On Gaelic Games:A better display last Sunday would have interrupted the county's downward trend at Croke Park, writes SEAN MORAN

READING THE entrails of NFL campaigns in their immediate aftermath can be messy and unavailing. Nothing falls into place more neatly than historically analysed leagues with their patterns, warnings and portents crystal clear having been filtered through a championship or two.

In the immediate term, nothing is that obvious. Mayo are likely to be the only one of the weekend’s eight finalists coping with a crisis of self-esteem as they look forward to the summer.

One of the most useful high-wire tricks of the league has been to optimise your spring progress. Advance too far and you can end up shipping the sort of setback to morale that blights a team’s summer. It’s actually better to underachieve in a more general way and approach the championship beneath the radar.

John O’Mahony will be familiar with the conundrum. Sunday was his fourth defeat in a league final, spaced neatly at three-year intervals since 2001 (two with Galway and two with Mayo).

Nine years ago after his Galway team went down to an unexpected defeat against, coincidentally, Mayo, one reporter cheerfully informed him that no team had gone to win an All-Ireland after losing a league final.

“Is that right? I see,” O’Mahony dead-panned, clearly feeling the events of the afternoon were enough for him to have to process without being forced into premature concession of the championship as well.

A few months later he was back in Croke Park ready to take Sam Maguire home across the Shannon. It should be noted that the year is significant. The startling recovery couldn’t have happened in any previous year, as it was achieved through the then new All-Ireland qualifiers format.

Neither was the route from NFL defeat to autumn redemption a linear progression; it required a moment of clarity brought on by hitting rock bottom with a comprehensive championship defeat by Roscommon a few weeks later.

The reshaping of Galway that summer involved reshuffling some exceptional players into new roles and blending in younger talent, much as Down before them and Tyrone afterwards managed when successfully reconstructing All-Ireland challenges.

That’s not really an option at present for Mayo, whose fate at the weekend felt uncomfortably more akin to what happened the county in 2007 when a disappointing league final preceded a disappointing championship.

Unlike the above counties they don’t have the reassurance of a senior All-Ireland championship to their name. The question has to be whether to persevere with players good enough to win Connacht but unable to take the challenge much farther or to rebuild entirely without the guarantee of even Connacht success.

Pat Gilroy looks to have taken the latter option with Dublin, a team of roughly similar achievement, and it’s likely the Leinster champions will have a hugely changed team when their bid for a sixth successive provincial championship begins. In retrospect Gilroy will feel the league worked out well after a season of consistent performance and the county’s highest finish in 11 years.

Whereas the success of an operation like that can’t be judged until the championship is over, O’Mahony must know he has some hard decisions to make in the months ahead.

A better display on Sunday wouldn’t necessarily have proved that Mayo had turned the corner but it would have interrupted the county’s downward trend at Croke Park.

Similarly, Cork know their 2010 will be judged on what happens in September not at the end of April but romping to a league title with an understrength team maintains their momentum and ticks the same box as Kerry and Tyrone did on the way to winning four of the last seven All-Irelands.

The remaining six counties in action over the weekend all had something to take away. Losing a Croke Park final to Armagh wouldn’t be any Down person’s definition of fun but the county was starting without Ambrose Rogers and Dan Gordon and, despite being outplayed, stayed in touch until the very end when a goalmouth scramble could easily have ended up in their filching the match.

Armagh manager Paddy O’Rourke, having visited the familiar environs of a Down dressingroom, summed up the afternoon.

“As I said to them, today wasn’t really about a Division Two title. It was about two teams getting ready for the championship.”

It was a good afternoon for O’Rourke whose team now pass championship opponents Derry on the end-of-season escalators and still have Ronan Clarke to return, although whether he’s back for the Celtic Park match is still up in the air.

For all that the National Leagues aren’t major crowd-pullers any more, the case for using Croke Park as a venue was vindicated, allowing counties which don’t see the stadium that often an opportunity to do so and in the case of both Division Three and Four finals, produce decent games of football.

One aspect of the NFL with definite championship implications is the system of the finals being repeats of divisional fixtures. The mood governing the issue of teams who have played in provincial championships meeting again in the qualifiers fluctuates and the recent annual congress heard a debate on a proposal to allow provincial champions a further round, which they could afford to lose.

Discussion incorporated the usefulness of losing as a diagnostic tool for teams and how it was unfair that provincial champions were the only ones denied the opportunity to learn from defeat.

The strictly hierarchical format of the past three NFL seasons provides further persuasive evidence on this point. Since 2008 there have been 12 league finals, three annually for each of the four divisions. In only two did the result match that of the earlier fixture between the counties (Kerry’s Division One win over Derry last year and the previous year’s Division Four final when Offaly beat Tipperary).

It could be argued that Wexford and Fermanagh drew the 2008 Division Three final, as they had their regulation match (Wexford took the title after extra-time) but overall there has been a strong trend of defeated teams turning the tables at the end of April.

This is of merely persuasive evidence because counties aren’t always fielding their best teams or at the same stage of the training cycle during the divisional matches but the percentages are too strong for that to be the whole story. In other words, for competitions to be fair there is a strong argument that competition conditions be, as far as possible, the same for all contestants. But then no-one ever maintained that championship structures were fair.