In the end, nobody and everybody was a winner at Croke Park yesterday evening.
Mayo and Roscommon will meet again in a week's time to decide who faces Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-finals, after a manic, helter-skelter seventy minutes that was low on quality but typical of Mayo games.
Absurd, nail-biting, nerve-jangling, teeth-clenching tension: check.
A late score in injury time: check.
An ability to stay in the game despite some very errant shooting: check.
Even the result was quintessentially Mayo: having drawn last year's All-Ireland final, they've drawn three of their five Championship games this year, all of which they had led only to concede the equalising score.
They peppered yesterday's game with another of the Mayo's defining characteristics: misfortune. The state of the Croke Park pitch is once again a talking point among Gaels and those willing to criticise U2 and Coldplay for just about anything. At times, it resembled an ice-rink, with players slipping most notably in front of Hill 16, where the grass did appear to be slightly discoloured relative to the rest of the surface.
But such is Mayo's prodigious proclivity for finding bad luck, they found alternate ways of slipping, too. Stephen Rochford flagged this after the game. He did not use these examples as a way of mitigating against his side's relatively poor performance, but he did accentuate a couple of incidents.
We had three shots to win that game. So I don't think fatigue had anything to do with it. I think Stephen Coen was harshly done. He says he didn't pick the ball clean off the ground; Donal Vaughan stood on a water bottle as he went to pull the trigger. Cillian O'Connor got a clean hit in the middle of the field. They kicked the equaliser off the foul that was called on Stephen Coen.
Let's just go back to Vaughan for a second... he slipped on a water bottle!? We had a look back at the tape, and it's true. We can't show the clip,but hopefully, these screen grabs do it justice. It's not obvious as he falls, but it is as he kicks it away moments later:
You can see the offending object more clearly as RTE zoom in a moment later, as Vaughan kicks the water bottle away. Keep an eye on the right of your screen:
Remember when David Dunn tripped over an empty crisp packet for Birmingham City? Mayo (naturally) have given us the GAA version.
