All-Ireland Final countdown: Mayo taking it nice and Andy

In December 2015, just a couple of months after their revolt against the management of Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly, the Mayo senior football panel assembled for a meeting with their new manager Stephen Rochford. Rochford had never managed a senior inter-county team before, his players had just lost an All-Ireland semi-final replay for the second time in two seasons and back-to-back finals in the two years before that, but together they made it their aim to lift the Sam Maguire Cup the following September.

“We know what we’re trying to work on and it wasn’t to be the best team in the country on the first day, it was to be the best team in the country on the last day,” declared goalkeeper Rob Hennelly after Rochford’s first game in charge had seen Mayo thumped 1-18 to 0-12 by Cork in Division One of the National Football League.

It’s well known just how agonisingly close Mayo came to achieving their goal. And then to completing their mission 12 months later than scheduled.

Few of the players did more to try and turn Mayo’s dream into reality across those two seasons than Andy Moran, named GAA Footballer of the Year in 2017 just a few days short of his 34th birthday. He remains the oldest winner of the award.

Last year it was the turn of Rochford, now an assistant manager to Kevin McStay, to feel the heat, if not from the players directly then from Mayo County Board officials who with an infamous statement decided to terminate the duo’s management reign one year short of an agreed four-year term.

When Andy Moran was appointed as their successor, no similar plan was hatched in the backend to reach this year’s All-Ireland SFC Final, let alone win it. And the reason was obvious; Mayo hadn’t won the Nestor Cup in four years let alone Sam Maguire, and their last All-Ireland quarter-final appearances in 2022 and 2023 had ended in eight and twelve points defeats to Kerry and Dublin respectively.

It was assumed then that Mayo’s first priority under Moran this year would be to win a first Connacht SFC since 2021. But it wasn’t, insisted Moran, correcting the media in the wake of last month’s dramatic knockout victory over Meath in Castlebar, where Mayo had previously exited this season’s Connacht championship after a 10 points hiding by Roscommon.

“People said to us at the start of the year what was our goal. I think ye wrote locally that our goal was to win a Connacht title. That was never our goal. Our goal was to try to get back to Croke Park and bring this promising bunch of young players to Croke Park and see how we get on,” said Moran bullishly.

That goal has been achieved – and some – to the extent that on Sunday next, Mayo will aim to win a third championship game in succession at GAA headquarters and raise the Sam Maguire Cup at the expense of defending All-Ireland champions Kerry. It begs the question though, why would a manager who as a player won eight Connacht SFC titles, including a famous five in-a-row, not have set a provincial title as the minimum target for his team this year?

Andy Moran gave me his answer last week when we met for a chat beneath the shade of the MacHale Park stand.

“Last year, after Galway here [Connacht Final], it was such a devastating defeat for us under Kevin and Stephen that it was so hard then for the boys to rise it because that was the ambition, it was the goal, and they were going to build from there, but you can’t be setting just that target for yourself – there needs to be a target beyond the target as well,” believes Andy Moran.

“Did we want to go well in the Connacht championship? Absolutely. Did we want that performance here against Roscommon? Absolutely not. But it happened and we could deal with it then because that wasn’t the primary objective of the season.

“You’re in three different tournaments now. The National League is hugely competitive and it was so important for us, being a first year group trying to get young fellas through, to stay in Division 1. And we won five out of seven games.

“I mean, look at the provincial championships this year, Kerry were the only winners still standing in the [All-Ireland] quarter-finals. So it’s really, really tough to do.” 

Were Mayo to end their 75 year All-Ireland famine on Sunday, they would also become the first winners to have lost two championship matches along the way. But it’s been a summer of speed bumps and wobbles right across the board, like how Down could lose a Tailteann Cup final to Division 4 minnows Wicklow and concede the highest score of the entire championship (3-33) against Armagh having begun it with the defeat of Division 1 champions – and All-Ireland second favourites – Donegal who could recover to hammer All-Ireland champions Kerry but also lose to Kerry’s underlings Cork before exiting the championship to Dublin who had both hammered and lost to Louth before taking out All-Ireland fancies Galway who had beaten Westmeath who had beaten Dublin in a summer that seemed to make no sense at all.

“We were just having a chitchat around the table on the Wednesday before the semi-finals saying it’s funny, Kerry, Louth, Mayo and Dublin have all taken good beatings, hammerings, along the way. It was a very unusual semi-final quartet because that doesn’t usually happen,” admits Moran.

“If you’re five percent off in the new rules and there’s any sort of wind blowing, all of a sudden you could find yourself 10 points down. If you’re Kerry against Donegal and you find yourself a man down, all of a sudden you can find yourselves 10 points down. If you’re off like we came out in the second-half against Roscommon, against another Division 1 team, you can find yourself 10 points down very, very quickly.

“The peaking at the right time of the year, to me that’s the thing. Have we worked out as management and coaches how to really peak? You come out of the National League, you do two weeks and you’re in London, you do two weeks and you’re against Roscommon. Where do you get the chance to actually get a bit of training? You don’t. Did we time that wrong? When I reflect back in a month I’ll probably say yes, but I’ll have to go back on what we did, the training we did, staying in London, all that sort of stuff. But have we got a lot right along the way as well? We have. So it’s just learning how this new system, this new format is going to work more so than anything.

“There’s no doubt about it, we’ve had some soul searching to do along the way but the effort the boys have put in, I can’t speak highly enough about them. The way they can play, the way they can run, that doesn’t just come from turning up; they’ve put in serious lifestyle choices around that. The major one for me is that some boys have moved from Dublin without jobs and have left good jobs to come home and play football for Mayo. What more can you ask?” states the manager.

It seems a fair assumption that if securing the Nestor Cup wasn’t a primary objective of Moran and his Mayo players this season, then ending up among the last two teams standing in the race for All-Ireland honours is something they wouldn’t have foreseen either. Or did they?

“I think if you go into a season and you don’t expect to be there, you’re not in the right spot, especially as one of the biggest counties in the country,” says Moran candidly.

“But have we progressed probably quicker than ye expected? Probably. But you know me Anthony, I’m an optimistic man and up to that Roscommon game I probably did expect us to be at the tail-end of the championship. But then you get a reality check and you have to ease back into it and see where you’re at.

“I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect it. I’m not saying I did expect it but I wouldn’t say I didn’t,” adds Moran, giving every sense of a man who wishes the season didn’t have to end on Sunday; that his team is only just finding itself.

“Omagh (v Tyrone) was the funniest feeling I’ve ever had in my life if I’m being honest because at 68 minutes I’d have been very, very pleased going into that dressing-room. And at 70 minutes I couldn’t be disappointed because if you were pleased after 68, you’re telling the lads lies if you’re disappointed just because Niall Morgan kicked an unreal two-pointer to win the game.

“But I remember coming out of that game and saying to the lads, it’s moving now, it’s beginning to click, they’re beginning to come together, the team is beginning to move, and we could all sense that, not only the management, but the playing group.

“We had the 20 minutes against Meath which nearly put that to bed but the reaction of the boys, against Cork, Louth, all of it just kind of came together. But we think there’s more in this group, we really do. And these boys will chase it down. Is that going to be good enough to come out with the victory? Let’s just wait and see.” 

Andy and his management team remained in Dublin following their side’s semi-final victory over Louth to watch the other last four clash between Kerry and Dublin, which the Kingdom won but 2-18 to 0-20 but only after benefitting from several controversial refereeing decisions and the off-day experienced by some of the opposition’s key marksmen.

“I thought Dublin did really, really well. I thought they were defensively brilliant but they couldn’t put enough on the board to put them through. But Kerry are Kerry and they found a way to win it,” said Moran before asked about anything specific he might have learned from that match.

“Are you ever going to be able to take the Cliffords out of the game? Probably not, but you can learn little things around it, how you can minimise them a tiny bit.

“Paudie goes up there and hasn’t played a lot of football but he gets a lot of ball and that is him back in the game. Seán O’Shea gets a lot of minutes behind him and you learn how these boys are progressing through their injuries and they seemed fairly lively,” said the Mayo boss, agreeing that there’s always pressure on Kerry to win All-Irelands but that Mayo will place pressure upon themselves too.

“We would think that we’re a really good team. We finished third in our league and we think this is a really, really good group. But we’re not looking at the outcome, we’re looking at can we keep this progress going, this line that we’re on, can we keep it going into the final and improve our performance along the way. And if that’s good enough to win the game for us, brilliant. But if it’s not, we can live with that.”