fought each other to a standstill in Castlebar until eventually, at three minutes past nine on a dank June night, Mickey Harte’s side found themselves the winners. Conor Doherty took the last penalty in the shoot-out and though Mayo goalie Colm Reape got a strong hand to the ball, it was not enough to stop it squeezing in off the post.
Kevin McStay’s side took the longest time to come up with an answer to the puzzle Derry set. Playing against the wind in the first half, they could only muster up six shots in total. Two of them came in the same breath, Jack Coyne’s outside-of-the boot effort dropping short on 24 minutes, Stephen Coen’s follow-up skidding wide after Odhran Lynch dropped it.
The Derry corner forward popped his first score of the day after eight minutes from a mark and followed up with two identikit efforts on the loop before the half-hour. For his fourth of the first half, he skated along the endline past Tommy Conroy and fisted over the bar. By now, he was on to his third marker and the game was barely a half an hour old. Mayo had nobody providing that sort of cutting edge.
Now we had a game. Derry had to shake themselves – and did. Gareth McKinless found his range with a point from right of the D, Brendan Rogers did likewise from a little more central. Derry had carved themselves a lead again but it felt like a fragile thing at this stage. They really should have seen it out from there and ought never have needed extra-time to get the job done. But although O’Donoghue’s penalty hit the net on 49 minutes, Mayo only added another point from there to full-time. They had bad wides along the way – a very kickable Colm Reape free and, as time ran dead, a fisted effort from Callinan. Those misses gave Derry a chance to stay alive.
It was such a gut punch for Mayo, made all the worse by the fact that the circumstances were pretty much identical to last week. They went man-for-man on a Derry kick-out but still allowed them up the pitch, a combination of tackling that was both too lax and too robust. And to top it all off, McKaigue’s equaliser was a fisted effort from pretty much the same spot on the pitch as Cormac Costello had scored for Dublin.
Derry-Gaa Football-Championship
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