One more session to put Mayo on song

Championship 2006 news: All the hard work is done but there's still one more important exercise in Mayo's All-Ireland football final countdown.

Manager Mickey Moran and his assistant, John Morrison, will take the team on a final bonding and spirit-raising session this weekend - aimed at ensuring the heads as well as the bodies are up to the task of playing Kerry on Sunday week.

The location of that session has yet to be revealed. None of the players present at the team press night in Castlebar on Tuesday knew where they were headed and when Moran was asked about it he answered with deadpan seriousness. "Aye, Lourdes," he said.

Not that there seems to be anything wrong with Mayo's heads at the moment. Confidence was already high among the players present at the new Breafy International Sports Hotel just outside Castlebar, which the Mayo team have been using for various aspects of their championship preparations and recovery in recent weeks.

Moran's own good form was helped by the fact that his 30-man panel is now injury free: "Yeah, the funny thing is, and touch wood, for the first time this year we have everyone going well. Trevor Mortimer is going well, Liam O'Malley is back training and flying. Billy Joe Padden is 100 per cent as well. That's nice."

With only 10 days to go before the final, Moran admitted the focus now was all on mental and physical freshness. The big question mark over Mayo going into their semi-final against Dublin on August 27th was how well they could handle three games in three weeks - and having come through that Moran is happy to wind things down.

"Credit must go to John's recovery procedures," he explained. "It's the mental pressure of a build-up to a game in Croke Park that can tire you out. It's like going to visit someone long term in hospital. It's the mental thing that can get to you.

"But the Wednesday after the drawn Laois game were the best hydration results we had. Lads hydrated immediately, were in the ice baths, and the pool the next day. What they ate and the rest that they got meant that they were flying on the Wednesday after the first Laois game. I was scared actually, they were going so well. They did it as well the next day and, while maybe weren't quite as well recovered for Dublin, that proves the dedication to their own game."

Had Dublin forced the replay - and Mark Vaughan definitely had the chance - Moran would have been a lot more concerned about Mayo's ability to recover: "Sure if that ball had gone over a draw would have been the worst thing ever from our point of view. I think four games in a row would have been too much.

"And Dublin could have closed us out, but football isn't an exact science. A few wee turns and you get the momentum going again, but there's no substitution for heart. That's the one thing we couldn't train for.

"Kerry is another step up, that's the reality of it. But the boys were very focused after the Dublin game, and in the meeting there afterwards they looked at things in the past, and looked at things they wanted to do, and they just wanted to focus on training. But time was short, only two weeks really to train, because next week is a tapering off week."