WHEN YOU LOSE a player to a black card in the first five minutes of an AIB Club All-Ireland football final, it would be easy to use the incident as an excuse for coming out on the losing side.

However, that’s not the case for Castlebar Mitchels midfielder Barry Moran who instead believes his side were just beaten by the better team on the day.

“To be honest I didn’t see it because I was running after my man and a free was given and I turned around and saw him talking to Richie [Feeney] and to be honest with you I couldn’t really believe that the black card went out.

“I was talking with Richie inside, he’s bitterly disappointed, an All-Ireland Final and he gets five minutes on the pitch due to a black card but in saying that that wasn’t the winning and the losing of the game and we’ve no sour grapes, Vincent’s were the better side on the day.”

Indeed, the Mayo midfielder believes Castlebar actually responded positively to the loss of Feeney and feels it was their second-half performance that ultimately cost them.

“We got a stranglehold on the game but if you look at our games over the whole championship whether in Connacht or against Crokes we’ve had mishaps, we’d sendings off, we’d injuries so I suppose we’re used to it and we pushed on from there but the bitterly disappointing thing is the second half, that we never pushed on from there and that’s the big regret, that we’re going to have.

“It’s fairly raw at the minute but we’re going to have to sit down and look at it, look at the second half in particular and have a look at how they caught us on the counter attack and a look at how they opened us up. It’s something that is going to haunt us but you learn from your mistakes and that’s what we’ll aim to do.

“We’re bitterly disappointed. Going in at half-time we were in a good position. We felt that we could have pushed on and we had a great opportunity to win the game. We didn’t. It was Vincent’s who pushed on and in the end they were the better team and deservedly champions.”

The turning point for Moran came after Danny Kirby’s second goal for Castlebar.

“Straight after Danny’s second they came down and got a goal which put them two back up and from there they got a purple patch and opened up a gap on us.

“We tried to pull it back and we got a goal ourselves but we could just never get back the gap that they opened up after they got the goal. That was the turning point.

We were pushing on and pushing on and trying to narrow the gap and we got caught quite a lot of times on the counter attack and they got vital scores.”

Whether or not Castlebar can return for another shot at the AIB All-Ireland SFC club football crown remains to be seen:

“Twelve months ago before we won a county would anyone have said we’d be here on Paddy’s Day, I don’t think so. Would there be many in the Mitchels? Deep down I don’t think there’d be many.

“We know ourselves we are capable of pushing on. It is going to be raw, it is raw, no doubt it is going to take a while but we’ll put our heads down and from there we’ll regroup and it’s early to be talking about it but we won’t find it until the Mayo championship comes around in two or three months time.”

Additional reporting from Mick Finnerty 

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