Cillian O’Connor insisted yesterday that he is not haunted by his injury-time miss in last year’s All-Ireland final replay.
The 76th-minute kick went wide at the Hill 16 end of Croke Park, denying Mayo the opportunity to take the game to extra time and bridge a gap back to 1951, when they last claimed Gaelic football’s biggest prize.
O’Connor, an experienced full forward, is unsure if he will be able to handle the pressure better if presented with a similar scenario again.
Mayo will face up to their biggest challenge since that game on Sunday when they travel to Salthill to play Galway, their rivals and the Connacht title holders, in the provincial semifinals.
“As a free-taker, you have to be pretty cold about it,” O’Connor said. “You could hit a brilliant free in the first minute but if you are still thinking about that in the second minute then you are going to be landed on your arse by a defender. The same mindset has to apply if you kick a bad free. You still have to win the next ball and you can’t be thinking about something that happened 30 seconds ago.
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“With this in mind, I definitely can’t be thinking about something that happened eight, nine months ago. It’s easy to talk but only time will tell if I am able to improve.”
O’Connor, who kicked the equalising point from play that sent the drawn game to a replay, admitted there was an initial period of devastation after the eventual defeat.
“At the time, of course, it was serious,” O’Connor said. “That is stating the obvious. Then you have to go through it and analyse it. There is a period where you try and reflect on it, to see what you could have done better, and that part is hard.
“Then, after that, you have to leave it there and enjoy your off season. So since the turn of the year I haven’t watched it back.”
O’Connor claimed that while his free-kick miss came at a decisive stage of the game, he made various other mistakes earlier in the match that weren’t focused on.
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“I don’t weigh that particular incident heavier than all the other mistakes I made in that game,” O’Connor said. “There were plenty of other things I could have done that could have also increased our score by one, so I just take it for what it was, a free that I could have scored and didn’t.
“The breeze was going from left to right so it was a bit more difficult kicking it in from the right, for a right-footed kicker.
“So I had to kind of cut through the breeze with it and I didn’t get the follow through that I wanted, that would bring it in off the right post. It tailed off to the left too soon. I have to leave that in 2016 and that’s what I’ve done.
“You can’t be too hard on yourself, beating yourself up over mistakes all the time. You wouldn’t be on an inter-county team if you weren’t fairly good at some parts of the game and you have to remind yourself of that sometimes.
“When you don’t win, there is a tendency from the outside to really forensically analyse everything that went wrong. Sometimes, in the noise, the positives can be lost.”