All-Ireland SFC preliminary quarter-final: Mayo 1-12 Derry 0-15 (AET, Derry win 4-3 on penalties)
FACING into an All-Ireland quarter-final against one of Dublin, Kerry or Donegal, you didn’t imagine for one second that Mickey Harte would be complaining.
His team came in past him bruised and sore and with ice packs strapped to limbs. They have seven days, eight if they’re lucky, to get right for whatever Monday morning’s draw throws at them.
They would have taken that on Saturday afternoon and for all of the two-and-a-half epic hours in MacHale Park at the end of which Derry and Mayo were prised apart by a penalty shootout, won by the Oak Leafers.
It was a dramatic recovery given what had gone before in this year’s championship, not least Mayo’s performance against Dublin a week earlier.
“When you get to this stage of the competition now, there’s no way you’ll sneak into the latter stages. You’ve got to win your way into it. If we want to be in the last four, there’s a serious task ahead of us. We’ll see on Monday morning what the nature of that task is,” said the Derry boss.
“Look, that’s the price you pay for not being in the pole position, we all know that,” he said of the relative lack of recovery and preparation time compared to the sides they might meet, whose reward for topping their group was a weekend off.
“The price you pay also is that you have to go to the other team for a home venue in the preliminary one. So these are the prices you have to pay, so you have to deal with that.
“Look at whatever, six or seven days, I don’t know when it’ll be. It’ll not be easy to recover from that, but still in all, I’d rather be thinking about recovering than thinking goodbye until January.”
There was a different energy about Derry in comparison to their previous four outings, including the laboured win over Westmeath. Harte said they had put particular focus on keeping a clean sheet, taken from them by a controversial Ryan O’Donoghue penalty, but they stuck at it and got their reward.
“Derry have had a great defensive record over the last number of years and maybe we just slipped away from it a bit and took it for granted without actually thinking about, let’s make this work again. So I think we did make it work pretty well there today.”