By Cian O'Connell

Mayo manager James Horan was hugely encouraged about the manner in which his forward unit put Tipperary under so much duress at Croke Park.

Horan identified that work rate as the chief reason Mayo dominated vast chunks of the opening period with Cillian O'Connor immense in attack.

"I thought the pressure we put on maybe after about five or six minutes of the first half, I thought our pressure, particularly up front, was very good," Horan responded when asked what pleased him most. 

"That gave us a platform for being able to keep pressure on them. 

"We won a huge amount of turnovers in the first half and that was the platform for the victory really. It got us in the lead and we just saw it out from there."

Mayo goalkeeper David Clarke made a string of important saves early on.

"They were very poor from our point of view, those high balls in, but even the goal they got was a terrible goal to give away from our point of view," Horan reflected. 

"So we’ll look at that for sure. Yeah, in the second half as well, the game was gone and maybe we got a little bit lackadaisical for a while and gave away a few goal chances."

Ultimately Horan was encouraged that Mayo progressed to another All Ireland decider against Dublin on December 19.

"It’s hard to know what type of game, and it’s hard to know what Tipperary were going to bring," Horan remarked. 

"We saw them obviously in the Munster Championship, we very much focussed on what we could bring and what we could do, and our strengths. We got a lot of those right today, kind of won us the game ultimately. 

"But with that we’ve a huge amount defensively I think that we’ll have a look at, try tighten up a little bit, I’m pretty sure we can do that, though."