30 seasons of history as FBD fires up again
Andy Moran signs autographs at the 'Meet and Greet' with Mayo supporters following the team's charity game against Offaly. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
For a 30th time, the FBD Connacht Senior Football League will take place over the coming weeks.
2025 marked 30 years since the league’s inception, however, with the GAA’s controversial decision not to run pre-season competitions last season and the Covid-19 pandemic preventing its staging in 2021, the Pearl anniversary has been delayed until now. And how the times have changed.
Where it’s Connacht GAA’s intention to have the upcoming FBD League ran off in 14 days, the inaugural event in 1995 began on Sunday, January 8 and continued until Saturday, April 30 – and that was despite a team less competing in those days, given London’s current involvement.
If you’re in want of a quiz question, Padraig Brogan scored Mayo’s first ever point in the FBD League in a 1-10 to 0-5 win against Galway at Flanagan Park in Ballinrobe. It was his first of six frees in the game while Diarmuid Byrne, the newly appointed Mayo U17 manager, fisted home Mayo’s first-ever FBD League goal.
Brogan struck 1-5 across two games the following weekend too, as Mayo drew with Roscommon in a Saturday game in Ballyhaunis, 3-2 to 0-11, but lost 1-6 to 0-6 against Sligo in Markievicz Park.
Mayo got back on track with a 2-11 to 0-7 win away to Leitrim which caused a three-way playoff between Mayo, Sligo and Galway to determine the inaugural FBD League finalists.
If the fact that Mayo’s victory over Leitrim had been their first in five years wasn’t sign enough of where Mayo Football was ‘at’ in those days, when they came to play Galway in the 1995 Paddy Francis Dwyer FBD League Cup Final at Tuam Stadium on Bank Holiday Monday, April 11, Mayo had just been relegated to Division 3 of the National Football League having gone the entire Division 2 campaign without a single point to their name.
And yet, drawing that game with the Tribesmen and beating them 0-16 to 0-15 after extra-time in the final replay thanks to Kevin O’Neill’s last-gasp winning point at MacHale Park on the final day of the month, the Green and Red were installed as 6/4 favourites to win the Connacht SFC. What followed was a 0-17 to 1-7 humbling to Galway in that summer’s provincial final.
Now, as then, the FBD League isn’t always an indicator of things to come in the season’s bigger competitions. So while the first two of Galway’s ten FBD League titles, in 1998 and 2001, saw them lift the Sam Maguire Cup later in the year, in the years of Mayo’s last nine All-Ireland SFC final appearances, on only one occasion had they begun that year with an FBD title. But that’s not to say the action that lays in store over the coming three weekends won’t be highly anticipated among supporters, particularly given the length that separates one inter-county season from the next these days.
Quite a lot has changed not just in Mayo GAA circles but in the GAA itself since the last FBD League was played in 2023. It will be the first of the split season and new rules era, not to mention the first FBD League with Andy Moran at the helm of the Green and Red.
Mayo supporters got to see their first glimpse of what life will be like under the Ballaghaderreen native after their charity game against Offaly at MacHale Park last week. And according to Moran, given the GAA’s new look calendar, what was initially seen as a competition to take a look at some club players has now taken on greater significance.
“I think the big positive is you're getting running into the legs. Pre-season isn’t the same as it once was, remember we used to play the FBD and you used a completely different 15, a club 15, but that's not the way this is going to be. What you have now, you have seven games in nine weeks throughout the course of the National League so you need to have your boys fit and healthy and moving into it,” explained Moran after the twelve points challenge match victory against Offaly.
“You always hear this thing, match fitness. The only way you get it is by playing matches, so now you have to play some of your stalwarts and then you have to kind of bring in the young fellas as well.”
It’s not just a chance for a fresh injection of youth to stake their claim but to get experienced men like Tommy Conroy, Michael Plunkett, Aidan O’Shea and Ryan O’Donoghue much-needed minutes before the National League begins at the end of January.
Supporters saw flashes of Conroy’s brilliance against Offaly, including a well-taken goal in the first-half, but The Neale sharpshooter has had an injury-hit three years for the Green and Red and his return to full fitness will be carefully monitored.
“We brought him out there after half-time and only that Colm [Boyle] said it to me after about five or six minutes, he said ‘we have to get Tommy off here’.
“Tommy's marker was about 45 minutes today so we're trying to mind him, trying to bring him through. He’s one that every team in the country would love,” said Moran, who is also blooding fresh faces like Darragh Beirne, Seamus Howard and Liam Golden, while also giving Sean Morahan, Cian McHale and Diarmuid Duffy more opportunities to stake a claim.
Andy added: “We've got a couple of young boys that we want to bring in. I think we've seen a huge, huge, monumental shift in Cian McHale in terms of his football ability. We see it with UL, week in, week out, so to have two left footers on the team, with [Conal] Dawson coming back into it as well, is huge because you need that balance in your team.
“It's a funny one because Diarmuid, I think, can play in numerous different positions. We've seen him playing, doing that man marking role for Ballinrobe during the summer. We've obviously seen him playing on the half-back line and the half-forward line. We just think there’s a nice cut to him, a nice bit of aggression to him. We can’t see the reason why he mightn’t be able to play in there. He’s a very, very intelligent lad away from football and he’s absolutely mad about his preparation in the game.”
Mayo v Sligo, 1pm in Fr O’Hara Park, Charlestown.
Galway v London, 6pm in Connacht GAA CoE.
Roscommon v Leitrim, 1pm in Orchard Park.
London v Sligo, 1pm in Connacht GAA CoE.
