Kelly: “We only want guys and clubs that want to play for Mayo”

Key players had returned for the Mayo League for their FAI Oscar Traynor Cup semi-final but given how they were unable to break them down for the equaliser, one had to wonder would they have found a way back if their vice-captain was around.

Ben Edeh, along with Nathan Reilly Doyle and Michael Fahy, were pulled out of the Mayo squad by their club Ballyheane due to a dispute between the club and the Mayo Football League over the scheduling of a recent Thursday fixture between themselves and Castlebar Celtic, a dispute that had overshowed the buildup to the semi-final.

Neither Ballyheane or the Mayo Football League have publicly commented on the matter and the Mayo squad and management has been caught in the crossfire, and manager Joe Kelly has admitted it impacted them.

“It obviously would. I'll say it straight up. As I said all along, it had nothing to do with us. Ben would have been an important feature. But look, Ben made a decision today not to be here and the Ballyheane club made a decision to pull them out, and that is their decision.

We only want guys, and we only want clubs who want their players playing with Mayo, and if individuals or clubs don't want their players playing with Mayo, we just get on with who we have.” It spoke volumes that Mayo still dominated the game outside of that opening five minutes but a lack of cutting edge cost them.

“To think that you take a player like that out of the team today and you still dominate a league like Limerick, probably the second-best junior league in the country, you have them on the ropes for quite a lot of the game. They're chasing shadows. They're looking to get possession of the ball. I'd say we probably had maybe 65 or 70 % of the ball for the game. But again, it's ball in net, and we just didn't have that outlet today.” 

On the two goals conceded, Kelly said: “I think the two lads will hold their hand up. It was just two individual mistakes. They were unlucky. One, we were caught with the flight of the ball over one centre back, and then the other centre-back was caught in a, I suppose, a very innocuous challenge where it happens 20 times in the game, but it might not happen in the box where somebody runs across you and your legs get tangled. There was no deliberate trip in it, but the guy was tripped but it wasn't deliberate, and he was just unlucky.

“You often legislate for one nightmare in the first few minutes of a game but never two and both of them end up as goals, it's just disappointing.” Kelly added: “Outside the first five, six minutes, I think we dominated the game. They couldn't believe how well drilled we were.

They dropped in, had 11 guys behind the ball quite a bit, but we didn't do enough to break them down either. Obviously, there's different reasons for that, but it was a really good footballing performance without finding enough opportunities up top, and that's probably the way I would summarize it. But it's a game we dominated, and when you dominate a game like that and you don't win it, you're always going to be disappointed.

We just didn't create enough. Obviously, you have a plan for the last 12 months or so, attacking plan, and for various reasons that goes out the window today. You have to look at a different plan.

Maybe only for about 15 minutes, we really got at them in the wide areas. We were playing a lot centrally and they were relatively comfortable with defending it, but it's just when you have so much ownership of the ball, you're always going to be disappointed.” Kelly praised the contributions of the returning Jordan Loftus and Connor McCarthy, with their immediate returns from injury meaning neither could play the 90 minutes (Loftus lasted an hour and was replaced by McCarthy). While the Mayo manager was coy on his own future, he believes this team are among the best in the country.

‘It's definitely not the end of the group. They're all mad keen to keep going to see can we get over the line. Is it over 30 years since there was one semi-final reached, or a final? The boys are definitely showing that they're in the top two or three in the country. It's a little bit of luck we need.”” “Especially in a county this size when you have so few teams. Our starting 11 was made up of Castlebar Celtic and Westport today. When you look at that, we’re not picking from a huge pool of clubs and when you have a club that pulls out players it's even more difficult.

“We're not far away and it's like everything else, we probably sound a bit like Mayo GAA, we keep going until we can find a solution. Whether we find it or not, time will tell but we definitely keep going for the betterment of Mayo soccer.”