Morrison Riled by Programme

Football is no stranger to poor excuses after a team loses a match. We've heard all manner of stuff coming out of the mouths of managers, players and coaches in the aftermath of defeat.

Blaming the absence of players through injury or suspension is a pretty popular one. Some managers might put defeat down to a series of missed chances or poor defending.

The poor state of some pitches also gets an airing in post match interviews, while a bad refereeing performance could also bear the brunt.

Sometimes you might even get the odd player or manager putting a defeat down to plain bad luck.

Not John Morrison.

After their defeat to Roscommon at the weekend, Leitrim's assistant manager didn't blame his players, the officials, or even the weather.

Nope. He blamed the matchday programme!

Morrison has cited an article in the programme outlining Leitrim's poor home record as a contributing factor to the side's "lack of self-belief":

"Who put those articles in the programme? ‘Leitrim never win at home’, ‘Leitrim have never beaten Roscommon’ and so on. They might have just said ‘lie down there until we whip you again’. The mindset and perception has to change in Leitrim and the likes of that programme do little to change attitudes."

Translating the publishing of these (factual) statistics into a possible reason for defeat surely borders on ridiculous.

The programme pointed to Leitrim's record at Carrick-on-Shannon that contained only seven wins in 49 games.

You can make that 50 games now John.

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Poor Mayo. John O'Mahony is having a torrid time this week trying to get his team ready for the opening round of the Championship.

Apparently, the Championship starts this weekend (though most of us should be forgiven if we have failed to notice the fact that Mayo are taking on New York this Sunday in the Connacht SFC).

And Mayo are struggling. There's lads doing exams, and there's a number of injuries. The team picked to face New York shows eight changes from Mayo's last championship game and contains four SFC debutants. In Friday's Irish Independent O'Mahony sounded worried:

"It shows how many young players we have in our squad. The New York game has come right in middle of exams, which is far from ideal. It's very demanding on the lads."

Speaking over a week ago the Fine Gael TD was equally optimistic:

"It will be important we don’t pick up any injuries as we won’t want to be stretched any further. Taking New York for granted would be very foolish."

Wake up and smell the Starbucks John... you're playing New York!

I'm reluctant to start into the usual northern complaint about Ulster teams having to negotiate through the quagmire of quicksand that is the Ulster SFC, but with Derry facing Monaghan, Tyrone playing Armagh and the coin-flipping outcome that Fermanagh and Down will produce (in a preliminary round!!), facing New York should be no more difficult than a stroll through Central Park.

It's another argument for another day (and Paddy Heaney had that day a few weeks ago in his 'Against the Breeze' column in the Irish News) but it highlights once more, the deficiencies in our Championship system. The disparities between the provinces. Galway and Mayo in Connacht, and Cork and Kerry in Munster are in the fast-track queue to the All-Ireland quarter-final.

O'Mahony and Mayo should be delighted with an early summer break Stateside. The rest of us are getting the waders out.