WHEN STEPHEN ROCHFORD got his hands on the managerial reins for Mayo, the county was in the midst of an era of complete rule in Connacht.
The Crossmolina man was appointed in the winter of 2015, a few months after Mayo had picked up the provincial senior football crown for the fifth successive year.
And yet Rochford has had a different experience as a boss in Connacht, a pair of semi-final losses at the hands of Galway and no western silverware to show for his efforts.
He has a chance to address that pattern of results next Sunday in Castlebar after Galway have strung together a sequence of recent victories over Mayo.
The games have been tough and hard-hitting encounters yet while acknowledging the increased physicality of Galway’s play, Rochford does not term them a ‘dirty’ team.
And he believes they have upped the ante with their rate of progress throughout this year’s league.
“Galway have really laid down a marker again, not just with us but throughout the league.
“If anybody was looking at trying to outline what was going to happen in the league from the middle of January, if somebody was to say one team was going to go unbeaten in the league, I don’t think anybody was going to pick that it was going to be Galway. We probably all would have said that it was going to be Dublin.
“So they’ve obviously moved on well from the 2016 team that beat us, and the 2017 team that beat us.
“So I expect a tough, physical, proper Connacht championship game, with very little of a margin in it in the end. On current form they’re the second best team in the country, and that really highlights the quality that they have.
“I know that there’s been maybe a little bit more made of it than necessary, but they have a lot of big, physical guys, but I don’t see them being a particularly dirty team to be honest, or anything like that.
“But if you’re going to be the team that they’ve set their ambitions out about, you won’t be that pushover either.”
Rochford admits there was plenty to consider before he committed again to the Mayo cause for 2018 in the wake of another painful All-Ireland final loss for the county.
“There was a lot of things that were telling me to make the decision there and then to go back, but there were a number of items to consider. So they were in relation to backroom team, player retirements, my own personal circumstances in relation to family and work, and a couple of bits in that.
“And then it was also seeking the support from the county board in relation to moving things on because although you may feel that you’re competing at the top table, the top table continues to move, and were we going to be moving with it.
“So it just took a little bit of time to have that dialogue, but my heart was always wanting to go back, or to see out my time. It probably took a week or two longer than I would have liked, but so be it.
“Someone within the management said, ‘it’s not a case of getting over it, you just adjust’. So it’s the same as any instance in life, you get on with it, you go on and you try and learn from it but not having particularly sleepless nights about that more than the game coming up, just knowing that we prepared well, we played well but we didn’t play as well as we had aspired to in that final.”
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