The stage is set in MacHale Park on Sunday for not just the big-ticket match of the championship’s opening weekend, but also a kind of verdict on what we’ve seen this season.
Mayo take to the field as league winners, just a week after their hard-won success against Galway in Croke Park. Opponents Roscommon have beaten them once in 22 championships, a sample encompassing 10 matches. Yet the challengers’ mood is upbeat, almost expectant.
There are reasons for this. How will Kevin McStay’s team have navigated the seven days since a fairly rare national title and more pressingly, eight matches in 10 weeks?
Neither are their neighbours at some random point in their history but rather they finished the league just two places behind their opponents, in third. There is also the vaguely unsettling statistic that Roscommon have won this fixture in the last three years that Mayo won the league.
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When Davey Burke took the reins in Roscommon after a late appointment last October, he was quite forthright about his ambitions.
“I know that there are plenty of good young footballers in Roscommon and we want to improve them as players. There is a perception that Roscommon are a bit of a ‘yo-yo’ team and we hope to sort that out.
“Look, we are not going to change the world or anything like that, but we want to harness the youth coming through and we aim to be a competitive top-tier team.”
He was correct on both opening points. About half the starting team come from the All-Ireland under-21 finalists of 2012 and ‘14 – a cohort denied only by the juggernaut presence of Dublin’s evolving record breakers at the age grade.
As for being a yo-yo team, the county has redefined the term in the past decade. Having got promoted from Division Three in 2014, they have literally shuttled between the top two divisions with just a single year’s rest in Division One in 2016.
Burke has been as good as his word and Roscommon look forward to a second successive season at the top for the first time since them.
Any meeting between Mayo and Roscommon is coloured by the history of previous meetings and the neighbouring rivalry between the counties. Mayo have twice Roscommon’s number of Connacht titles, 48-24, but curiously, just one more All-Ireland, three against two. They may be less likely to win but are certain to compete.
Nigel Dineen was on the team, which finessed the 2001 provincial final with an injury-time goal by Gerry Lohan, who is a brother of Eddie, one of Burke’s selectors.
“Roscommon on any given day would feel that they could beat Mayo even though Mayo would have the edge on them in championship terms,” says Dineen. “It’s a healthy rivalry. On their day, Roscommon are a match for any team but I think Mayo bring out the best in them.”
He also managed the under-21s in 2012 and 2014 and is a firm believer in their quality as footballers.
“A lot of those players have experience and have won a good few medals at under-age. It’s a quality side and just a matter of getting the best out of them. Since Davy Burke came in, he has introduced organisation on the defensive side. We have good forwards, including to come off the bench.
“The most fundamental thing is getting consistency. This year, to stay in Division One was a massive, massive bonus because Roscommon were one of the favourites to go back down.”
Burke would have been mostly on people’s radar for having led his county, Kildare, to the very first under-20 All-Ireland in 2018 and for being exceptionally young for a senior intercounty manager – turning 35 this year.
His first intercounty appointment was with Wicklow, for two years from 2019. Former county treasurer Alan Smullen was secretary to the head-hunting committee and he says they were hugely impressed from the start.
“When the selection committee first met Davy, he blew us out of the water with his preparation and attention to detail – and his positivity. He has such energy. What struck us was that he was way more experienced than his age suggested. He had been around teams in management or coaching roles for a long time even though just in his early 30s.”
Some of those roles go back a bit. Burke worked as a coach with the Dublin women footballers in the middle of the last decade, a time when the team was accumulating more motivation for the future than silverware, stuck in an apparently endless loop of disappointment against Cork.
He had managed his own club, Confey, to a first league title in Kildare and went on to manage Sarsfields in Newbridge and Maynooth University, who he took to a first senior league title at the end of last year.
Smullen quickly formed the view that the applicant manager had absorbed lessons everywhere he had been.
“We had a fantastic year with him,” according to Smullen, “getting promotion. We always knew that he would go on to other things. He left a year early but we had said, ‘two years with an option of three’ and he made his decision and was very honest about it, really, really up front.
“We wished him the absolute best – didn’t want to lose him; of course not. But he was definitely destined for bigger things. The lads in the dressingroom were devastated to lose him. He manages people really well and is especially good at one-to-one communication.”
The league campaign saw Roscommon open with three wins, including against provincial champions Galway. They lost narrowly against Mayo in March, storming back into a match that was getting beyond them and Dineen, who also provides match analysis for Shannonside FM, says that the match provides plenty of encouragement for Sunday.
“The first 15, 20 minutes Mayo just blew away Roscommon. I was working on the radio at that match but the thing was that they had done the same to Armagh and they came back and drew the match. I wouldn’t think that Mayo will get the same leeway early on that they got in Hyde Park.”
If there is to be a surprise, how does he think that will happen?
“For Roscommon it will be the defensive side of things. We have the forwards to win but if we get our defensive structure right next Sunday, we’ll be very hard beaten. It’s the first time in a long time that I think Roscommon are getting Mayo at exactly the right time.”
