BARRY MORAN HAS rubbished the suggestion that Mayo are on the slide and reminded their critics — “it’s not about peaking in January.”
Stephen Rochford’s side kicked off the league on the wrong end of a nine-point beating against Cork last weekend.
And RTÉ Radio pundit Tommy Carr was quick to predict their imminent demise that very same afternoon.
“Mayo have had their better days,” he said. “Mayo are on the way from the summit on the way down with that team.”
But Rochford was missing 15 players for his first league game in charge — some to injury and others, like Moran, to Castlebar Mitchels ahead of their upcoming All-Ireland club football semi-final.
Up next are the four-in-a-row chasing Dubs who visit MacHale Park on Saturday night, and while the Cork defeat will turn up the pressure, Moran warned that there’s no need for Mayo to press the panic button.
“The defeat against Cork … they won it by a big margin, rightfully so,” he said.
“I suppose it puts a small bit of pressure on but, at the end of the day, it was the last weekend in January.
“We have the Dubs coming on Saturday and obviously we’ll be looking for a big performance and a big kick out of ourselves.
“But it is early days as well.
Stephen and Tony [McEntee] and the lads are only in. They’re building on that, so I wouldn’t really be panicking.
“From the outside looking in, I wouldn’t be too worried with the loss to Cork in the sense that as long as you identify you’ve a lot of work to do and you go and do it, it could be the best thing that happens yet.”
Carr’s scathing assessment ran totally against public opinion, which has Mayo installed as 9/2 third-favourites to end their long wait for Sam Maguire in Rochford’s first season.
But he pulled no punches and said: “If you put the gun to my head here now and asked me to pick the teams who could potentially win the All-Ireland, Mayo are not going to come into that bracket at this moment in time.
“I think they have had their best opportunity.”
With barely a competitive ball kicked, and nearly eight months out from the All-Ireland final, Moran believes it’s far too early for such wild predictions.
“You know you can’t judge any teams, where they are going to end up next summer, on what happens in January.
“It was a bad defeat by Cork, but to say the team is on the slide or anything like that, I wouldn’t think so.
The way I’d look at it, to be quite honest with you, we have a lot of lads who are as hungry as ever. They realise how much work we’ve got to do.
“Looking at Mayo over the last couple of years, we’ve been lucky enough to be playing in August and September and we’d be hoping to get back there again.
“It’s not about peaking in January. It’s about building towards getting through the league and towards championship.
“I wouldn’t really be panicking, or agreeing with the judgement that Mayo are on the slide as a squad.”
