Lifting Mayo to new heights

Andy Moran was 18 days old when John Maughan was handed his first start for the Mayo senior football team in a National League game against Louth. The date was November 20, 1983. Kevin McStay played at corner-forward, Maughan at centre-back, in a one point win against Louth in Crossmolina.

20 years later Andy Moran was handed his own National League debut by John Maughan in a two points win for Mayo away to Down. Another 22 years later Moran has replaced McStay as Mayo senior football manager.

The wheel of Mayo football has struck its share of potholes but it has never stopped turning and churning.

Whether any of the players Andy Moran intends to cap for the first time in the upcoming National Football League become Mayo senior football manager themselves one day, we can all only hope we’re still around to find out. But given that symmetry fits hand in glove with Andy Moran, there seems every chance.

Remarkably, in 101 games of Division 1 football, Moran played in 23 home wins and 23 away wins, in 18 home defeats and 18 away defeats, and in five home draws and five away draws. The duplication feels almost mysterious.

Do the maths of course and that still leaves nine games outstanding, but Moran made a decent fist at splitting those games played on neutral turf down the middle too: Mayo won four and lost five.

He also had a fondness for the binary numbers, for not only did Moran play in 101 league matches but he scored 11-110 in the course of his senior championship career.

The hope is that such symmetry can remain a bedfellow of the new manager, not least because years ending in six have a special resonance with Mayo football. The senior team has contested the ‘6’ final in each of the past three decades, 1996, 2006 and 2016, and each time did so under the guidance of a manager in their first year at the job – John Maughan, Mickey Moran and Stephen Rochford. Mayo supporters will cling to that omen even tighter than Moran did to the hope that his first ever game for Mayo wouldn’t be his last – a tale to which we’ll arrive at shortly.

And then of course there’s the fact that Mayo’s first of three All-Ireland SFC titles was won in 1936, the 90th anniversary of which will occur on September 27 next. What chance we’ll have won the fourth by then? (10/1, according to Paddy Power, who has Mayo ranked fourth favourites behind Kerry, Donegal and Tyrone to lift Sam Maguire in 2026.) 

Andy Moran says he was “probably strange” in that even as a player, he always wanted to become Mayo manager someday, and yet he’s not sure if it has fully sunk in yet.

“It’s a great honour, for myself, my family, my club, and we’re just savouring every day at the minute,” he admitted in conversation last week.

“A lot of people have been asking if I’m enjoying it. If you don’t enjoy it in November or December, you’ve no chance of enjoying it in January or February or March.” 

We speak just days after the Mayo team’s return from its pre-season training camp in Portugal. The manager had spent the weekend before at the Mayo Association London’s annual gathering and before that had visited the USA on team business.

“We’ve done a lot of hard work, even away from the playing group. We’ve done a lot of getting around, meeting supporters of ours all around the world. It’s been so busy that I haven’t sat back to reflect and say ‘I’m the manager’. Maybe around Christmas time it may happen,” the 42-year-old said.

By then, he’ll have performed that nastiest of managerial tasks, trimming what currently is a rather sizable Mayo squad. A challenge match against Meath last Sunday is followed by another against Offaly in MacHale Park next Sunday, featuring many of the players who impressed Moran and his coaching sidekicks Colm Boyle and Paddy Tally during their trawl of this year’s club championship. But just who will make the cut for the FBD League and more specifically, the start of the National Football League on January 26, remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: youth will have its fling.

“In the last four years we’ve won three [Connacht] minors and our first U20 Connacht title in seven years, so there’s a crop of players coming through that like winning, that are used to winning, and it’s very important that we give those fellas a go.

“To do seven or eight of them in the league in a game would be too much, so you need to balance it with senior players beside them, guiding them through. But there will be debuts.

“Will they make mistakes that may cost us along the way? Of course they will. But that needs to be balanced with developing the squad and making yourself better over the next couple of years. How brave will that be? I think some of these guys are good enough and ready to play so why not straightaway?” 

Stalwarts like Colm McManamon and James Horan had just hung up their boots when a teenage Andy Moran was called into the Mayo squad in advance of the 2003 National Football League. But other survivors of the 1996 and ’97 All-Ireland squads, like Kenneth Mortimer, Noel Connelly, James Nallen, Fergal Costello, David Heaney, Maurice Sheridan and Peter Burke remained, offering the sort of guidance then that Andy Moran envisages Aidan O’Shea, Cillian O’Connor, Robbie Hennelly and others will provide to the youngest of his panel this season.

“What happens to an awful lot of players is that they come in and play really, really well at the start, they explode onto it and the first two or three games are good. But then, and I’ve seen it over time, a forward might get taken out by a back or a back by a forward, and all of a sudden you see a massive confidence dip.

“It’s just letting these young guys realise that this is not a straight line. You’re not going to go in and be that star that you were at 18, 19 or 20, there’s going to be a dip and that’s what you learn from.” 

It’s fair to say Andy Moran is speaking with first-hand experience; travelling all the way to Newcastle in Co Down, he didn’t make it as far as half-time when debuting in Round 2 of National Football League Division 1 on February 9, 2003.

“I had to be taken off with exhaustion,” recalls Moran with striking clarity. The game was only 22 minutes old.

Describing himself as a “young, green 19-year-old” who John Maughan had simply told to ‘run as much as you can’, another manager might easily have made that Andy Moran’s last match, especially when his replacement Ger Brady entered and scored the goal that helped Mayo to a 1-11 to 0-12 win. Instead, Moran would go on to make another 100 league appearances and 84 more in the championship.

“The big thing John did for me, he didn’t use it against me that he had to take me off before half-time. He realised that I had showed something, that I wasn’t fit, and he had the experience to know to give me another go.

“We played Laois in Ballinrobe the next game and he started me again and all of a sudden my career took off. But my career could have ended that day against Down. I played against Cavan and then John took me out of the team and I didn’t play again for the rest of the year. Then he started me again in ’04. I can learn a lot from that, just to realise that it doesn’t work our perfectly for everyone straightaway and it takes a bit longer for some fellas to break through.” 

At a similar end of the spectrum now are players like Eoin McGreal, Hugh O’Loughlin, Darragh Beirne and John MacMonagle, all members of last season’s Mayo U20 panel who Andy Moran has included in his initial panel along with some slightly older newbies in Adam Barrett and Kuba Callaghan. There are others too but generating as much conversation among supporters was the manager’s decision to return from the cold the aforementioned Cillian O’Connor and Robbie Hennelly along with James Carr and Michael Plunkett. Those were easy decisions to make he explains.

“The character these guys bring to the dressing-room is huge and for me, that’s nearly the most important thing in bringing them back,” said Moran who believes the Covid pandemic, because of the restrictions imposed, dramatically altered the dynamic of the dressing-room, particularly among a certain age cohort of player.

“You came to training, you social distanced, you played your game at the weekend, you didn’t socialise, but them older fellas were there before that so they’ll have seen the way a dressing-room should work, the banter that should work, the craic you should have.

“The likes of Robbie, James, being fun around the place, being grumpy, being angry, all that sort of stuff, you need a certain level of character within your dressing-room.” 

It was one of the key reasons why Moran was so keen, so early into his tenure – and well in advance of when most other inter-county teams do so – to bring this ‘new’ Mayo group to Portugal for a training camp earlier this month. The last such camp was in 2019 when Moran was still a playing member of the squad.

“Eoin, Hugh, Darragh, these guys coming through, John MacMonagle, when are they going to get the chance with an Aidan O’Shea, to sit down and have a cup of coffee or have a chat and connect with each other?

“It’s an amateur sport and between kids, college, work, you’re rushing away from training, you’re trying to get home, you’re trying to do the next job, so to get away and experience each other’s company, to sit down and have a meal together, little things like that are important. That’s the way teams connect in my opinion.

“There was a lot of work done. We got a night out and we had a bit of craic but we got up the next morning and we trained again and had a few hard training sessions after that as well. But I think it’s important when you’re on a camp to experience the other side as well, a bit of a singsong.” 

If Mayo could end the season like they have begun it, with very good reason for a singsong, now there’d be lovely symmetry to that.