Andy on Kobe: 'He’s a great kid. He’s a really talented boy'

The tightest marking job done on Kobe McDonald on Sunday was that carried out by his big brother Jordan Flynn. Referee David Gough hadn’t the whistle taken from his mouth after calling time on the massacre of Monaghan when Flynn rushed towards his new Mayo teammate and frogmarched him off the pitch and straight down the tunnel. It was done with all the urgency of a man who was after hearing Ryanair’s last call for boarding and him and his buddy still 10 minutes from the gate.

A career took off on Sunday. Where it will fly too, nobody knows, but the sky’s the limit. At least that’s how it seems.

In a nine minute window, Kobe McDonald had scored a goal, a two pointer and two singles from four shots at the posts. Another touch set-up Ryan O’Donoghue to kick the final point of a resounding 2-30 to 2-11 Mayo victory. All this on the 18-year-old’s debut.

Jordan Flynn sensed that if he didn’t get his younger sibling off the pitch immediately, Kobe could still be in the middle of St Tiernach’s Park posing for photographs and signing autographs on Monday morning – and not at his school desk in Gortnor Abbey.

“This was a game we had kind of earmarked [for him],” admitted Mayo manager Andy Moran afterwards.

Eight days earlier Kobe and his Gortnor Abbey teammates had lost a Connacht Post Primary senior ‘C’ final to Mayo rivals Balla Secondary School.

“He came straight to training last Wednesday and away he went, he wanted to play. It’s great to see and it’s great to have him on board,” said Moran. It sounded something of an understatement.

To put into some sort of context what 18-year-old Kobe McDonald did in 18 minutes on the pitch in Clones, in 2018 it took the first five league games of his Kerry career for a just turned 19-year-old David Clifford to score the equivalent seven points from play that McDonald managed in little more than a quarter hour last Sunday.

A futile and pointless exercise to make such a comparison? Perhaps. After all, another Leaving Certificate student, Conor McCahill, only a week earlier and ironically against Mayo, kicked three points on his debut for Donegal. And there are countless other teenagers whose first spins out will have outshone Clifford’s but who could only dream of playing as good once in their career as Clifford is now doing every single game. But there can be no doubt that anyone fortunate enough to have been in Clones last Sunday sensed they were witnessing something exceptional. Something that would endure.

“He’s a great kid. He’s a real talented boy and we’re just happy to have him for as long as we have him,” said Moran of McDonald who is due to join AFL side St Kilda later this year.

“He’s 18. Let’s just enjoy him while he’s here. We’ll give him every chance to play. Of course he’s a special talent, all these guys who are brought to Australia are, but to be so humble around it is the key thing about Kobe.” 

The pass for McDonald’s 58th minute goal was laid on by Flynn but receiving the ball on the 45 metre line, the Crossmolina attacker still had plenty to do before flashing the ball past Monaghan goalkeeper Kian Mulligan.

“That’s the sort of individual he is, the sort of person he is; he’s clinical,” said Andy Moran. “We just hope for the year that we keep him healthy and give him every chance to play senior football.” 

The possibility that Kobe and his Mayo teammates could find themselves playing in Croke Park as early as next month cannot be ruled out after the Green and Red’s third win in four games, with two of their remaining trio of Division One matches taking place in Castlebar – beginning with next Sunday’s visit of Armagh.

“We’ve had an awful run of it, we’ve had four games and three have been away but we’ve come away with three out of four wins. We’d have bitten your hand off if you had given us that at the start of the year,” admitted Moran.

“I’m not saying you’re fully safe but the way the games run from hereon in, you can experiment a bit and throw fellas in. We’ve made four or five switches for every game so far and we’ll continue to do that,” added the manager who was asked if he’d like to see his team reach the league final.

“I don’t think it puts us up or down to be honest. If we get there, we get there. We play London two weeks after the league final; I’ve a big enough squad that I need to look at players.

“If they go out against Armagh next week and they’re well able to play and they give a good account… you always want to win your home games, you don’t want to give them up. So we’ll be trying to go after the game with the fifteen we put out on the pitch.

“Out of the four games, I think we’ve had 40 minutes, 15 against Dublin at the end of the game and 25 against Donegal, where we were very poor. The rest I think we’ve been quite good so we’re quite happy with it,” Moran added.