only the Roscommon players who were a little cranky though, with the manager Davy Burke holding nothing back in a withering post-match assessment of his team after their 0-15 to 0-9 loss, one that has placed them in real danger of relegation from Division 1 after they had placed third in the table just twelve months ago.

“It was men against boys out there,” he told TG4 interviewer Brian Tyers who had actually put it to Burke that he must have been delighted with his players’ performance in the first-half.

“Probably delighted with the last twelve minutes,” replied the man who wasn’t even born the last time Roscommon won a National Football League game in Castlebar (1984). “I didn’t think we showed up at all for the first twenty to be honest.” 

It was a case of rinse (quite literally, given the downpours) and repeat after half-time, with the Saffron and Blue again present in body but not in spirit.

“It looked like we had no energy, we looked a bit lifeless and Mayo were full of it,” said Burke, his opinion no less forthright now that he was explaining not to Brian Tyers but to John O’Connor, Roscommon GAA’s own public relations officer.

“Both teams were on the third week of a three-week run so there’s no excuse there. We’ll have to look at our preparation. We started really, really slowly, we were really, really poor. Mayo were toying with us. It’s very disappointing tonight.” 

Like I said, cranky.

None of which is of any concern to Mayo, who have now all but secured their place in Division 1 for 2025. Indeed, if the mood took them they could even attempt to reach consecutive National Football League finals, something the county hasn’t achieved since reaching three-in-a-row from 1970 to ’72. In all likelihood they’d need to win both their remaining games, against Derry and Monaghan, to do so.

9,610 spectators watched Fergal Boland score Mayo’s first point of either half on Saturday night and quite uniquely, that achievement against Roscommon was an exact repeat of what Boland had done at Pearse Stadium against Galway in the opening round, and at Austin Stack Park against Kerry in Round 3 where he again scored Mayo’s first points of either half, in between which he had scored Mayo’s very last point – the match-winner – against Dublin, which perhaps remains the team’s most important score of the campaign to date.

Add in his brace struck away to Tyrone and with eleven points to his name, not only is Boland Mayo’s top scorer from play after five rounds of the National Football League, but across the division he’s headed only by a list of sensational quality in terms of those who have scored more from play, namely Darragh Canavan of Tyrone, Con O’Callaghan of Dublin, Kerry’s David Clifford and Sean O’Shea, and Shane McGuigan of Derry.

And to think the Aghamore man was deemed surplus to Mayo’s requirements this time last year.

Long-time readers will know it’s not today or yesterday since we espoused the ability – and bemoaned the underuse – of Fergal Boland by Mayo. If guilty on occasion of the occasional overturn, that’s only because he shows for – and gets on – more ball than possibly any other Mayo player on the pitch, and that when in possession, his attitude is that you must speculate to accumulate. And so where he is willing to actually run at an opponent or try and unlock a defence with a killer pass, others choose to engage in a sideways, backways, any-which-way-but-forward cowardly sort of game.

To their credit, management obviously accepted a mistake was made last season and invited Boland back into the fold. They may thank their lucky stars they did because only for the half-forward’s refreshing he-who-dares-wins sort of mentality, you shudder to think where Mayo might actually be right now. Outside of him and Saturday’s official man-of-the-match Ryan O’Donoghue, who is the division’s fourth-highest scorer when you include his frees, the rest of the attack (despite Aidan O’Shea’s gesturing) is struggling to make much of an impact on the scoreboard.

Saturday was the third game in-a-row that Mayo failed to score a goal from play, and nor have they particularly looked like doing so. In fact, of the four in five games they have managed, two of the goals have been from the penalty spot while the other two were scored by Eoghan McLaughlin and Stephen Coen, meaning a Mayo forward has yet to hit the net this season. And with their next obstacle a defence as tight as Derry’s, Paddy Power isn’t exactly going to be shaking in his boots on Sunday week, nor Derry ‘keeper Odhran Lynch for that matter.

Sorry, that crankiness must be catching.