O'Shea: Mayo facing "biggest challenge"
June 21, 2016
Aidan O'Shea and the Mayo team make their way out at Dr Hyde Park.
©INPHO/Donall Farmer.
Aidan O'Shea says Mayo will have to raise their game to avoid having a short summer.
Stunned by Galway at the weekend, the Connacht champions of the past five seasons now face an unfamiliar championship trek through the back door:
"From a player point of view, definitely it's our biggest challenge. Having not done it before, it's hard to quantify it and not knowing who we're playing it's hard to focus. So it's very much on ourselves now," O'Shea told The Irish Independent.
"Previously we've lost in August or September and had to wait nine months or longer to get back to where we had been the previous year.
"We've a three-week window now to try to get ourselves back playing good football, enjoying our football again and get a bit of momentum. If we don't rise to it, it could be a short summer.
"When we were winning Connacht titles everyone was saying, 'would you not be as well off going through the back door because you're not getting much of a challenge?'.
"I'd prefer to have won the Connacht championship but we haven't. We're going to have a couple of games in a row, hopefully, to get ourselves right.
"It's very hard to say whether it's a benefit. But it's not a benefit if we wallow in this loss and arrive at the game in three weeks' time still back in MacHale Park last Saturday."
