Rossies in rude health as 'vicious rivalry' is renewed

Some bracing feedback from last week. A few Rossie fans were a bit miffed last week that the media remained besotted with Mayo, when their own team had gone three from three and were sitting atop the league.

Choosing to cover Roscommon this week in the wake of their Clones setback might stand as a further provocation.

Roscommon's bright young manager is on a different page to some of their supporters. For Davy Burke, the one saving grace from the loss to Monaghan is that people now might stop blowing them up.

"There's a lot of talk, a lot of unwarranted talk. We’re a good, hard-working team, we’ve decent players, but we need to turn up every day and do it," Burke told RTÉ Sport last Sunday.

Prior to the league, Roscommon were branded the likeliest candidates for relegation and routinely compared with every cross-channel yo-yo team that sprang to mind. The Norwich/Fulham/West Brom of Gaelic football was the verdict of the podcasting fraternity.

Those relegation fears have dimmed somewhat - though not entirely, it's still possible to go down on six points as the Rossies themselves did in 2003 - but they have now been replaced by a new worry, namely that they might wind up in a league final a week before playing Mayo in the Connacht championship.

The perils of catastrophic success are looming large. Those negatives could of course be cancelled out somewhat by the fact that it could well be Mayo themselves lining up opposite in the league decider, presumably rendering the Division 1 final into a high-budget dress rehearsal.

It would also result in this weekend's game being the start of a trilogy. Maybe even an entire franchise. Rory O'Neill, on the RTÉ GAA podcast, pointed out that they could conceivably meet in the championship