JUST as he had done two weeks previously, John Maughan kept his men behind closed doors in their dressing room long after the final whistle had blown. This time, however, there would be no reprieve. End of game, beginning of grief.

The players, stunned into silence by it all, struggled to put words on their emotions. None more so than Liam McHale, whose personal desolation exceeded the collective trauma. And with good reason - his sending off in the seventh minute was, he felt, rough justice.

"I'm gutted. I felt I was a victim of the referee. It was a free for all and I don't know how I was picked out," he declared.

Goalkeeper John Madden was back in civvies and being ushered to the dressing room door by an official but he insisted on defending McHale: "Liam gets sent off after being on the receiving end of two big haymakers of punches. I could see that from 150 yards. . . some official trying to make a name for himself sending off the big shot."

Wing forward James Horan's sympathies were also with McHale. "He has an impeccable track record, probably one of the greatest sportsmen in Irish sport. The stage was set for him and he was chopped at the knees, basically. That's the way I feel about it, I think it's a disgrace that he was sent off and very unjust."

Two players were sent off but Mayo suffered the bigger loss, he maintained: "I heard one supporter coming out after the game and he said we lost our best player, they lost their worst player, and that kind of summed it up for me."

The swirling wind and greasy surface made conditions much more difficult than the drawn game but Horan felt that the wind did not affect Mayo unduly when playing against it in the second half. "I think we probably played our best football against the breeze. Once or twice we maybe over carried the ball coming up the field, or a Meath man got a hand in over our shoulder and we lost the ball at crucial stages. They went down and got scores from them. You just can't afford to do that at this level or you'll get punished."

With a superb five points from play. Horan was easily Mayo's best forward. "Long distance shooting would probably be one of my stronger points but having said that, if I scored 15 points and we still lost it wouldn't mean anything, wouldn't make any difference."

The team had believed at a very deep level that they could win this game, he said. They had played good football all year and, we probably played the best football out there but, on the day, we were just unlucky."

The team had put in an unprecedented level of preparation all year to reach the final and the worry for many Mayo supporters was that they would not be able to come back and do it all over again. "I'm sure we can," insisted Horan, "but we'll have to sit down in a couple of weeks' time and reflect on it all. But this group of Mayo players is very ambitious and we'll be back - you can be sure, of that. Things have changed in Mayo.

Centre half back James Nallen also felt that the team was good enough to come back and win an All Ireland. But they were also good enough to have won it yesterday, he added: "We could have won it, I felt confident that we would but luck never went our way. A couple of decisions which went against us were very unfortunate.

"The conditions made it difficult but we played quite well against the wind in the second half. We found it very hard to break down the Meath defence but we can bounce back."