Endgame frailties a source of real concern for Mayo

In the aftermath of Mayo’s defeat to Cork last weekend, Kevin McStay was asked about their difficulties in breaking down a blanket defence. He wouldn’t have been surprised by the question – it has become the dominant theme in all Mayo-related analysis.

On The Sunday Game highlights show, Paul Flynn gave it the full monty iPad treatment, devoting over two minutes exclusively to what Mayo are doing wrong when faced with a well-structured, packed defence.

“They haven’t got time to figure this out,” Flynn said. “It’s concerning for McStay. He has a bit of work to do.”

Doctors differ, patients die. It’s true that Mayo’s scoring rate has spluttered and suffered in the face of massed defences, particularly in recent weeks against Louth and Cork.

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Of the 12 teams left standing, only Armagh put up lower totals across the last two games of the round-robin (0-27 for Armagh, 1-25 for Mayo, everybody else no worse than 0-31). But low scoring isn’t why they came third in their group. Not directly, at any rate.

No, Mayo’s most pressing issue has been their tendency to fade out of games in the latter stages. Against Louth, they were five up in the 74th minute but only had one point to spare when the long whistle blew in the 76th. Against Cork, they went from six points up in the 57th minute to three down at the end.

They didn’t need to shoot the lights out to win either encounter, they just needed to manage the endgame. But instead, they handed the initiative back to a couple of teams against whom they had all but completed the job.

If you take everything after the 60-minute mark in both games as a cut-off point, Mayo played a combined 31 minutes of football and were outscored by 1-8 to 0-3. That’s why they’re travelling to Salthill this weekend instead of resting up for a quarter-final.

“When they come under pressure in the last 10 minutes of games, when the other team has to go for it and put on a full-court press, Mayo don’t react well,” says Billy Joe Padden. “They don’t protect a lead the way they should. They haven’t operated very efficiently in that scenario.

“They haven’t been physical enough around the middle of the field. They haven’t got their kick-outs away, they haven’t been clinical enough taking their chances to knock the other team out of their momentum. They haven’t had the know-how to hold possession for long periods of time and take the sting out of the game.”

This isn’t something that has just come to light in the past couple of games. Throughout the league McStay’s team developed a bad habit of allowing teams a route back into matches that ought to have been done and dusted.

They were five up on Armagh in the 67th minute and contrived to cough up a draw. They were eight up in Roscommon in the 50th minute and still needed a goal-line stand in injury-time to get out with a win. They were level with Monaghan on the hour mark on the final day but ended up losing by six.

“If you keep putting yourself in that situation, it is eventually going to catch you,” says Colm Boyle. “There’s something in it for your opponents. I am sure that team-talk for teams leading into Mayo games include fellas saying, ‘If we are three or four points behind with 10 to go, this game is definitely not dead’.

“If you pile the pressure on them, if you get a couple of scores, you’ll see that Mayo players aren’t comfortable in that situation. The opposition are feeding off that energy. The nervousness, not just from the Mayo players but from the Mayo crowd as well, feeds into it too. That was essentially a home game for Mayo last weekend – they had 90 per cent of the crowd. So Cork were feeding off that edginess in the stands. They knew that this is something you can chase when you’re playing Mayo.”

Everyone knows it. How could they not? If you hadn’t seen a minute of Mayo football this year and only looked at the numbers, their fade-out problem would still stand out a mile.

Mayo haven’t won the second half of a match in league or championship since beating Donegal on March 19th. That’s seven matches ago. They’ve conceded 12 goals all year – three of them have been in injury-time at the end of games.

So why does it keep happening? Nobody is inclined to blame it on a lack of fitness or conditioning. Mayo aren’t an old team so age isn’t an issue. And their panel is deep now – the four subs McStay brought on last Sunday were Tommy Conroy, Enda Hession, Eoghan McLaughlin and Kevin McLoughlin. They generally end games with close to their strongest team

For Padden, there’s a fundamental problem in their midfield. One way of shutting down a game is by securing restarts, repeatedly and dependably. Three of Cork’s six late points last Sunday came from kick-outs – two of them from Colm Reape, one from Micheál Martin in the Cork goal.

“They’re lacking a certain player,” says Padden. “They’re lacking a Seamie O’Shea. They’re lacking somebody who isn’t spectacular but you know that if you put a kick-out down on top of him, he’s not going to end up on the ground and he’s not going to end up in a situation where somebody is going to outfield him. The ball is going to come down and he’ll either win it or it will be there for a break.

“Matthew Ruane, Diarmuid O’Connor, Jack Carney, Jordan Flynn – they’re quite similar. They’ve played well but they want to run around all over the field. It’s great to have players like that, you need all of them.

“But I think in those latter stages of games, they need somebody else who can go in and be a huge physical presence and manage that situation. I am surprised that Aidan O’Shea hasn’t been sent out there to do that, to close out those games.”

Ultimately, the issue is probably more mental than physical. Mayo just haven’t been thinking clearly enough when the pressure has come on. James Carr fluffed a handpass to O’Shea on the edge of the square against Louth when a goal would have killed the game. Last weekend, the celebration of Conroy’s goal indicated a team-wide chilling of the boots. Within a minute, they’d coughed up a penalty at the other end.

“It was a real release of emotion – you could see they thought the job was done,” says Boyle.

“They had beaten Cork, they had beaten the blanket. To concede a goal straight away and be back in the thick of it – you could see it in their reactions. They were downbeat and frustrated because I think they knew there was a possibility of, ‘Here we go again. We’re back in a game we should have won by now’.

“They didn’t take the sting out of the game. When Jack Carney got fouled by Maguire, there was an opportunity there to slow the game down. That was a bad belt he got to the head – the Mayo players could have seen that as an opportunity to get in and even make a bit of a shemozzle out of it. And while everything is settling down then, get players around, get reset, see out the game. But they didn’t do that.”

Everything feeds everything. Mayo go to Salthill this weekend with most of the outside world having given up on them. They’ve shot their bolt. They’ve wasted their best days on the league. They can’t play against blanket defences.

But none of that was a problem when they beat Kerry and followed it up by leading by five deep into injury-time against Louth. Or when they went six points up against Cork in the 57th minute last Sunday. Handle their business in either case and they’d be in Castlebar this weekend. Handle it in both and they’d be kicking their heels and waiting for the quarter-final.

“If they had seen out the Louth game and won 0-14 to 0-9, people’s perceptions would be so different,” says Boyle. “The same goes for last Sunday. All they had to do after the goal was see it out and everyone would be saying it’s a job well done.

“The killing thing in both games is that Mayo have started to look more susceptible when the other side has had to abandon the blanket and come out and go after them. Mayo were comfortable in both games – they had the blanket broken really. But they collapsed then when Louth and Cork went for it. That’s the worrying thing from my perspective.”

Mayo have problems, like everyone else in a wide-open championship. They just might not be the ones that everyone talks about.

Might not be too difficult to fix, either.