Red Letter’ day for Mayo as Bowl final awaits

The Mayo Schoolboys/Girls and Youths AFL U12s girls, under the stewardship of Mike McGeough, Dave Bristow, Martin Barrett, Clare Hoban and Helen McGeough, made the long journey to Letterkenny to take on Donegal last weekend. The prize awaiting the victors was a place in the Bowl Final of the SFAI Inter-League in Kilkenny in May.

Reaching this stage of the competition in their maiden season as a League representative side, and with a management team cutting their teeth for the first time in charge of a Mayo Girls’ squad, has been a very decent achievement. They fully expected a tough encounter and that was certainly what transpired.

The match was evenly contested with both sides creating openings. A fine early save from Mayo’s goalkeeper Michaela Kavanagh prevented the home side from taking the lead but midway through the first-half, Lexi Murphy showed the skill and guile on the ball that observers have grown accustomed to and she slotted home to give Mayo the lead.

From that stage on, the game became fairly nip and tuck with resolute defending from the two teams. The match was into the final thirty seconds of normal time when Donegal earned a corner-kick and converted it after some hesitancy amongst the Mayo players.

Mayo took the break before extra-time to quickly regroup and dug deep into their reserves. Within five minutes of the restart, they were ahead again. Lexi got her second goal when calmly finding the net despite the close attention of the Donegal backline. Mayo were quite comfortable after this, seeing the game out for the 2-1 victory which now sees them play Kerry in the final.

A delighted Mike McGeough was full of praise for his entire squad and management team. “Our squad is so full of talent that it makes our training sessions high quality. We honestly felt prior to this game that we had left no stone unturned in our preparation and were as prepared as we could be. We will get back on the training pitch this week and look to be as equally well prepared for the Final in three weeks’ time.” 

Head Coach of the Mayo Schoolgirls Emerging Talent Programme John Flanagan lauded the achievement too. “We had Mike earmarked for a role with the girls for a while before we got him simply because we want the best coaches in the county working with the girls. Mike in turn has put a superb backroom team with him and the future for this group looks very, very bright. This result means that we will have two teams playing in finals in the Girls section. Out of 15 Leagues who will be represented at the various finals, five will have two sides, and the fact that we also have two proves once again that our girls’ sides can hold their own with anything in Ireland.”