Pat Holmes says he couldn't pass over the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to manage the current crop of Mayo footballers.

New Mayo co-managers Holmes and Noel Connelly worked with the county's U21s for four years, leading them to All-Ireland glory in 2006 - and the former says he couldn't pass up on the chance of working with that batch of players again:

"It's not something you take up lightly," he tells The Irish Daily Star. "Noel had expressed an interest and I suppose, being realistic, if he wasn't doing it I definitely wouldn't have gone at it on my own.

"I suppose the attractive thing from our point of view was that we had worked with pretty much all the players from the team that played down in the [All-Ireland semi-final] replay [against Kerry].

"Twelve would have gone through our hands at U21 level that started on the pitch. We know all the players - myself, Michael Collins and Noel - we had done four years at U21 level and we felt we would love to get involved with that group of players again at a later stage.

"Now is probably the first opportunity and if we didn't do it now we wouldn't be able to because they would be gone. We weighed everything up and we said we'd have a go at it."

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