New managers have made their mark, but questions remain for Ros’ and Mayo

By Kevin Egan

For all the strides that the National League has made in recent years in terms of its importance, here in the GAA we’re still a long way from the world of soccer, where the phrase ‘the league table doesn’t lie’ is an accepted truism once you get into the final third of the season. The GAA's leagues can be notorious fibbers.

Mayo finished third in the top tier of this year’s competition, Roscommon were fourth. Even the most optimistic supporters of either of those two counties would struggle to rank their own heroes that highly, even if most people would agree that the best two teams in Ireland are the two counties that contested the Division One final.

Add in Leitrim beating Sligo, Tyrone pushing Armagh to the wire and of course Westmeath shocking the country with Sunday’s fantastic performance against Meath in Tullamore, and it’s clearer than ever that league standing might be a decent guideline, but it’s still a very uncertain tell of a team’s capacity and ability.

To a considerable degree, Sunday’s game in Castlebar (4pm) is an acid test for two sides that have shown promise with new management and an overhauled playing panel in 2026 so far. On both sides of the Ballaghaderreen frontier there are supporters who are pleasantly surprised with how things have gone in the spring, but they also know that championship games in London and New York are of no use when it comes to testing the pressure points in any team.

What we have seen is that the new managers in Mayo and Roscommon – natives in both cases – went into their roles with a very clear idea of some glaring deficits in their sides and they’ve taken huge strides towards turning those weaknesses into strengths.

In 2025, Mayo’s inability to kick two-pointers was widely cited as a huge handicap, and so far this year they’ve been exceptional in that regard, peppering scores from outside the arc. Meanwhile Roscommon were deemed, up front in particular, to be a team with plenty of good kickers but also quite bereft when it comes to pace.

Fast forward to the current campaign and players like Darragh Heneghan, Rob Heneghan, Conor Hand and Colm Neary have made the Rossies into one of the best teams when it comes to transition play and punishing turnovers.

There are other sectors where there are some positive signs, even if it’s too early to say that matters have been resolved. Aidan O’Shea has performed well as a physical target and playmaking fulcrum at full-forward, but how that will work as the speed of the game picks up remains to be seen. The Breaffy veteran is a wonderful tackler and a great option for a long delivery, but as the game speeds up on drier ground, those skills move down the pecking order in terms of what’s needed to thrive.

A similar verdict could be given when it comes to the Roscommon midfield, which has now settled at Keith Doyle and Conor Ryan. These are two young players with no shortage of natural ability on the ball and in the air, both offer a scoring threat from distance. And if – for example – the Mayo midfield was Stephen Coen and David McBrien, then Doyle and Ryan would look like they might make the better overall contribution.

How they would cope against players like Jordan Flynn and Bob Tuohy, who are much more mobile and much more interested in getting up and down the pitch and creating attacking overlaps, is another matter.

Defensively, Roscommon are very inexperienced with as many as four of their likely starters to be very raw in terms of championship games, but tactically, it’s Mayo who perform more of a high wire act.

Their system isn’t entirely man on man in that there is a considerable amount of handing over attackers from one man to the other that goes on in order to try and keep each defender in a role and a sector of the field in which they are most comfortable. But in the finest Mayo tradition, Sam Callinan and Paddy Durcan will bomb upfield from the wing-back positions, and because that will often leave them with no-one home, they will trust in their inside line defenders to win their one-on-one battles.

Michael Plunkett was allocated the centre-back role against London and he has a huge amount of responsibility to marshal everything going on around him in this current Mayo structure; yet if you asked 100 Mayo supporters who would be their first choice to wear the 6 jersey, Plunkett probably would do well to get much more than 20 or 25 votes in what would be a very broad and diverse field of candidates.

With Enda Smith back in the form of his life at centre-forward, this is not an ideal position for Andy Moran to be still uncertain of the best man to fill the number six shirt. To this reporter – who admittedly, is not a former Footballer of the Year and not a proven coach and manager either – there would be a strong case for pulling David McBrien back from midfield to try and marshal Smith, even if there is an element of robbing Peter to pay Paul about that.

Roscommon have their uncertainties too, and like the team as a whole, much of it stems from their inexperience, more so than any lack of form. Caelim Keogh was handed the full-back spot at the start of the year and the fairest thing that can be said about the Pádraig Pearses man is that he made Mark Dowd’s decision to leave him in situ very easy by playing like a man with ten years of intercounty football under his belt.

Still, taking on Aidan O’Shea is something else entirely, and if any novice full back told you with confidence that he was ready for that test, you’d say it was naivety rather than well-founded. Ronan Daly will relish the challenge of trying to keep Ryan O’Donoghue under wraps, but that leaves Eoin Ward (most likely) to try and manage the Swiss army knife that is Jack Carney, a player that can field, score, pass, run, and of course kick with both feet adeptly. There are matchup challenges aplenty at that end of the field for Dowd.

On what is an incredibly busy weekend for games of immense significance, many in the hurling championship but a fair few big football clashes as well, there will be some hastily hashed together articles that will focus on Sunday’s fixture in Castlebar through the prism of the history of the rivalry, or from the perspective of Kobe McDonald’s travel plans, or indeed the old reliable source of clicks and eyeballs that is the Andy Moran/Ballaghaderreen angle.

That stuff still matters. For the opening weekend of the league, I was in Salthill for the meeting of Galway and Mayo, when things got a little tense in the press box between two local reporters, one from each county. It threatened to boil over when mention of Moran hailing from Roscommon was met with the rejoinder: “I’ll tolerate a lot. But don’t you dare call him a Roscommon man,” and given all that, there will be an understandable temptation to focus on those old chestnuts that always touch a nerve.

But while those tropes will always apply to this fixture, Sunday’s game is fascinating for so many compelling football reasons. Roscommon and Mayo are each walking the tightrope of going through transition, while at the same time maintaining their competitiveness and exceeding expectations. But in MacHale Park, one of the two bubbles is likely to burst. Meanwhile whoever remains standing at the end of it, will suddenly have a lot more pundits wondering if maybe, just maybe, they might be the real deal.

As for a verdict? Assuming Daire Cregg remains suspended, then we’ll say Mayo by three or four. If the Boyle man gets a reprieve at DRA level, however unlikely that may be, then his scoring ability could give Roscommon a great chance to keep flying closer and closer to the sun.