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not entirely, it's still possible to go down on six points as the Rossies themselves did in 2003 - but they have now been replaced by a new worry, namely that they might wind up in a league final a week before playing Mayo in the Connacht championship.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 round robin and have already met in the FBD. We could be talking five or six meetings before 2023 is out. Roscommon and Mayo might become sicker of each other than they already are.
As far as the national media is concerned, Galway-Mayo is the Connacht old firm but this is a spiteful little rivalry, at least from the Roscommon side.
Our qualitative research indicates that Roscommon supporters harbour more antipathy to Mayo than Galway, although this may be conditioned by the former's status as by far the loudest presence on the western football landscape over the last decade (we might have gotten a different answer in 2001) and there are no doubt also geographical variations within that.
"People don't realise, the rivalry between Mayo and Roscommon, we hate each other," Frankie Dolan told Eoin Sheahan on Newstalk two years ago, in the course of a prolonged bout of score-settling with his old manager John Maughan.
Anyone who ever sat next to a Roscommon fan when Andy Moran was in possession couldn't dispute the claim. During his playing days, Roscommon fans regarded Andy with the same warmth as Celtic fans did Mo Johnston, circa 1989. Croke Park stewards can probably count themselves lucky they didn't have to dispose of pigs' heads and other such projectiles after the 2017 All-Ireland quarter-final.
Moran, of course, is from the contested territory of Ballaghaderreen. The Local Government Act of 1898 constituted a significant land grab from Roscommon, as they expanded along their western frontier, hogging a few townlands and baronies in Mayo and Galway. None were as important as Ballaghaderreen. Quite why it ended up in Roscommon's possession is a matter of historical confusion. There is a suggestion that Roscommon attracted Ballaghaderreen in the same way Ireland attracted Google and Facebook in that a local MP in the area liked the look of the less onerous council rates regime on offer.
It was in the wake of a Mayo-Roscommon league game six years ago that Gay Sheerin lashed out at the tribal obscenity of having two Mayo men on the line for Roscommon.
"I fought for years against Liam McHale and Kevin McStay, and they hated me and they hated Roscommon," Sheerin told Willie Hegarty on Shannonside Radio, not stinting on the hyperbole.
"And they can't have got that love for Roscommon. There's no way. Because I couldn't get that love for them."
Watch Kevin Mc Stays interview with me after the Roscommon v Kerry match. He responds to one local critic ! pic.twitter.com/3aDXbxWpns
— Marty Morrissey (@MartyM_RTE) March 5, 2017
Standing in the sleet talking to Marty Morrissey in the Hyde the following week, McStay described the rant as "the greatest load of nonsense" adding that Sheerin - though he didn't name him - "would want to cop on to himself."
Notwithstanding his incurable Mayo-ness, McStay guided Roscommon to a glorious and unexpected Connacht title the following July, sweeping past Galway in a downpour in Salthill ("we blew them into Galway Bay," as hairdressing superfan Paddy Joe Burke put it in his viral soliloquy the following day).
Roscommon celebrated that provincial title with their characteristic wild abandon, as they do all of them. Two years later, when they repeated the feat in Pearse Stadium, we were treated to a retro premature pitch invasion. Not a regular phenomenon whenever Mayo or Galway pick up the Nestor Cup.
McStay's predecessor John Evans, who presided over their rise through the divisions though struggled to make the breakthrough in championship, professed himself amazed by the rivalry between Roscommon and the rest in Connacht, labeling the rivalry between Roscommon and Mayo as "vicious" - though he also lobbed Galway into the mix.
The perception was that Roscommon lived for upsetting the big two in Connacht finals. Post-1980 at any rate, this has been the realistic summit of their ambitions in trophy terms. Therefore it was perhaps surprising to see the county endorsing Proposal B - the radical but doomed format which would have jettisoned the provinces and essentially have transformed the championship into the league - in late 2021, whereas Galway and Mayo, who treat the Connacht championship as a simple means to an end, rejected it.
As Martin Carney pointed out prophetically ahead of the 2010 Connacht final - one of the crueller upsets of the past two decades - "Roscommon love to gatecrash the dreams of other teams."
Munster football has a big two, Leinster football once upon a time had a big two. Ulster is a special case. Prior to the arrival of television, Cavan constituted a big one in the province, now it's an uber-democratic mish-mash, with Tyrone the only regular winner since the mid-80s.
But Connacht, if you peruse the records, doesn't so much have a big two as a big two and a half.
In demographic terms, Roscommon are among the big overachievers in Gaelic football.
The county has a more or less identical population to Sligo, though without a big urban centre or League of Ireland outfit to distract from the monomaniacal focus on Gaelic football. This has resulted in 24 Connacht titles compared to Sligo's three.
But Connacht, if you peruse the records, doesn't so much have a big two as a big two and a half
Since the Second World War - the Emergency brought us tea rationing, media censorship and Roscommon All-Ireland victories - they have picked up at least one provincial title a decade. This isn't something their more high-profile opponents this weekend can claim, Mayo having registered a duck in the Connacht title column in the bleak 1970s (not coincidentally, Roscommon's best decade in the television era).
While Burke was anxious to talk down his team after Clones, he was less reticent in the off-season, describing it as one of the most exciting jobs in the country. In particular, he highlighted their riches in attack, unusual among teams operating on the fringes of the elite.
The Murtaghs and Enda Smith have been mainstays for the past half-decade. Into this mix has arrived Ben O'Carroll, the match-winner in Salthill and an electric presence in the victory over Armagh.
He also dismissed any nagging feelings that Roscommon's late 2010s era of relevance was passing, pointing out that the U20s reached an All-Ireland final in 2021.
Kevin McStay, finally in the job he was resigned to never getting, is back in the Hyde this weekend, which he once described as a "well-struck 50" from his own back garden.
Mayo, themselves concerned by the spectre of the league final booby prize, are nonetheless confident of dismissing the Rossies before the experimentation can begin in earnest.
In truth, Hyde Park has never been much of a fortress in championship. Roscommon haven't beaten Mayo at the venue in summertime since the 2001 Connacht final. Against Galway, you have to go back even further, to 1990.
But Roscommon relish taking down the big two when they can. We may all have a job divining the motivations of the leading Division 1 teams at this stage of the league but there's enough local bad feeling to keep both sides interested ahead of this unlikely top-of-the-table clash.
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