Anything is achievable when we’re competitive, insists McStay

Kevin McStay is confident that his Mayo team will be an improved version of that which won last year’s National League but exited the All-Ireland senior football championship in disappointing circumstances. The manager spoke both frankly and bullishly in the wake of his experimental side’s landslide victory over the Mayo Club All-Stars in Saturday’s charity match in aid of the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association.

The game, played indoors at the Connacht GAA Air Dome, saw McStay’s county selection run out 7-20 to 0-17 winners against a club pick that included among its starters Mayo footballers Aidan O’Shea, Jack Carney, Sam Callinan and Bob Tuohy. Mayo are back in action at the same venue next Sunday, January 7 (3pm), when they take on London in the quarter-finals of the Connacht FBD League.

It was the first opportunity Mayo fans had to see their team since last June, when a topsy turvy summer culminated in a twelve points loss to eventual All-Ireland winners Dublin. It was a championship of peaks and troughs for McStay, who saw his side lose to Roscommon on home soil where they also barely cast aside Louth, but who also oversaw away wins against both the 2022 All-Ireland finalists Kerry and Galway. Ultimately though, it was defeats to Cork and Dublin that seemed to define Mayo’s season, with Kevin McStay keen to stress that he and his management team have “taken the big points” from the 2023 campaign.

“We feel we’ve done a very thorough review of our performances on the pitch and off the pitch. That was done to a very high standard and the big messages that we need to take away, we have them and we’re dealing with them and working on them and trying to improve on them every day that we can. And I have no doubt that we will improve in all those areas and that we are going to be a better team in 2024 and that we are going to be a stronger team. I’m sure of it, and that’s what we want to bring to 2024,” the manager told the Western People.

Twelve months ago Kevin McStay was preparing to lead his native county into competitive action for the very first time as senior boss, but that wasn’t all that was new. Every manager across the country was trying to grapple with how to approach an ultra-condensed season that would also feature a new championship format. McStay made no bones at the time that Mayo’s style would be to hit the National League with a bang because the GAA’s new game-on-game calendar offered “no time to breathe”. And he doesn’t envisage Mayo’s approach to Division One will be much different this time around.

“You have to remember this time last year, we were a brand new bunch of people meeting a brand new bunch of players and even to be credible among the group, you had to be winning matches and that would probably have been part of our approach; to be ultra-competitive, have a good pre-season, get ready for competition, and then we started winning games. And when you’re winning games, well somebody write to me and tell me which ones we want to lose, because it doesn’t work like that.

“We’ve one season now, with the split and the new championship, and we’ve all found our feet a little bit more, we all know how that rhythm works. We know the places you need to be around May for instance. Of course that informs how we’re going about it,” said McStay, admitting that Mayo’s focus will be “slightly different” in 2024.

“We know where we need to improve. We got a good rinse in 2023, we learned an awful lot from it, but I said to the boys two or three weeks ago, at half-time in that All-Ireland quarter-final when we ran down the tunnel, the championship was wide open. We know that. I know that’s not the vibe that comes out of the result, but look back on it, we know we’re not that far away. They’re just small margins.

“2023 was what it was, we won what we won, we lost what we lost, but we have to show improvement now right across our full game,” the Ballina native insisted.

The Aghamore duo of Conor Hunt and Tom O’Flaherty, Tomás Fahy from Kilmaine, Ballina’s Ciaran Boland and Conor Reid of Moy Davitts were all handed starts by McStay last Saturday, with other newcomers such as Sean Morahan of Castlebar Mitchels, Westport’s Conal Dawson, Kuba Callaghan from Ballaghaderreen, Ballinrobe’s Aaron McDonnell and Balla goalkeeper David Dolan featuring at various stages too.

“They all did themselves no harm today. I’ll talk to the rest of the coaches during the week but we were quite pleased with the energy and the enthusiasm levels that everybody showed out there,” said McStay who plans to cut his extended pre-season panel in the coming weeks.

“Ultimately we’re just looking for how people are moving, do they understand the way we’re trying to play.” The accuracy of the players impressed the manager, so too their confidence in and around the goalmouth.

“We were creating a lot of goal chances, pushing it to the nth to see could we get the goal chance and if we couldn’t, then to tidy it up and get the point and get out and get ready for the kick-out.

“We had some good movement on our kick-outs, it’s an area we want to look at. A lot of our hand-passing and foot-passing was tidy today, for late December. I know it’s a false environment to a certain extent (indoors) but we were happy with that.

“Energy and enthusiasm at this time of year is going to bring us an awful long way down the road and that’s the first thing I want to see, and once I see that then I know the attitude is right, and once the attitude is right then Mayo are competitive. And anything can be achieved when we’re competitive,” he concluded.