‘We defended like dogs’ – Stack on win over Mayo

By Kevin Egan

As Roscommon completely dictated their Connacht championship quarter-final with Mayo in Castlebar last Sunday, it was easy to forget the horror show that was the start of this year’s league tie against the same opponents. On that occasion, Kevin McStay’s charges exploded out of the blocks by scoring seven unanswered points in the opening quarter.

At the time, it felt like a continuation of that type of game wouldn’t just have secured the two league points, it would have also destroyed any sense of hope or ambition that Roscommon might have brought to MacHale Park for the championship tie.

Instead, however, the Rossies rallied to eventually lose out by just two points, and they had a template for how to take on the league champions.

Step one? Don’t fall into a huge hole at the start of the game.

That’s easier said than done, however – so the obvious first question to Roscommon captain Brian Stack after their 2-8 to 0-10 win last weekend was, how exactly did they do it?

“We learned a lot from that game,” the St Brigid’s man replied.

“You certainly can’t give Mayo a six-point head start, they’re such a good team, they’ll close it out because they’re a smart footballing side. We targeted the start and we got a right good start, even playing into the wind.

“We knew they were going to target our kickout when we were into the wind so we had a plan in place to go long and really get around the ball, fight for breaks and show them how up for the game we were. We did well there, I’m not sure what the numbers were but it gave us that platform in the first half. They could see we were up for it, and then we were well set up behind the ball if we lost out.”

The team lost their way in the third quarter a little, with a series of shots from distance going astray (four of Roscommon’s six wides in the game were struck in the first 15 minutes of the second half) and Stack was happy to see them fall back into their original structure after that.

“We were disappointed with the third quarter, we were kicking outside the scoring zone, going for pot shots. But we really got it together in the last quarter, we defended like dogs.

“Our plan was to keep going the way we were going, sometimes if the wind is too strong it doesn’t suit to kick a ball, especially on that surface. You can’t really fully use the wind to your advantage, so the idea was to keep going as we were going. We didn’t execute well in the third quarter, but we regrouped then and got it together.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise from Roscommon’s Mr Versatile was that he reckoned it wasn’t a case of finding a new gear after the league, but instead it was simply carrying their form from the league through to the championship.

“We were going as hard in the league as we were today,” he said.

“There’s only a couple of weeks in between, just the one for Mayo, so we had to be ready. Especially after spending so long going up and down between Division One and Division Two, we weren’t taking a backwards step in any game. You could see that in the last game against Donegal, we wanted to get to the league final and we tried to do everything we could to give ourselves the best chance of making that happen”.

While Stack, David Murray and Conor Daly all had huge afternoons against Ryan O’Donoghue, Tommy Conroy and Aidan O’Shea respectively - holding the Mayo inside line to 0-2 from play in total - further out the pitch, Roscommon’s control of the war in the trenches was no less significant.

Niall Daly was in the heart of that battle, attacking breaks and carrying ball from the wing-back berth that he has made his own, and he too spoke about the importance of the team’s statement of intent in the opening 25 minutes, holding Mayo to just one point.

“The big thing that stood out a mile was that our starts against Mayo and Kerry were so far off the mark, and then Mayo started against Galway the same way they did against us. So, we targeted the first 20 minutes to ensure that we were still in the game,” said the Moate CS teacher.

“We found ourselves 1-2 to 0-1 up, which was an unreal position to be in. The way the wind was in the first half, it was about putting bodies on the line, fighting for the breaks, and the boys around the middle were unbelievable in what they did.”

“To win a Connacht championship is a big thing for us, that was one step and we’ve to win two more games to do that,” Daly added.