McStay unsurprised by ‘deserved’ victory over Kingdom

1936 began with the death of Rudyard Kipling, and it ended with Mayo as the All-Ireland senior football champions for the first time. A tenuous link, but it’s hard not to put yourself in the shoes of the Mayo manager of the day when we think of the first line of his poem ‘If’.

“If you can keep your head when all about you, are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” There would be worse ways to begin the instruction manual for taking the helm of the senior footballers in this county. Perhaps Kevin McStay has taken his words to heart, because there was quite the air of “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” in his response to Mayo’s victory over Kerry on Saturday afternoon.

“I’m not going to get high, I wasn’t getting low when the other games were on” he told reporters in MacHale Park.

“All I’m interested in is our attitude, do we present to compete? Most of the time we do, sometimes we have a wobble and we don’t play as strongly as we want to.

“I’m not seeing anything that’s surprising us as a management team. We know that we have a very honest group of men who work awful hard for Mayo. When we go training and we get ready to play a game, they put in a huge amount of effort, and I’m very pleased that they were rewarded with the two points today.” 

Consistency of response, but consistency of approach too. On the issue of what has changed over the course of the campaign, from the lows of Galway to the highs of Saturday, his answer was a resounding, not much.

“I keep saying, there is an opponent, every opponent throws some curve at you,” was how he explained how there can be such a dramatic shift from one narrow victory to the next, with a topsy turvy draw in Armagh in between.

“They’ll bring a different defence, a different way of attack, a way to work the overload and you have to settle down and see what those questions are and see can you match them or do something better. I thought we did that very quickly, we got to grips with the game. The first-half was very good, then a bit of a wobble before half-time, but it was never anything that was going to knock us out.

“They had their purple period after half-time, predicated on their ability to win breaks, we’ll certainly be looking at that. We might have had a little dip, the first-half was really good on the break, and that then led to them chipping away. But then when it turned the corner for the last 10 or 15 minutes, we really rowed back into it.

“Then there was a great finish to it, we fought really hard for the big balls in the last five or six minutes. We had got a bit of a knockback, it looked maybe as if they were going to go on and win it. But great heart, great determination. Not anything that surprises us about the group, but they kept at it, and I think deservedly got the clinchers.” 

That was the cue for the softball pitch, the chance for McStay to knock out of the park all the lingering accusations about Mayo’s track record in close finishes. He didn’t take it, instead shutting down the premise.

“The Armagh game was closed out really well. A lad cuts in and kicks the ball wide with the final play of the game, I’m not going to cut the head off him. I’m just going to say we worked that position incredibly well. We worked positions very well again today because we ended up with quite easy scores; they were nearly walk ins, which is very gratifying.

“There’s an argument about last year and finishing out games, but I remember the Dublin one, it was just a superhuman play,” he explained.

“Sometimes you just have to bow the knee to that, and that’s the way it goes. But I think we’re getting better at it, we’re getting more experienced at it as a group, we’re beginning to understand what we want to do together as a group and we’re a lot more cohesive. We’re building and building, and we’ll build again this week for the next fence.” 

On matters of team selection, there was no deviation either. Davitt Neary was the glaring absentee, but it was confirmed that there was no injury or other issue, merely a big picture approach, and one that will continue into the final two rounds of games against Derry and Donegal.

“We’re just managing Davitt very carefully. He’s a young man who’s had a good start to his Mayo career. It’s his first year and we’re very conscious that these are high octane matches. We had a long trip last week and he did very well for us, but we’re trying to build capacity in the panel and we’re trying to see other people,” McStay replied.

“There were lads that played in Armagh last week that didn’t see game time this week and that’s not a reflection on their performance, it’s a reflection of how we need to build out capacity. It’s going to be a very long championship season.” 

One packed with lots of unforgiving minutes, soon to be filled with lots of distance run.