By Cian O’Connell for gaa.ie

Moments after an enthralling contest unfolded, Roscommon manager Kevin McStay tried to make sense of it all.

McStay steered a youthful Roscommon side to Connacht SFC glory, and his evolving outfit delivered another gritty display on the Croke Park stage.

While it wasn’t a perfect performance McStay was satisfied with the resilience Roscommon demonstrated, especially in the closing stages.

“We have never played here before, all the young players bar Sean McDermott, he has played one, the rest of them have never played Championship here at this level, at Quarter-Final level,” McStay reflected.

So the Roscommon boss was delighted that his players secured valuable big match experience at GAA headquarters.

“That is great,” McStay admits. “It is money in the bank we’d see it as for the replay, but not only the replay, for next year and beyond for our development. “That was good, but we just made so many errors throughout the game it was hard to get momentum, we kept turning the ball over, but we never said die, we kept at it.”

Ultimately McStay felt that a draw was ‘a fair result overall’ considering the pockets of supremacy enjoyed by both teams during an absorbing tussle.

“I said it outside, I have a lot of recall of us attacking from the half back line having turned it over and then get 30 metres into the Mayo half and get turned over again to give it back to them.

“So I think it is probably a fair result overall, I think we deserved it, we showed a lot of bottle for a young team.”