Mayo chase Connacht and consistency

Kevin McStay had already offered up what undoubtedly must be his worst memory of the Connacht SFC so it was only fair that he was asked for his best.

The man who saw his life flash before him when in charge of the Roscommon team that somehow fell over the line against New York in 2016 had some 33 years earlier made his Mayo debut in a Connacht Final against Galway having never trained with the team as much as once.

“Imagine that happening now. The manager would be fired,” McStay told reporters at last week’s official 2024 launch at the Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence.

“I was only a young fella and came out of nowhere. I played a good under-21 match the week before and some fella said ‘We’ll take a chance on him’.” 

And that’s exactly what had happened. Mayo, the eventual All-Ireland champions, had opened the 1983 Connacht U21 Championship with a 2-11 to 1-5 win over Leitrim in Carrick-on-Shannon on July 8, with an on-fire McStay firing 2-4, and on July 17 McStay marked his senior debut by scoring two points in Mayo’s 1-13 to 1-10 provincial final loss to the Tribesmen.

“I was in the army so I was locked away in the Curragh and I was released at 10 o’clock that morning. I went in and shook hands with fellas I’d never met before. I’d never trained, never played.” 

That, despite the result, remains perhaps Kevin McStay’s happiest Connacht SFC memory, but it’s one that might drop a place in the rankings should he manage Mayo to this season’s title. He won it once before as Roscommon manager in 2017 but McStay has never hidden how special an honour it feels to be in charge of his native county.

“Winning your provincial title is a big achievement. The few medals I have I cherish them, a lot of effort went into winning them, whatever the grade was. I’m a big supporter of the Connacht championship and I hope it continues forever,” he said.

But it’s not just for the prestige that the manager and his players have placed lifting the Nestor Cup very high on their list of priorities this season, but for what an unbeaten championship run also offers in terms of schedule, rhythm and confidence.

“We took serious lessons from 2023,” explained McStay, adding that as part of a very detailed review, he sought the views of players “in every aspect on and off the field”.

“It was the first time the new schedule and the split season were put together so nobody knew the road ahead, but you learn. The key learning is that it’s a two-week rhythm if you’re winning in your championship and if you’re not, everything gets tighter. So getting a bad injury from hereon in is really, really difficult.

“It’s somewhere in the back of our heads, what a lovely season would look like, but there’s two fences to jump before you can get to the [Connacht] final.” 

It didn’t seem to have been too much of a hindrance, if any, to Mayo last year however, when they emerged from a six-week hiatus after an unexpected Connacht quarter-final defeat at home to Roscommon and stuffed Kerry in what was their first championship defeat in Killarney since 1995 – or in other money, 40 games.

Mayo won by five points and should probably have won by more given that Shane Ryan had saved four excellent Mayo goal chances before substitute Eoghan McLaughlin eventually rifled the game’s only goal past the Kerry custodian in the 61st minute.

So how did Kevin McStay feel on the journey home that evening?

“Giddy. I’d say we all were, we had to be,” he admits honestly. “You were saying it’s 30 years since these guys had been beat down there and you know they are a big standard, and when playing at home probably a bigger standard. To do what we did was very commendable and it was significant.

“There was great excitement and that’s only natural, that’s how confidence is built, but I do remember very clearly, in the dressing-room, us management going in and strongly challenging a back-up performance, that in isolation it wasn’t going to be enough. The challenge was what are we going to do when we play Louth next, and we didn’t reach that peak at all.

“Something like Killarney makes you feel like everything is possible, it makes you feel that the dream that we all dream about is possible. But very quickly you are knocked back to reality if you don’t continue the standard.

“We were highly consistent in that game, it never stopped. We had planned our subs very carefully and it was one sub coming on better than the other. So there was a great sense of driving this on but that certainly didn’t happen in the next match or against Cork, and then your confidence starts ebbing away a little bit. We got the big win against Galway but now that’s putting you into week on week, you’ve lost your rhythm and we paid a high price for inconsistency.” 

36 players were used by McStay throughout the Allianz Football League Division 1 campaign just ended, which was quite the departure from 2023 when the team selected for that season’s Division 1 final was the same in all bar three positions as what had been selected for a challenge match against Sligo over four months earlier. Paddy Durcan, Aidan O’Shea and Fionn McDonagh were not available for that challenge game at James Stephens Park but had they been, then it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the manager might have named the exact same team against Sligo as he did for the Division 1 final against Galway in Croke Park.

“It was one of the observations that came out of our review, that we reached our best 18 or 20 very quickly and we might have reached our starting 15 fairly quickly,” McStay agrees. “But the context was that we were a new management, we were getting to know players, getting to build up relationships with them. And of course we wanted the credibility of winning games and to build confidence between the management and the players and the best way to do that is be fairly consistent in selection, so you’re getting a fairly consistent performance.

“This year, we have built out the panel quite dramatically, the first years and second years have got another pre-season and I think we’ll see the benefits of that later.

“Pre-season is heavy. If you’re a first year coming in here from club football, the loading, it’s hard going on a 22-year-old or even a 27-year-old club player who’s made a late burst in his career. For them to get through it without getting injured, then to get through the rhythm of the first three weeks of a National League, game-game-game, and they’re coming in to look at the review on a Tuesday and they’re looking at the preview on a Friday, and it’s all the information, the tactics, the formations, things that have to be givens in a game, they have to learn all that off. There’s set defences, there’s set plays… so they’ve been brilliant, they’ve come through all that and they’re going to be the better for it, no question.

“Our average age is around 24.5, so we feel we’re going in the right direction, we definitely have built out the squad through more players putting their hand up but also, players coming back from injury who are right in the mix at the right time. So, we’re in very good health and touch wood that stays the same because it’s very unforgiving this schedule.”