‘Overall, I can look back and say we maxed it out’
ANDY MORAN
‘EVERY TIME YOU WATCH, WE STILL SEEM TO COME UP A POINT SHORT’
IF Andy Moran was of a paranoid disposition, he might view the current health emergency as the new extension to Mayo’s House of Pain. A glass-panelled conservatory, perhaps, with panoramic views of a beautiful but cruel landscape. During lockdown his team’s seemingly never-ending trauma has had the full re-run treatment, all packaged as landmark days for others. Donegal’s fairytale win in 2012, Jim Gavin’s first All-Ireland the following year, and, of course, Dublin’s three-in-a-row in 2017.
‘We should have won those games but we don’t seem to be winning any of the replays either,’ jokes Moran.
Well, if you don’t laugh, you will…
Not really, the crying game has never been for him, but he admits his regret at breaking the habit of a lifetime by looking back.
‘I had not watched the ’17 final until The Sunday Game put it up recently and, if the truth is to be known, I did not sleep too well after seeing it,’ he admits.
‘I felt for my poor wife Jenny, who was sitting beside me, and I was going “rewind that there for me”. I would say it took me an hour to watch 30 minutes of tape. I was rewinding it and freezing it and going “why did he do that and why did I do this and that was no free in”. Suddenly, you find that you are actually living through the whole thing again.
‘You really do live through it. I think the day will come when my son, Ollie, or my daughter, Charlotte, will want to watch it and we will sit and watch the whole thing and go through it but for now, no, it’s not for me.
‘It would probably take me three hours to watch the full 70 minutes.
‘They were showing the ’13 final as well recently and Bernard Brogan sent me a text message to tell me that it was on the TV but I was making sure I was not watching it.
‘I struggle watching the old games. A part of that too is that I just like watching new stuff.
‘I love watching (James) Clifford, (Cathal) McShane, Seán O’Shea, Shane Walsh and our young fellows Ryan O’Donoghue and Oisín Mullin. I like watching new exciting players and see what they can bring to the game.
‘That is partly why I don’t watch the re-run of old matches and there is a part in me that just does not want to be watching those games.
‘No matter how many times you watch them, we still seem to come up a point short.’
For a player who was involved in six All-Ireland senior finals – excluding 2012 when a ruptured cruciate ligament ruled him out – without getting over the line, it may well be convenient to take the view that the journey matters more than the destination.
But from the two implosions against Kerry in 2004 and 2006, to falling off the competitive cliff by the end of the noughties, Moran feels no need to look back in anger, only pride.
‘To be honest, I take a great kind of joy from an individual point of view, in my own football.
‘And that would represent a big change for me because when I was in my mid-20s I would have been very hard on myself when it came to football. It was after that I really, really learned to enjoy it.
‘Of course, when looking back at something like the ’17 final that you have moments where you go “oh why did I do that?” but overall, I can sit back over all the years, and particularly with that team from ’11 to ’19 and say, “do you know something, we maxed it out”.
‘In that ’17 final, we got to 1-16 and I always had this thing that the target to beat the Dubs was to get to 20 points and we got to 19.
‘Every time we are going to the last minute, it is not like we faded away. When I look at 2004 and ’06, and I would ask did we max ourselves out on the day? And if we had maxed ourselves out, would we have beaten that Kerry team? No.
‘But still the bottom line is: did we max ourselves out on the day? We didn’t. There is a huge frustration and disappointment in knowing that whereas, bar the Donegal final in 2012, we played well in the most of them.’
When he finished up last year at the age of 36, the evidence confirmed he had squeezed everything out of himself.
Eight Connacht medals, a National League title, two All-Stars and the 2017 footballer of the year award on top of holding the all-time appearances record for his county (85 of his staggering 182 appearances came in the Championship) ensure his legacy will stand the test of time.
More than anything, as he scans a grim landscape, he feels blessed that it ended in the manner it did.
‘I was awful lucky with the way it ended; yes, we got beaten by Dublin and we did not win the AllIreland, but I got a National League medal, I got to play in Croke Park, Killarney and in MacHale Park on an unbelievable evening against Donegal.
‘Good friends of mine are in the same place now and you would be thinking what their thought process is. It is really a difficult time.
‘If I was part of the squad this year I would really struggle now because I would not be the best trainer to run and to be deemed aerobically fit enough to go up against the likes of Jack McCaf
‘MY FOCUS NOW IS ON COACHING - TO SEE IF I’M ANY GOOD AT IT’
frey, Paddy Durcan or Lee Keegan. I never had that, so the gap between me and them would have got bigger and there are many like me in that regard.
‘The guys who are 34, 35 and who were going for one last twist, they are going to struggle. Even if the games come back later in the year, the struggle will be huge for them to keep that gap as close as possible.
‘Would my heart go out to the lads who were going to call this their last season? Absolutely, but it could just force them to go for another one.’
Next month will mark his fifth anniversary since he took the gamble of walking away from his job as a sales rep to open his own gym.
He now has three – two in Castlebar, including the Lough Lannagh Leisure Complex and a newly established boutique gym in Claremorris – all under his brand name The Movement.
Confronted by a crisis, he has made the best of his limited opportunity with an ambitious online presence holding his business together, keeping all 18 full-time employees on board, with the help of the Government Covid-19 payment scheme.
‘When you include part-time, we have 26 in total. It was not viable to keep the part-time staff on as they were financially better off taking the Covid payments.
‘These are extremely tough times but we kept our 18 staff on through this, trying to stay busy, trying to stay in the game and make ourselves relevant,’ he explains.
However, he needs help. Under the phased lifting of restrictions, his door will be among the last to be unlocked.
The swimming pool in Lough Lannagh, run on a public/private partnership with the local authority, is scheduled to open on July 20, gyms on August 10.
‘A year after opening, we started to see our business as something completely different to what we went into. We don’t get involved on the whole side of preparing teams.
‘Our whole philosophy is to get people moving, get them feeling better about themselves and if the by-product of that is that they look better that is fine, but our main focus is making people feel better and making a social aspect to the gym.
‘At the minute, in the middle of Covid-19, I do believe we play a vital role in community.
‘We make gestures towards mental illness and helping people out with their mental health and at the same time we are not opening the doors to businesses like ours. I don’t think that is right because people need an outlet.
‘Our date at the moment is August 10, but hopefully we can move quicker than that. The longer this thing goes on, the more knowledge we are getting about it.
‘But we are going to have to live with it for a certain length of time. Can we live and hide away from it? Absolutely not, we can’t.
‘People mention the economy and they mention it as if we are putting money ahead of human life.
‘If you look at the work that Pieta House and the Darkness Into Light campaign does, a lot of it is trying to encourage people to get out and be sociable. I do believe once we start opening all of this up, a lot of these issues – which are huge – will to some point ease.’
The same applies to the GAA, but with the provision that health trumps games. However, he is adamant that some relaxation has to take place soon, starting with the opening of club pitches.
‘I believe there is a big call for them to be opened. I saw Colm O’Rourke and Michael Murphy saying that as well recently and we are not calling for our games to be reintroduced.
‘What we are calling for is for our pitches to be opened so that a young fellow can go and run safely on a pitch, spend a little time and relieve some tension, fill himself with a bit of energy and get himself moving again.
‘As for the games, last week Statsports brought out an amazing study in terms of how much contact is made between players in the English Premiership, playeron-player and how long it takes to contract Covid-19.
‘The knowledge base is growing every single day. I think there is going to be a huge impact on the GAA, it is a contact game but we need to give it the time to see where it is going to lead us to in the future.
‘Fingers crossed, we can also come up with a study to say that playing our game is not going to affect us in any way in our health moving forward but health needs to be number one on the agenda.’
As for his own future, it will be more bib than ball. He would love to see the shutters roll up, not least given his ambition to get Ballaghaderreen back to the county final where they lost to Ballintubber last term.
This time, however, he will operate a dual mandate as player-coach, but he does not see it as an equal division of labour.
‘I want to kick more ball but the focus right now for me is coaching to try and see if I am any good at it,’ he explains.
‘My focus is to try and build as much knowledge as I can, get out there and get coaching and see if it something I am good at.
‘I have seen so many people who I thought wouldn’t be great coaches and they turned out to be the good ones, while the fellows you expected to be good didn’t turn out that way,’ says the 37-year-old.
In a way, there is a certain logic to the cliché that great players don’t always make good managers or coaches.
To reach the top, players have to be innately selfish in focusing on their game rather than others, and that is the source of the challenge in going down the coaching road..
‘That is what I notice because I would have come from a place where my mother wouldn’t buy a paper the week of a game because she didn’t want to bring anything home that might distract me.
‘And when Jenny and I were together first, everything about food was focused on what suited my diet as a player, and then suddenly you move into coaching and you have to turn all that around.
‘There is a lot of learning in it and I am not even at base camp yet.
‘I am right at the bottom, trying to work my way up to the top. I would be very pragmatic about it. If it is something that suits me and I really like it, I will definitely stick at it.
‘If it does not suit me and if I think it does not work well and I am not as good as I want to be at it, I will move away into a different element but I am definitely staying involved in football, one way or the other.’