We’re back in Connacht SFC action this coming Sunday. Roscommon come to town for a pivotal provincial championship semi-final meeting at Hastings Insurance MacHale Park where throw-in is 4pm. Meath’s David Coldrick is the ref, the match is live on RTÉ2 and Midwest will have live radio commentary on it as well.
The outcome of Sunday’s match is way more important for both teams that will a Nestor Cup decider be for whichever of us wins it. As well as a place in the Connacht final, which, barring an upset of seismic proportions in the other semi-final, will surely be against Galway, Sunday’s victors will also be one of the eight seeded teams in the All-Ireland SFC draw, while the losers will go into the unseeded pot.
This means that while a Connacht title is now no more than a nice-to-have, getting to a Connacht final is a must-have. This will surely have a significant bearing on the kind of contest we can expect to see at Castlebar on Sunday.
Like ourselves, the Sheepstealers enjoyed a fruitful Division One campaign this year. Widely slated in advance to drop straight back down to Division Two, Mark Dowd’s team made a nonsense of that proposition, with their form in the early rounds marking them out as possible finalists rather than probable relegation fodder.
They ended up with four wins and three losses, placing them fourth – ahead of Galway on the daft head-to-head rule, with both counties ending on eight points – and just tucked in behind Andy Moran’s Mayo in third.
Roscommon could easily have done better and might even have pushed on to a final appearance had they come away from Killarney in Round 1 with something to show for the considerable effort they put in that January afternoon. Instead a buzzer-beating late point from Tomás Kennedy gave Kerry a wholly undeserved one-point win that day.
Home wins over Monaghan and Armagh followed and, although they didn’t know it at the time, victory over Galway over at Pearse Stadium in Round 4 meant they were already safe in Division One with three matches left to play.
The eleven-point reversal they suffered at Dr Hyde Park to Dublin was, then, a rude shock but two weeks later, also on home turf, they had six points to spare over eventual league champions Donegal.
Round 7 saw the pair of us meeting in Castlebar, in what was a bit of a twilight zone encounter. We needed to see a reaction after the hosing Kerry had given us the previous weekend but we didn’t want to show our hand fully and didn’t want either to end up in a league final either. They had no interest in displaying their wares at all and so went with a team shorn of most of their main talents. Our 21-point win has no relevance whatsoever for Sunday’s meeting.
Instead, Roscommon are certain to rock up to MacHale Park feeling good about their recent championship record there. They went from 1986 to 2019 without a single championship win over us at the venue but they followed that upset win over us that year with another one on their next visit in 2023.
In both years, of course, we’d been crowned league champions soon before our provincial championship meeting. Call it coincidence, call it what you will, but in 2019 and in 2023 Roscommon did what they’d also done in 1970 and again in 2001, which was beat us in Connacht just after we’d claimed the league title.
In fairness to our lads, having to face them a mere week after the high of beating Galway at Croke Park in the Division One decider three years ago was unfair in the extreme. It was also a situation we didn’t manage very well, signposting a championship campaign that would soon spin wildly out of control for us.
Those two Roscommon wins over us also highlights a glaring shortcoming on our part in recent years, which is our Connacht championship record over our two main provincial rivals at Sunday’s venue.
The most recent time we beat either of them in a Connacht SFC match at Castlebar was the 2014 Nestor Cup decider win over Galway. The last time we beat Roscommon in a provincial tie at the venue was in the semi-final the previous year.
Incredibly, twelve long years have passed since a win over either of them on home turf, during which time we’ve lost at MacHale Park to Galway in 2016 and 2018, Roscommon in 2019, Galway in 2022, Roscommon in 2023 and Galway again last year. This is a provincial itch we could really do with scratching on Sunday.
We’ve both had one outing so far in this year’s Connacht championship. We had an untroubled win over London in Ruislip while they made very short work of New York over in Gaelic Park. The main talking point in that one was the sending-off of Roscommon’s ace attacker Daire Cregg for what appeared to be not a whole load.
Whether or not his appeal succeeds could well have a bearing on Sunday’s meeting. We’re favoured to win it but that was the case the last two times Roscommon came to town for a provincial championship meeting too.
Sunday’s game is set to be the first real test as Mayo manager for Andy Moran. A win makes us one of the seeded teams and it gives us a shot at a Connacht title, even if provincial titles mean little or nothing in the wider scheme of things now. A loss brings us a whole load of trouble, though, and, with it, the prospect of an early end to our inter-county year.
This is a winner on the day fixture, with extra-time and, if necessary, a penalty shootout, to be used if there’s no victor after seventy minutes. So, what do you reckon: will we beat the Rossies on Sunday? Let’s end with a vote on that question.
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