"We want to play as if there is no tomorrow" says Garrity of Leitrim's challenge in relegation series

Leitrim will approach Saturday’s TG4 All-Ireland SFC Relegation playoff semi-final against Mayo as if it were almost an All-Ireland Final as manager Jonny Garrity urged his players to ‘play as if there is no tomorrow’!

The Green & Gold renew acquaintances with a Mayo team fortunate to edge them 2-11 to 1-11 in the Connacht SFC earlier this year with Saturday’s clash in Tubbercurry’s Kilcoyne Park (2pm throw-in) seeing the winners secure their status in the Senior grade for 2026 with the losers going into a relegation final the following Saturday against either Armagh or Donegal.

And Garrity has urged his players to forget the implications of the fixture next Saturday and concentrate on producing a performance without worrying about a potential game the following week: “The focus is completely on this week and on nothing else. It would be the same if it was a semi-final of a championship and you were hoping to get to a final. 

“You'll always know that there's another day, potentially, but you don't want to put too much onus on that day because that's out of your control and you can't do anything about it. What we want to do is play like there is no tomorrow and if we can do that and put in the kind of performance that I know is in the girls, then we're going to give ourselves a really good chance.”

In many ways, Leitrim face into a game with almost the same importance for Ladies football in the county as last year’s All-Ireland Final and Garrity admits that the same topic had been broached in the Leitrim camp in recent days, even comparing Saturday’s clash with Mayo to last year’s All-Ireland Final:

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“We've spoken about that during the week - those words have been said, that It is effectively our All-Ireland Final. It's a situation where you're not on a good run of form and you're there because you're not going too well, but you come up against teams that are in the same boat.”

The one difference, of course, between this campaign and last year is that Leitrim were playing to extend their season in 2025, now they want to end it on Saturday: “Last season, we wanted to extend the season with every match that was coming up. We wanted to get it going another two weeks and another two weeks by keeping winning.

“This season we want to end it. We want to end the season this Saturday by winning the game. If we were to manage that, it would be a fantastic achievement.”

To do that, Leitrim have got to have the right mindset: “I think in any relegation pathway, it'll go a long way to deciding who wins based on who has got the stronger mindset and mentality coming out of their respective troubles. We have spoken about this as a group. We've worked on it. 

“We want to be the team who are determined and together, and whatever about the opposition that we may come up against, we have to be united, be determined and be playing together as a group. If we can do that, we know that we're probably going to maximise our chances and that's exactly what we're planning on doing now on Saturday.”

The team’s mindset for these games is crucially important and the Leitrim boss admits that they were aware of how tough the Senior grade would be for last year’s Intermediate champions but stresses that the mindset that brought victory in Croke Park can be utilised to keep Leitrim up.

“It's something that we've been mindful of, even before a ball was kicked, there has to be an understanding of the realism of our situation, that there will be adversity at senior level for a team that has been promoted - that is a guarantee. A lot of our success or lack of success will be dependent on how we deal with that adversity. 

“The girls have been conditioned very well to know that whatever the result, or the manner of the result, we might suffer, it is always about the next game. It's always with the knowledge that we need one win to stay up. 

“We're never going to get that win if we put our heads down. It's always about taking whatever learnings that we can from any given match, despite how one-sided it may have been on the scoreboard, and looking to progress from there.”

Garrity does not expect to have a full panel to call from on Saturday, a constant theme in 2025 but stresses that he is happy with the calibre of players at his disposal: “We haven't had a clean bill of health this year and I don't think it's going to change. It's been a challenge and we might be looking at one or two coming back but we'll also have one or two unavailable for the game. We're certainly not going to be hyper-focused on that.

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"We know that in any given match, in any given season, you're going to have to utilise your panel and you've got your panel  for a reason. We're really happy with the group that we have. That won't be used as any sort of an excuse - we are where we are. We've got players that will come in if they need to and those players will be of the calibre that we expect that will allow us to produce the performance that we're capable of.”

Despite the results Leitrim have endured this year, Garrity believes that  his charges have the ability to produce a big performance against Mayo: “After the Galway match, the aim was always to progress game on game over the course of the All-Ireland group stage. When you look at the results,  we suffered a couple of heavy defeats but we are looking at how we improved incrementally. 

“There have been improvements, they haven't been enough to get close on the day. There hasn’t been enough improvements to get us a result to get us into a quarter-final, but they are enough to bridge the gap to hopefully a really good performance and give us a real chance to stay up.”