IF THROWING away aa All Ireland is a crime, you could never convict John Maughan of complicity. Watching him during the last 10 minutes of play yesterday, he was as composed as a chess player shuffling the pieces around against a novice. It was the pieces that were getting excited.

Flashback. Meath are within a point of Mayo. A sampling of the noise in Croke Park reveals it to be one long howl. The game is loose and frenetic. John Maughan stands with his hands on his knees, peering in from the touchline, making sense out of it all.

Graham Geraghty gets the ball in his hands, turbo glides over 10 metres and before he has planted the ball wide, Maughan has turned and summoned a sub Kevin O'Neill, from the bench. O'Neill stretches and contorts. Maughan watches the game, hands on his head. Jody Devine hoofs one into the Mayo square. It gets cleared.

The next passage of play sees the ball drop into the hands of Colm Coyle. You know the rest.

Maughan just turned and started planning for the replay.

Took his players and locked them in their dressing room for half an hour of post mortem and introspection. Talked them through the game before any doubts or regrets began to congeal.

Media folk are crook nosed vultures, of course. We gathered in great numbers outside the Mayo door where their might be carrion. Tears of lament at least. Maughan drove us away with his cool healthy reason.

"To be honest," he says, "the last point is just a detail. I just saw it bounce over the bar, I think, but my recollection of events isn't great. A back and a forward went for the ball and it bounced over. What's important is that we only scored 1-2 in the second half. We would have wanted to put more on the board than that.

"It's never over till the Fat Lady sings," he says, laughing to himself for slipping into cliche. "That's the way football is. I'm looking forward to the replay now.

Thirty four years old and he's just come within a hop of the ball of bringing Mayo the All Ireland they have craved for 45 years. He's not excitable about it. Nothing to bask in. Nothing to weep over.

"We had the winning of the game, sure. Another three or four minutes and Meath would feel the same. There are areas we will have to improve on. On the sideline you can't tell much about the quality of the game. We have two weeks, very little training can be done, it's a question of getting the minds right."

He rubs the game through his hands, sorting the wheat from the chaff. What he needs to keep for two weeks, what he needs to discard.

"I was happy how we shifted around play today. We varied things. We'll probably get involved in a little bit of gamesmanship for the next two weeks. Football is like that now, a lot of tactics involved.

"We gave away the ball too often, though. We were still winning possession in a lot of areas of the field, but having done that we would concede the possession to Meath too easily. We just gave the ball back too easily.

"On a number of occasions we dropped the ball short into the keeper's hands. You can't afford to do that at this level. Had we put it wide or over the bar, anywhere except in the keeper's hands, we would have won the game. We'll have learned from those things. "We are a young team. If we are to be here for the next five or six years, they are the lessons."

Already himself and Sean Boylan are shuffling the pieces. Wondering what the other is telling his players.

"I am pleased that we came here and refused to capitulate. We played within ourselves. Sean Boylan will say to them that they can improve. It's interesting. Something to look forward to."

Two more weeks. More nights on the training field with the darkness drawing down and legs getting heavy.

"It's a long long year," he says. "We started off this time last year. For amateur sportspeople, the commitment and dedication is unbelievable. That has to be rewarded. The confidence level has improved no end from the word go. The potential in Mayo has always been there."

He knows the rota already. Here is a routine managers fall into after drawn games. The team who snaffled the draw tell themselves how lucky they were not to lose. The team that surrendered the win tell themselves that they almost had it.

Down the corridor, as befits the reprieved, the Meath dressingroom is more welcoming. It must be wearying to see the media at a time like this, but Sean Boylan greets us like lost friends.

When it comes to the planning and the tactics and jockeying the bench, nobody does it better than Sean Boylan. He has won games in the past for Meath with the right substitutions at the right time. In the mayhem of an AllIreland, being able to make those decisions amounts to genius. The timely introduction of Colm Brady yesterday was easily as important as Coyle's point.

Back in the dressing room, Boylan is shuffling the pieces already. Good at it. Effortless. He has had his chat with his team. His first chat that is. Many more to follow. Meanwhile, mind games.

One thing is certain," he says, readying himself for the shower, "John Maughan would have been talking to that team about our semi final performance, talking to his players, picking them up and telling them that we weren't as good as we seemed. Now, maybe, they know that we're not as good as they thought we were.

"It's not just the case that Meath are just happy to be here, but Mayo themselves are fine, fine footballers. I was very impressed with Mayo right through. Their demeanour, the quality of their football really, impressed me, as it did against Kerry. I know that we were blessed to get out of jail today."

Making allowances for managerspeak in both camps, that locution which Maughan cheerily describes as gamesmanship, there had been a drop in the level of Meath performance. Sean Boylan worried about the loss of intensity.

"It's hard to reproduce the intensity all the time. There's a lot, of young bodies out there. It's hard to lift it again and again. We have to get the energy levels back up now. Imagine when they scored the goal how light their legs got for five minutes, how heavy our legs were when we missed chances. We needed to get the break to pick ourselves back up. In the end we got the break.

"There is no guarantee that you are going to come out with the same momentum as this game finished with," says Boylan. "There is a new game. They start from scratch out there. We know a bit more about each other now. That's about all. We didn't lose and we have mistakes to learn, from. We'll be looking forward to it."

There aren't two finer people or two finer managers in the country. Maughan and Boylan deserved their 70 minutes of parity yesterday.