Stephen Rochford is confident that Mayo can bounce back from their Connacht SFC semi-final loss to Galway.

Last year's All-Ireland runners-up will have to take the qualifier route for the second year-in-a-row after the gut-wrenching one-point defeat in Salthill. Rochford paid tribute to his team for pushing the hosts all the way after Keith Higgins was sent off in the first half.

"Obviously losing Keith (Higgins) at a critical time in the game, 10 or 15 minutes before half-time, it asked a lot of the lads, but I think they showed a lot of resolve. We'll look back on that game and opportunities to not just draw the game, but to maybe have won it," he is quoted as saying in the Irish Independent.

"Playing with 14 men doesn't help, especially when you're playing against the Connacht champions and now a Division 1 team, so we ended up playing over 50 minutes in tough, tough conditions."

He continued: "We hit the post, we hit the crossbar, we had a ball cleared off the line and we had two shots in those closing minutes," Rochford said.

"We didn't have a malfunction. We didn't have a situation where there was no life in us, maybe compared with where we were this time last year.

"I'm tremendously proud of the effort that the lads put in there, but ultimately we've just come up short. We've got to take that on the chin, dust ourselves and get ready for a route in the back door."

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