ROCHY ROAD TO DUBLIN
Stephen getting used to scenic route to Croker but now it’s all about the result..
IN just his second year as Mayo manager, Stephen Rochford will already have 19 Championship games under his belt by Sunday evening. To put perspective on that, in James Horan’s four seasons in charge from 201114, Mayo only played three games more. While few Mayo managers have had uneventful tenures, Rochford’s has been especially madcap. He’s failed to reach a Connacht final yet has guided the team to two All-ireland finals and very few of the previous 18 Championship games have done much to calm his nerves. “There is a lot in this job… this role... this position…” says Rochford (inset after 2016 final), “and I’m very privileged to be managing the Mayo team, getting to All-ireland finals. There is a big workload in it but I knew that when I was signing up for the job. “Things have moved on from those first two months, we lost the first three League games, so when you sign up for the job initially, that is not part of the plan anyway.” They don’t necessarily have to lose for Rochford to get it in the neck though, with the drawn Allireland semi-final against Kerry a case in point. The selection of Aidan O’shea at fullback was the major talking point, with much of the commentary uncomplimentary. “You are under the microscope, you are in a situation whereby your performance is evaluated by a result. “I would ask you to show me any other profession, and this isn’t even a profession, where you have journalists, pundits, analysts, evaluating your performance on a weekly basis. “I don’t see politicians, solicitors, whatever it is, getting that kind of scrutiny. And the narrative can change from week to week, depending on a result. “You work within your own county. The Mayo support have been very good to me, to the team, and whatever sort of criticism we were getting in the week between the two games, we sort of sheltered ourselves away from that as we had enough to be focussing on in relation to winning the replay, to not be distracted by a headline, a comment or a line here and there.” If last year’s route to the Allireland final was unwieldy,
this year’s has been even more so with two replays as well as extra time being required to see off Derry and Cork in the qualifiers. It wasn’t until game seven, the replay against Roscommon, that they finally started to look like themselves again. “That game, we never looked at the scoreboard, we just looked at the next play, looking to achieve the next score,” Rochford explains. “We didn’t get sloppy in defence, we didn’t let them in for any soft scores or chances.” Mayo’s season has teetered on the brink at various stages, particularly against Derry in the first round of the qualifiers, when defeat may well have been enough to bring Rochford’s reign to a premature end. “No matter how hard we were trying to score, we just couldn’t. “We had 18 wides, five balls into the goalie’s hands, and five times we hit the woodwork. That’s 28 shots with no reward, plus what we scored. Still we had to wait to see if James Kielt was going to knock us out. You’re saying, ‘Holy Christ’ and (snaps his fingers) we could have been out of the Championship like that.” And the Championship would have been much the poorer for it.