Dublin and Mayo had barely left the field after the All-Ireland final when the prevailing verdict began to circulate: Mayo left the match behind.

Dublin would not – could not – play so poorly again. Jim Gavin smiled tightly and said he was just "very happy" his team was still in the All-Ireland and then the Dubs vanished.

The prediction was that they would return to Croke Park in a mood of wounded intent, determined to atone for a misfiring performance.

Through nobody’s fault, the public judgment placed Mayo, the challengers, at a disadvantage. Why should Dublin be allowed to assume the wounded animal role? This was a game in which the champions had been gifted with two own goals; when freakish happenstance conspired to block Mayo again. Surely the challengers were the side that should have left Croke Park seething at how the day had worked out?

When he sat down in Castlebar just 24 hours after the final whistle, Mayo manager Stephen Rochford could list plenty of areas in which his team needed to improve. But he wasn't prepared to use the two goals as an excuse.

Tight margins

“Yeah, I think . . . you concede two goals against Dublin, you’re asking for trouble. If you’d asked me beforehand, if we conceded two goals, would you win the game, I would say it’s unlikely,” Rochford said.

“So, we would look at it to say there were aspects to the game that if we’d done a little bit better, yeah maybe we would have got the result or fallen over the line, being so tight the margins.

“We certainly weren’t near our A-game and we look forward to the next couple of weeks, and aiming towards getting that game out of us.

“But there’s a lot more that I’m not happy about. In relation to the concession of the two goals, people talk about them being freakish and that, but actually Dublin were in there with the ball, had created an opportunity. Maybe on a drier day there wouldn’t have been the need for a Mayo man to stick the ball in the back of the net; it might have been in there from a Dublin foot.”

Rochford’s remarks were an immediate attempt to pull Mayo’s fate right back to where it belongs: within the four walls of the Mayo dressing room.

Everyone has a theory on the consequences of the drawn game. One of those will be right. If Dublin win on Saturday, history will decree that Mayo let another All-Ireland slip, that they failed to capitalise on a rare, rare day when the All-Ireland champions malfunctioned.

Rochford doesn’t pretend he hasn’t heard the arguments. On Sunday evening, for instance, someone told him his team had been referred to as “celebrity losers” in a Sunday morning newspaper column before the match.

Lost opportunity

“No more than a player being called a ‘cheat’ over the summer . . . I don’t think it is necessarily fair language,” he says. “But that is a choice for that journalist or pundit. It certainly didn’t keep me awake last night when I heard about it.”

And he was aware that the immediate response to the game favoured the notion that Mayo had somehow let Dublin off the hook. Rochford accepts that may be the view of the outside world. And he is fine with it.

“With all due respect I’m only concerned with what 33 guys and the management focus on. And we genuinely don’t see this as some sort of lost opportunity. We see it as an opportunity to get our top performance,” he says.

“We did a lot of things right but we did a lot of things that we wouldn’t be happy with and if we had set them out as what were our five, six, seven key points in the game. I would certainly see us demanding an improvement. The challenge is to get that over the next three training sessions along with that element of freshness.”

Forward division

Mayo’s potential to mix things up for the replay has been broadly overlooked. The attention has been on whether Dublin will elect to inter-change the A-list names within its elite forward division. Diarmuid Connolly alone was given an exemption from the criticism directed at all six starters in the drawn match. Paddy Andrews and Paul Mannion both advanced their cases for promotion to the first team in their appearances.

Jim Gavin has always been fearless when it comes to shuffling his personnel. It means that the public – Mayo included – are in the dark as to the likely make up of Dublin’s starting front six.

“So be it. We will know it at probably 4.35 on the Saturday. My view on it is that you look at the opposition from a point of respect and try to understand the qualities they bring in order to arm your team or provide them with knowledge of how the other team will play,” he says.

“To be honest, and I say this in a very respectful manner, whether it is Paddy Andrews that is in there and one of the other starting six drop out or Paul Mannion or Eoghan O’Gara, they still bring enormous quality and threat. So we will still be focusing on what the challenges are.”

The focus on Dublin’s glittering attack and Mayo’s defence – and those goals – means that Mayo’s attack has also been subject to little scrutiny.