THE DROWNING rain that sent them on their homecoming parade seemed perfectly suitable for their sorrows, if they hadn’t drowned them already, and the sombreness of the day after Mayo lost a sixth All-Ireland football final in 23 years.
Only this journey home is greeted with a defiant sobriety, manager James Horan seeing only the brightness of the days ahead, not the darkness of the days Mayo have left behind. If losing to Donegal on Sunday has taught them one thing it’s that Mayo are good enough to win an All-Ireland, as long as they stay believing.
“And I definitely do, absolutely,” says Horan, standing in the lobby of the Regency Hotel with the look of a man not fearful of the future, only ready to embrace it.
“And ask anyone, like James Nallen, who has been around this team a long time, a lot of Mayo teams, because these guys have the desire and ambition that you need, what it takes, to be successful, so they’ll keep at it.
“We didn’t win on Sunday, but I certainly thought we were good enough to win. Even the way we started, we still had opportunities to win it. But we didn’t take them, so we’ll take in on the chin, learn from it. And I think everyone can see we’re going in the right direction, building on very solid fundamentals of the game.
“And we’re very competitive, even if we don’t play well. So you keep building on those, and we’ll get better and better.”
Horan played in two of Mayo’s last six All-Ireland defeats, in 1996 and 1997, and also witnessed Mayo being taken apart by Kerry in 2004, and 2006: this one, he insists, was different, and past defeats certainly had no bearing on it.
“I genuinely don’t think so. No. I wouldn’t look too much into past defeats, although that’s the record that’s there. But I suppose those finals were lost in very different ways. On Sunday, we didn’t play as well as we could, and we have to accept that. We made basic mistakes. If you analyse it that way we didn’t deserve to win. And you could argue that Donegal might have got a lucky goal, here or there, but overall they deserved to win.
“But on big game days it’s always things like that, a missed hand pass, or a dropped ball, making a wrong decision, bringing into contact when you shouldn’t . . . they’re the things that cost you. And that’s what cost us, in my opinion. Maybe there was more intensity, more aggression in the tackle, whatever. Maybe a bit of nerves. Some of the balls we dropped I thought were unusual, so maybe it was a combination of those things. But we’ll learn from the experience, be better players for it.
“As regards the desire of the team, yeah the guys will drive it on forward, no doubt about that. Even yesterday there were guys looking at skill protocols, strength and conditioning protocols, for the winter. And that was straightaway after the game, and that was hugely encouraging.”
Truth is Horan has already brought Mayo a long way during his two years in charge, and suggests there is nothing he could or would have done different on Sunday: “I think we dealt with their game, probably had the majority of possession throughout the game. We dealt with their counterattacking game very well, and looked quite comfortable. Apart from that opening 10 minutes. So look, on another day, we could have won the game. But that’s the way it is.”
No one doubts Horan will see out at least the last season of his three-year contract, although he admits nothing is ever certain in this game.
“Well, I don’t know how contracts work in the GAA, to be honest. All I remember on the night I got the job I was told it was three years. So we’ll see. But I suppose it is relentless, absolutely relentless, and maybe that’s something I didn’t fully appreciate. Morning, noon and night, and every single day. It’s hard to get a bit of off-time, but you wouldn’t do it unless you enjoyed it.”
* Yesterday’s final attracted the second highest television audience for the event in the last eight years. The encounter saw 1.4million viewers tune in to RTÉ Two’s coverage of the game, with an average of 960,500.
