Roscommon GAA Discussion Thread

The mind boggles at your 'reasoning'.

Let's look at the incident without naming the teams, maybe that will help.

Team A win a can't-miss free with time up. The free will be allowed to be taken and the game will finish. The scores are level. A player from the team about to lose the game goes down on his knees into the grounded player, hoping some idiot from the team about to win will decide that winning doesn't matter and completely over-react and hopefully the free will be changed to a hop-ball. And that's exactly what happened. It worked because a player from the team about to win a crucial game didn't have the discipline required, just like Donal Vaughan.

How anybody can defend Harney's actions that day is beyond words. I have yet to hear ANY Roscommon fan other than you defend him.

Donie Vaughan is still in hiding somewhere in Mayo. It was a rush of blood that he will always regret.

Ultan Harney had a similar rush of blood. Lesser consequences maybe. But hard to fathom what goes through players minds when they do these things. I'm not condoning players dropping like a sack of spuds at small amounts of contact. But they should not be given that opportunity to do so in the first place.

Haven't we been 6-8 starters short; C Murtagh, enda Smith (suspended for Tyrone), Donie (suspended for Dublin), N Daly, 4 Brigids players not available for prep and Tyrone. Then the two players from last year gone travelling (McKeon and can't recall other off top of head.)

Speed and application is directly related to player quality IMHO. Not sure is it justified to debate our organisation - I couldn't fault it.

We can't count Ciaran, hasn't he opted out for the year, and while I haven't heard it confirmed there was a lot of talk of Eddie stepping away too, at least in the short term.

Who from Bridget's is proven that's to come in? Ben?

Yet again your refusal to answer my question speaks volumes.

😂😂😂😂

Improved performance, even allowing for how poor Monaghan were on the day.

We should have pushed on more in the last quarter though. A huge chance to pad our score difference, which might come into it before the league is out, it could be us or Galway yet, and decided on score difference, and if it is we will regret not being more ruthless today.

Where's Ben O'Carroll?

Jesus, that was absolutely pathetic!

And I wouldn't mind but Mayo were there for the taking.

Can't help but feel despondent after that defeat. So many issues all over the field. So passive and one paced, no coherent attacking plan- a lot of our first half scores were off the cuff moments of individual magic, no defensive plan bar flood players back to inside the 45 and then we are too stand offish. Very leggy and lethargic throughout, like how many times did McLaughlin just burn past our lads.

And what summed the night up for me was that back heel attempt when under no immediate pressure to cleanly pick the ball up.

Tyrone Dublin Mayo defeats all followed the same pattern of huge second half collapses. This is one hell of a long game management are playing if it is that.

Can't lay blame on one thing. That was a moment of madness and we knew about it for 8 months that he wasn't eligible.

Multiple factors contributed to the loss in Tyrone. The Brigid's players were eligible to play but we rested them... Are you going there next?

I fear it's the latter.......don't buy into a lot of the crap about holding back, shadow boxing and cutehoorism that's spun during the leagues. It's not just a matter of turning on the tap at the end of the league and being happy to drop into Division 2 with perhaps one win out of the 8 league games. It doesn't really happen like that.

I hope your right, however.....

The form and pace were playing at is so far off of where the top teams are. I mean, they aren't going to stand still and wait for us to catch up, they are going to improve too. How many of that starting 15 for Mayo on Saturday will start an AI quarter final? Or the Galway team we played? The likes of a fit Ben, Harney, Heneghan, Ronan and Niall to name a few will potentially improve things but we've lost ground and are coming from a lower base/further behind than we were at the latter stages of the league last year. With the new compacted season calander do we have the blocks to work on and catch up with the work the others do? I hope your optism is not misplaced.

Looks like a competition to see how many halfbacks we can fit into the same team :)

Has Doyle dropped out of the panel altogether?

After the Mayo debacle I said I wasn't going to go today as a form of protest... but of course I ended up going. I wish I didn't change my mind.

The first half was simply a contiuation of the last day. Complete lack of urgency, no pace, careless in possession and absolutely no penetration.

At least in the second half they finally showed a bit of bite and urgency. Not that it made a whole lot of difference, as even when Roscommon got back to 3 points on more than one occasion, you just never felt that Kerry were not going to win.

Following on from a few posts I made recently, I have to be fair and say that Ultan Harney was very impressive when he came on. He brought much-needed strength and aggression around the middle and his ability to run directly at the opposition while not losing possession is a very important to Roscommon.

From a league point of view, here's hoping Derry put out a second-string side with one eye on the League final. It's clutching at straws, but you never know.

However, from a bigger picture, I'm worried. I can't understand how a side can deteriorate so much in a year and why so many quality players and two coaches walked away after a year that showed so much promise.

Mayo fan here so can't give much insight on the recent developments of your lads, but when the two sides met at minor in '21 ye gave us a right good hiding, 4-13 to 2-12 and the scoreline flattered us. Ye won pulling up.

No question they'll be in with a shout on Wednesday if they've kept half the group together & got some reasonable progression. We got blown away by the strength and physicality at midfield that day and even bringing in some very talented young lads from our '22 minor final side (wouldn't be surprised if we've a couple of u18s involved this year too along with a backbone of mostly u19s) that's an area we'll still be focusing on/worrying about come Wednesday (I'd know a lot of the lads involved to watch from club/previous underage and couldn't even begin to guess who from about 8 of them might be in the middle come throw-in).

Should be a cracking competition with the move to round-robin this year. All of Roscommon, Mayo, Galway and reigning champions Sligo (still not entirely sure how they beat Galway last year) will be fancying their chances I'd imagine.

A few solid runners (back and front) and some of the more exciting underage scorers we've seen in recent memory on our side so if they can live with that potential higher physicality (from you, Galway and Sligo) we'd be hoping to do well.

Niall Hurley alone can be worth the entrance fee if he catches form. I'd have fancied him making a fairly big impact for us at senior this year but guessing the S&C isn't quite there yet (tricky player, young O'Carroll-esque, so would probably take an awful lot of punishment when he gets thrown in there). Dara Hurley, Diarmuid Duffy, Darragh Reilly, Ronan Clarke, James Mahedy, Paul Gilmore, Sean Morahan, Conal Dawson, John MacMonagle and Tom O'Flaherty (along with Rio Mortimer, Yousif Coghill, Darragh Beirne and Tom Lydon just u18s) all lads I'd be hoping to push on in coming years and have senior potential from this lot.

Diarmuid Duffy started a league game for us at senior and played +90 minutes this year before dropping back to 20s a couple of weeks ago & Darragh Reilly played a challenge game for us early in the year (vs club all stars) making a nice late cameo. Tom, Sean & Conal would have been around the extended panel the last year or two and involved in the odd friendly/challenge game.

Darragh a relatively new name for us even here in Mayo as most of his recent years has been spent playing underage soccer for Ireland. Would have spent a lot of time from u15 to u17 with a well known Evan Ferguson (played left back on those teams iirc). Shows as a creative and decent scoring wing forward for his club so interesting to see how the new management team (a few well known names involved there) end up using him.

Notable only 4 of those mentioned (Tom, Conal, Sean and Darragh) in their final year of 20s, going to be a fairly young squad for us I'd guess.

Neither side has released the panels yet this year (Sligo the only Connacht side I've seen putting them out yet) when they normally come out ~week before the first game so still plenty of question marks bouncing around on both camps I'd imagine.