Tbh that was a very disappointing performance. Not sure what the reasons are but Mayo looked like a team ready to challenge for All Irelands but the regression to what we saw today was hard to understand. Galway presumably have improved massively but Mayo sadly looked rudderless and unmotivated and lacking in the basic skills. Maybe this is being too hard on them and there are genuine reasons for such an outing but the whole team looked out of sorts. Will listen to the podcast and hopefully the interviews will shed some light on what's going on.

@joeg completely agree. Never looked up to the level required, which was very odd and their intensity in the tackle wasn't at the same pitch as Galway. Hopefully they have their eye on a bigger prize but I felt it was important to retain the provincial crown today.

I heard the ladies team are based out of ballina this year, wonder is all the extra travelling taking its toll on the players ?

Correct me if i’m wrong but none of todays starting team were from north Mayo and majority are from Westport, Castlebar or East Mayo and would have a 90 minute round trip to training 2-3 times a week for the last 4 months.

McGuinness pulls it out of the fire again. What an incredible mindset and work ethic he has built into that team.

I genuinely think the man would win us an All Ireland. A great great manager and deserves every success he gets. Delighted for Donegal, wouldn’t mind seeing them win Sam at all.

1 lady from Knocknore and 0 from Carnacon. I think these 3 clubs are the top clubs. What is going wrong?

Wow were miles behind donegal and armagh, all their forwards can score and run direct with the ball

@Green & Red; I’ve been saying it here since 2014…literally every year I’d say, that had Mayo had McGuinness that he’d have won an All Ireland or two!! People thought Horan was as good as him. With respect to James but he isn’t in the same league as McGuinness(few if any are).

There was some debate on here back at the start of the year where some still doubted him and questioned his ability/influence/tactics etc. Madness. I described him in the past as a magician. Part of this is turning his players in winners. Anyone who can’t see that now is blind. It doesn’t matter what happens from now. He brought a team from nowhere in 2011 to champions in 12..and back to a final again two years later (this was a squad of players with no underage pedigree). Now with an average bunch, no where near as good as twelve years ago, he has beaten Derry, Tyrone and Armagh to land an Ulster title. What a manager. He is pure class. Fair play to him and to Donegal. They are so lucky to have him.

@Mayonaze,

Couldn’t agree more. I remember those same debates. “Oh it’s negative football” “He ruins the game”. Pure bullshit from our fan base at times.

It’s such a shame that we didn’t approach him back 2 years albeit we did have strong candidates. Nothing in his league though. Hard to believe today he has won more provincial titles than Rochford has in his whole IC managerial career.

4 Ulster titles in 5 goes is just outrageous. I will say this, McGeany is spoofing as a manger. He must not want his players to shoot??

I remember putting this question up here on this blog at the start of the year.
It was, that we will see whether a manager can change a teams fortune in a short time.
McGuinness has certainly done that.

Of course, he has experience in Professional management from his Soccer time.

There are will be many twists and turns left in the All Ireland series, but it's a must that Mayo play the Dubs outside Croker.

Bate the Blanket

Don’t think Jimmy has as much experience as our management team - or so we were told.

Not that I listen much to Donald Trump but I do remember him saying something very relevant in 2016 against Clinton. He said something like “Yes Hillary has more experience then me, but it’s very bad experience “

Hard luck to the mayo ladies they were on a roll maybe they just ran out of gas. But they've shown promise so hopefully bounce back from this!

Two battle hardened 'finished product' teams, something we are not. The catchphrase of the day's 'joy to watch' applies to the way both teams were able to take ridiculous scores from distance. Hopefully we will see some progression in our performances in the next few weeks. Right now, we are just flat, predictable, cavin will have no fear in Castlebar

Why is everyone so upbeat about Donegal winning today. There are not unbeatable as Armagh showed today

Upbeat!?

Not to be rude at all, but I think you’re missing the point completely?

Any word on a challenge match the senior men played today. Close game is what I heard

@Pod Fan do you know they were playing?

All analysis of our style of play identify the same problems- full back line left exposed and asked to defend one on one against top forwards, our build up play way too slow, too much lateral passing and an inability of our forwards to kick scores from 25-35 yards.
How in the name of God does someone within the management not see this. Do they sit down and review games and say yes this style of play we are playing is going to be successful??
I think like the Donegal team under Rochford- the players are bored and have no faith in this system. Look at the attitude of the Donegal players now under McGuinness.

@Clare I think it was Westmeath

@Southmayo Exile, Jimmy has rescued Donegal from Rochford's style. Redemption will come for us too. Hopefully

Vaaldam, Carnacon no longer force they were. Now most clubs have their own ladies teams they don't have the huge surrounding area they once had to pick from.
They currently bottom of league with losses of:
Charlestown 12-19 to 0-01 Carnacon
Westport 10-26 to 0-01 Carnacon
Conceded to Hollymount

@Pod Fan thanks! and oh and was close though westmeath are not bad side at all..

I do agree on the whole Rochfords style don't want to be harsh but our style of play is Rochford style 100%.

In fairness to Mcguiness he's turned donegal around I still don't think they will get to a final or anything like that but I was one of his doubters at the start of season and HD my hands up fair play to him for turning donegal around..

Great comment South Mayo. A team has to totally buy into a system. I don’t believe our lads do, if we have one. Will we ever see Mayo players kick points like that today from both teams. If we could with all the possession we usually have, we would be in business.

That was some game today especially the point taking from all angles, exciting to the very end, superb penalty taking. Jim McGuinness is some manager and a winner. I wish we had him in Mayo. I know well some of the mayo fans look down their nose at him and make comnents about his tactics. Then here in Mayo we have lots of over and back play, not enough long range point scoring and no sweeper played last week. As for the U20 debacle - I have little faith anything will be done by the powers that be. The Tyrone team yesterday were outstanding/very impressive.

Goagain

Totally agree in relation to the U20. Tyrone were extremely impressive in particular their forward play. Played like a senior team.

Should be noted that Donegal drew the match today..they didn’t win it and Armagh let them back into it twice (sound familiar).

No way should it have been decided on penalties…GAA have got it all wrong in their pursuit of more money.

Genuine disgrace that the hurling match last night was behind a pay wall!

@Spotlught yeah vert true fair play to Mcguiness but still think Armagh are dark horses this year..

U20 is such a crucial development stage. Our results and performances (not always aligned) this year have been really poor, with the exception of moments against Galway. Management wanted to make Mayo a ‘very difficult team to play against’ or words to that effect. They failed in that objective quite dramatically losing to Leitrim, Sligo and Down. Now, we have a bunch of lads whose morale has taken one hell of a wallop and that’s bad news. For others perhaps after listening to far too much hype since they were minor, it could be a timely wake-up call. Regardless, I don’t see how there’s any positivity to take from this u20 campaign and an awful lot of that rests on the shoulders of management.

In spring 2025 our 20’s team will be made up almost exclusively of lads from minor teams that won Connacht in ‘22 and ‘23; one of whom should have won an All Ireland and the other who fell away limply against a much more physically imposing Monaghan in an AIQF. Despite those reverses, it’s potentially an impressive pool of players to pick from next year and let’s speak frankly here; nothing short of a top 2 finish should be acceptable. If the current management team are retained, and I’m not even remotely convinced they should be, then there’s big pressure on them to get it right. But also now, on the players themselves. Time to step up to the plate. Preparation for that starts now in terms of individual players improving and fine tuning basic skills. It’s also key that they are on the correct conditioning programme and they surely don’t appear to be from looking at them compared with opponents. However it’s also really important that they are in the right, positive group environment. A winning one. Forget about this shite about making them better people. Management’s goal is to win championships. That comes from the top and that’s where I’d be concerned. Can the players show up for next year and buy into the message management are saying to them when it’s from the same leadership that oversaw such a miserable campaign in 2024?? It sure as hell makes it an uphill task. I and those who follow the underage teams quite closely, had high hopes for this management ticket this year but boy did it fall flat.

Super game today. Jim McGuinness is a top class manager and deserves huge credit. The score taking today was of the highest order. But brilliant and all as Jim is, both Tyrone and Armagh took them to extra time and now because of this half baked system they face Tyrone again next week when they should instead be playing Armagh in a replay. Kieran McGeeney and his team were desperately unlucky today but the narrative now will be that Armagh are bottlers and Jim is the messiah. We know all about that in Mayo. Small margins indeed just as last week v Galway and the kick of a ball decides who is the hero and who is the villain. Well done to Louth today for making the provincial final competitive. For all the bad press the provincials get we had 4 reasonable finals this year. One final point as I started with Jim I will finish with him as well. I thought he was extremely gracious in victory with his acknowledgment of a great effort from Armagh. Now I know it should be easy to be gracious in victory but PJ was the exact opposite last week.

Hard luck on the ladies but hopefully they will improve for the All Ireland series as they will have to. They are in with Dublin and Kildare so Dublin look a step ahead of most so realistically the big game will be against Diane O'Horas Kildare who won the Intermediate Championship last year.
I couldn't believe all the positive comments on the Ulster Final today from the pundits. I know the point taking was good but as far as I could see both teams when they lost the ball just ran back to defence. There were no shots at goal while I was watching but admittedly I was so bored that I turned it off and dipped in for the score at times. It was a borefest for me but great penalties.
The u20 management should do the decent thing now and call it a day and let someone else have a go next year.

To me it looks like we have too many chiefs on that U20 management team.

JoeG and Mayonaze speath the truth. I have copied below a post from another thread I posted earlier, but the sentiment is exactly in agreement with JoeG and Mayonaze with regards to the U20 management set-up.

"Once Sligo got control early in that second half our sideline seemed static and leaderless. Looking down from the stand that evening there didn’t seem to be any direction, instruction or encouragement from our sideline. They seemed very mute. There was loads of lads in and around our sideline but no one directing things out on the pitch......Great players don’t always make great managers/coaches and while our sideline is stacked with stellar names that does not necessarily mean they are brilliant coaches. Also, many of that management team came direct from the Senior Ladies set up and those two codes are very diffferent sports. What works in Ladies football does not always work in Lads, and the physical demands, speed and distances in both running and ball movement are very, very diffferent."

Unfortunately, I don't expect any review or hard questions from our county board.

On the Jimmy topic, he has done well with Donegal to get them back competitive no doubt about it. Will they be contenders ? I thought they just got over the line with both Tyrone and Armagh but they'll now have momentum and belief. This championship is beginning to have a very open look about it so you never know.

@joeg I think we have the same problem at senior.

I tend to go out of my way to look for positives and search for the silver linings when looking at games, simply more enjoyable that way for me when I've no direct input on fixing anything I might feel is broken, but hard to disagree with any of the critical comments. Here or elsewhere. Even in the context of all the injuries this year (before & during the campaign - they were pretty brutal), it's a tough year to pull too many positives* from.

A lot of talk on questions to be asked. I'll happily throw down a few bouncing around my head.

1 - Panel Selection: Did we get it right?

Day 1 we could all see it was a light & mobile panel (lots of mentions of age, but some of the younger lads among our best for size & physicality. I'd suggest the shortage was as much on player profiles to balance match-ups when needed, rather than simply more older lads with more S&C), especially in the middle third.

Chats were had here and on the Discord on the clever strategies we'd need for restarts using speed & movement without obvious targets to hit high for primary possession, but none seemed to appear for the year and we seemed to consistently be going high & long. Often to disadvantage. On the occasions where the initial concerns came to light and we were (relatively frequently over the year) getting overrun with power in the middle third, we didn't appear to have a Plan B to attempt to stop it (or didn't appear to want to use some of the limited options we did have available, partly feeding into 2 you'd imagine).

2 - Player Retention: What went wrong?

Keen not to specifically name individuals but glancing at the panel over the year we can all see names that were removed over the course of the campaign (and some obvious omissions that weren't among them). Each will have a unique story but the trend among them begs the question if all was ok with morale in the camp? If not morale what issues did we hit & what do we need to do going forward to avoid/mitigate/remove those issues?

3 - Tactics/Motivation/Confidence: Where and why did these go wrong?

Easy to nail these fairly generic catch-alls whenever a result doesn't go in your favour but I think there will be lots of folks wondering about match-ups gone wrong (and yet retained), worryingly frequent collapses - especially in the 3rd quarter (hard to know how much was tactical tweaks by opponents getting them on top or just our lads coming out flat), consistent shooters (at club/school/county) hitting very inconsistent returns, incredibly poor returns on goal chances created and a severe lack of intensity (tackles/presses/turnovers) in a number of games.

Not sure the correct framing of this question beyond... what went wrong? And, possibly more importantly, how is it going to be improved and fixed for next year?

* My own highlights (excluding the Down game which I wasn't at and didn't have available to stream) being some great performances from Darragh Beirne (outrageous workrate and tackling, his timing on when to stick the hand in as good as anyone in any position I've seen at u18... and coming packaged as a silky forward that's saying something), Eoin McGreal (on a team challenged for size and physicality he was a rock for us this year, saying something when again an u18 member of the panel. You'd wonder how different some of the games might have been if he'd started and continued the year fully fit), David Slattery (looked right at home given his first year breaking into the underage setup. An outstanding prospect for a proper Barrett-esque defensive-defender, something we're in relatively short supply of) and John MacMonagle (outstanding in every game and in the one he missed you could feel his absence in every attack that got through the middle).

McGoldrick ref for saturday

JR. Unfortunately it really looks that way. Had a chat with 2 other lifetime GAA men this morning and going through the panel, the league campaigns, style of play, defensive set ups, attacking strategies, and basically everything we could think of and it's hard to see much if any improvement in any areas. I think we might have actually regressed. I hope I'm wrong but it's getting hard to raise any enthusiasm for what's going on.

How many of the Sligo under 20 team this year were part of the under 20 team in 2023 that got to an all Ireland final ?

@Sean burke: 19 of the '23 AIF panel were still underage & involved this year. 10 of the side that started the final starting their first round drawn game against Roscommon.

I'd tend to question size and power rather than purely age or S&C when it comes to our squad. The latter do feed into & are (considerable) factors in the former, they are independent and not linear correlations across players.

Donegal v Armagh (0-15 to 0-15 after 70mins) was a very enjoyable game when compared to the muck served up by Galway & Mayo the previous week (0-16 to 0-15 after 70mins)...at least I think that's what people are saying on this blog...

Tsu , im glad you replied , a lot of Mayo supporters were aware of the age profile of the sligo team .

"I’m not sure of the age profile of Sligo but they seemed to be bigger and stronger than us,” he said."

Unfortunately Mayo management were not aware .