McStay leaving no stone unturned ahead of transatlantic test

As good as anything in the country. That’s Kevin McStay’s assessment of the Mayo senior football team’s backroom unit, as the Green and Red get ready to launch their 2024 Connacht SFC campaign. The Mayo boss was speaking in the context that just days out from his team’s provincial quarter-final in New York, all 36 players in his squad are “out on the grass”.

“We have no long-term injury worries,” said the Ballina man who credits the good health of the panel – after seven rounds of league football in nine weeks – to the expertise of Mayo’s medical, physio and S&C staff, and to his own conservatism.

Diarmuid O’Connor has not played since pulling up during Mayo’s fourth-round clash away to Tyrone but his manager expects the Ballintubber player to be “very close to selection” for Sunday’s Big Apple clash. Whether he is picked is a different matter.

“No matter what happens we’re in the round robin so there’s three fixtures straightaway and of course the ambition is to have three fixtures after it, so there’s six. Put in two [sic] Connacht, there’s enough of the season left to say ‘we’re not going to chance him there’.

“I’m very conservative about bringing fellas back when there’s no requirement to do it. Why would you be racing Diarmuid or anybody back if he’s not ready? You’ll see them when they’re ready,” assured McStay.

“We all go to New York with everyone training so that’s good news on the eve of a championship.” 

The Mayo squad will travel to the USA this Thursday and take a Monday night flight home, with Kevin McStay fulsome in his praise of Mayo County Board for agreeing to finance sending all 36 panellists to New York.

“We’re a big unit but we all have to be together, that’s the nature of a team.

“The way we’re framing it is that it’s a Connacht championship quarter-final, so once the word championship is mentioned everybody’s lights go on. We know what the schedule is, we know what’s involved, with the total focus being on winning the quarter-final, getting back in the best of health we can as soon as we can, and then preparing then for what lies ahead.

“Of course, there’ll be downtime and fun for the group, we’ve a very exciting programme in terms of football, downtime and different bits and pieces which I think will appeal to everybody. But the focus right front and centre is the fixture at 3 o’clock,” added McStay who with some dark humour joked he had only concluded therapy having been manager of a Roscommon team that nearly became New York’s first-ever championship victim in 2016.

Claremorris native Brian Gallagher featured at midfield for the Exiles who eventually lost 0-17 to 1-15.

“You know how this game goes, if you’re silly and look a couple of fences ahead of yourself, something unexpected can happen. And in 2016 the expectation was that we’d go over and take care of business, but into injury time we had not taken care of business and we were incredibly lucky to get out with a victory. So that to a certain extent has coloured my view of what’s ahead of us. 

"I’ve been very strong within the group as to how we treat this,” insisted McStay, reminded that Mayo had already endured defeat to London in this year’s FBD League. But he assures that the homework has been done on a New York team that last year made history by recording their first-ever victory in the Connacht SFC by beating Leitrim on penalties..

“In the world we live in now, you can get a good pin on them. You can get video from previous years or video from when [their players] were playing with counties here in Ireland. That’s all out there and shared nowadays.

“We’ve people watching and reporting back and putting together as much data and video as we can, so there’ll be no excuse there. We’ll be well prepared for them, we know what they have and we’ll go after it.”