Aidan O’Shea is being unfairly refereed because of his size

Hard to believe Aidan O’Shea doesn’t make a decent living from his sport. We waited for him outside Mayo’s dressing room door. He was last out. We crowded around him like American journalists do with Lebron James. Or Spanish hacks who crave even the sparsest words from Messi.

The 25-year-old looks like a professional athlete, behaves like one too, but he’s a purchaser at a pharmaceutical company in Westport.

After what we just witnessed that seems like madness, but it’s where he’ll be this afternoon. “We’ve been here before – last year – so recovery is crucial now. It takes a lot out of the body.”

Go to work

Six days to recover like a professional athlete. And go to work. “Obviously boys have to go back to work, get on with their day jobs. That’s obviously difficult because boys are trying to recover at 100 per cent. We’ll do the best we can to be back here in tip-top shape next Saturday.”

Can you take time off? “I’m due to be off tomorrow. I’ll probably take a few hours off in the morning and probably go in then. It’s difficult because you are taking holidays. We’re amateur athletes so we have to go back to the day job.”

O’Shea has spoken before about how he feels there is an inevitable journey towards professionalism.

“It’s going to go there eventually,” he said in April 2014. “We all know that. It might be 20, 30, 40 years away but that’s the way it has to go. The way our country is set up, the way our population is, you are not going to have 32 teams. You will probably have franchises, you are probably going to have to split the championship into a different structure.”

The headbutt came up. In the 42nd minute, with Dublin leading 1-8 to 0-9, one of several scuffles broke out between the O'Shea brothers (Aidan and Séamus), Colm Boyle and Dublin defenders James McCarthy and Philly McMahon.

McMahon struck Aidan O’Shea, who turned to see if an official had spotted it. They did not. It looked like you were headbutted. Were you? “Yeah, I was head-butted alright but that’s not for me to enforce the rules of the game. There were plenty more things out there the ref missed too.”

Did it get nasty? “Ah no, look: it was a fairly competitive game out there. Some good one-on-one combat. The referee, Joe [McQuillan], I thought he had a fairly good game for the most part. You are not going to get everything right.”

Similar line

Noel Connelly, Mayo’s joint manager, took a similar line but did reiterate his belief that O’Shea was unfairly refereed because of his size (much like Michel Murphy).

“I’ve said this before, and don’t like going on about the way Aido gets tackled at times,” said Connelly. “Other players who are smaller in stature, had they been marked the way he is would be getting frees in my mind.”

What about the way O’Shea was treated off the ball?

“It’s something we brought to the attention of the linesman on a number of occasions. It wasn’t just Aido. I thought Kevin McLoughlin got a tough time.

Untouched “But look

, this is senior football. We don’t expect to come here and be untouched, don’t get me wrong, but some of the jersey pulling to the ground was obvious at times. I didn’t see as much action taken as I would have liked.”

O’Shea refused to crib about the levels of attention he gets from opposing defenders.

“Ah, I don’t know. Some days you get them, some days you don’t. You just got to keep fighting in the tussle and see what happens. Today was a tough day but the next day we will go at it again.”

But back to work first. An old lament but remarkable in itself.