‘I was sick with nerves’ – Kobe McDonald reflects on All-Ireland final

Though he may have looked like he was taking it all in his stride, Mayo star Kobe McDonald admitted he was ‘sick with nerves’ on All-Ireland final day.

The morning of the game, arriving at Croke Park and the presidential greeting all weighed heavily on the 18-year-old, as he admitted on an Australian podcast.

“You wake up in the morning and you are sick with nerves. You are trying not to talk about it. I shared a room with my brother (Jordan Flynn) and another lad on the team, Paul Towey. We are trying to do whatever we can not to talk about Gaelic, not to talk about the game. We’d a meeting at 9am and I was dreading it because it just gets me to overthink it,” he said.

“When you get off the bus, there’s a bit more hype about the final than the semi-final and any other game, get in, do your normal routine. We walked out to walk the pitch, still sick, still shaking, still looking around seeing how many is coming into the crowd, seeing, trying to find my spots on the pitch to make it feel like home, see that I know what I’m doing,” he said.

The presential greeting and the parade all had to be cleared too and he got advice from his father, Ciarán, and brother Jordan.

“There’s a band playing which is something different, small things like that that are not in any other game. A different one you do in the All-Ireland final that you don’t do in any other game is you line up and you shake hands with the President and all that, it’s like 15 minutes of extra stuff before the game that your mind is racing, your mind is ticking, then you get to do your pitch walk, you walk around with the parade, the place was hopping!

“You’re looking around. I asked for advice off Dad and Jordo. Something they liked to do was look into the crowd and see faces and it gets their minds occupied so you’re not thinking about it. And then finally the ball was thrown up and it was game time and you’re not thinking about anything else which is very good, that was nice,” he said.

McDonald and Meath man Eamonn Armstrong, another Irish rookie at St Kilda, were interviewed on the podcast, Young Guys Inside the System, a podcast produced by Young Guns Sports Management, who are agents for both players.

It was hosted by Xander Maguire and joining McDonald and Armstrong on the podcast was Logan Young, an agent with Young Gun Sports Management.

Maguire asked Kobe if he felt the weight of the world had been lifted off the county when the hooter sounded.

“I think the easiest word to say is it was just relief, that we wouldn’t go another year of being laughed at at home. It is easy to say we were the laughing stock of Ireland. Everyone would say ‘Mayo, a great team until they get to a final and it all goes pear shaped’. So finally to be able to hold our heads high and say we finally climbed the mountain was very special,” he said.

He gave the Australians an insight into the celebrations with Armstrong quipping that he texted Kobe on the Sunday and didn’t get a reply for four days.

“The Sunday, you’re in the hotel for this winning banquet, all the board and family members are all in having a meal or whatever. Just a couple of drinks, nothing hectic at this stage, that goes on until 3 or 4am and then you’ve the choice of going to Coppers, which is like a night club in Dublin so a few of us went there, 10 or 12. Then you go home, sleep it off and then you wake up like maybe 10am the morning because there’s a tradition that a select few of the players on the winning team goes to a children’s hospital on the day after to show the Sam Maguire and go around and meet a few of the kids and their families so you have to be in decent shape for that.

“Then you head on the train back home, you go to our home pitch and the homecoming with the cup and there was like 55 or 60,000 there, that was probably more incredible than the scenes after the game. That was mental, it was a Monday and there were 60,000 lined up on the streets of Castlebar.

“Then you go out that night and you move on then to the following Sunday or Monday, it kept going.” Maguire asked him if he was taken aback by how big a story it was internationally.

“I knew it would be big nationally but I didn’t think anyone internationally would care. They don’t even know what the sport is so I didn’t think they’d care but I suppose the magnitude is huge, 75 years is a long time when you think about it. And I think there was a clip of commentary from Mayo people doing it and that probably added to it. That commentary was incredible. It was maniac stuff,” said McDonald.