Paul Flynn Identifies Most 'Bemusing' Part Of Deflating Mayo Defeat

Paul Flynn has accused Mayo of a "lack of energy" in their defeat to Cavan on Sunday afternoon. Mayo lost out on a scoreline of 1-17 to 1-14 in Castlebar. This was Cavan's first win over Mayo in the championship since 1948 but the majority of the aftermath has been dominated with talk of how poorly Mayo performed.

This year's Division 1 finalists and Connacht runners-up failed to pose much of a threat to Raymond Galligan's men. Only for a last-minute Aidan O'Shea goal the margin would have been wider.

On RTÉ's The Sunday Game, six-time All-Ireland winner Flynn was critical of Mayo's lack of energy and the lack of their manic work-rate which we saw in spades in their Connacht final defeat to Galway. Kevin McStay had reminded RTÉ that it was a one-score game in the end, but Flynn was unconvinced.

Kevin said there was only one score in it but that was not a one score game. Over the totality of it Cavan were by a distance the better team. The thing that would bemuse Mayo fans and Kevin McStay's management the most is just that lack of energy.

Whatever about anything else you're just saying what did we do really well against Galway and it was "we outworked them, we stripped them, we didn't give them any time on the ball" and that's basically the fundamentals you'd expect from your team every time and they didn't get it today.

Today Cavan outworked Mayo and that was the foundation for Cavan's win.

Speaking on The Irish Examiner's Gaelic Football podcast former Mayo manager and player James Horan described Mayo's overall structures as "farcical".

I think, Mayo will look at today's performance and Kevin McStay will get a lot of heat, the players will get a lot of heat, all that will happen and part of that is par for the course. Mayo's structures are farcical for an inter-county setup.

We talked about Louth and where Louth are going, the structures they have in place... "All these is a vision of where Louth are trying to go. Mayo, we do not have that

Horan went on to describe how the county teams in Mayo, senior and underage alike have no set training base and find themselves running from pillar to post looking for places to train.

My last two years in Mayo, we couldn't train on the back pitch in MacHale Park so I was scrimping and scraping off teams and clubs trying to get venues to train. I know the U20's are the same thing this year, in multiple club venues trying to get pitches".

We haven't built structures or laid down foundations like we should have over the last decade. We're behind so many other counties in what they've done and how they've progressed with their structures, their coaching, their pitches, their academies.

While Mayo's defeat to Cavan will grab the headlines and the frustration of supporters may be directed toward Kevin McStay and the players, Horan insists that the overall setup leaves a lot to be desired.

Mayo - in terms of GAA - is a big brand and is big business and we just don't have the structures to support it, whether that be a CEO or performance director or what it is so we don't have that and that fundamentally is why we don't have the basics of a pitch at a centre of excellence overall.

I think that's where a lot of the focus should be not just what people see at the tail end of it which is an intercounty manager or players. To me its incredible and there isn't that much heat about it.