There would be huge frustration, ultimately I’m a Mayo fan
Ending his county’s great obsession fuels McStay’s ambitions
IT can be taken as a measure of the unrelenting nature of Mayo’s misery that Kevin McStay can’t pinpoint which TV post mortem he was due to officiate at when he answered a plea from home. ‘It was either 2004 or ’06, I was inside in RTÉ getting ready for the night show, and it was uncanny the amount of times I was on the night show on the night of finals, and my mother rings me, “Ah, whatever you say now, please be nice to them because tonight is not the night for that”,’ he recalls with a smile.
The thing is there were far too many nights like that over the bones of three decades on the Sunday Game and, while some of his colleagues played the tribal passion card for show, McStay was always the honest broker.
He was admired – and the quality and integrity of his punditry benefited as a result – for that, but he did it so well that many viewers must have left wondered if there was a beating Mayo heart inside him.
Well, doubt no more.
‘There would be huge frustration, because ultimately I am a fan, I am a supporter.
‘I played for Mayo – I loved playing for Mayo. It was a very special time in my life, I never took it lightly.
‘I wish I had done more; I really wish I had but I always wanted to give something back to Mayo and I have got that opportunity now,’ says the 60-year-old, who made more than 50 appearances for the county before a broken leg in 1990 brought the curtains down on his playing career.
His return as manager has been a long-time coming, two previous failed attempts (the latter in 2015 amounted to a brutish snub after he was initially the only candidate interviewed) only served to reaffirm his suspicion that it would never come to pass.
In a way, though, his delay in getting here might just be a blessing for him and the county. This time, his application to enter the race was conditional on former manager Stephen Rochford coming on board with him, in the process ensuring a stellar management team that will see Donie Buckley installed as head coach, with support from Liam McHale and Damien Mulligan.
The backroom team is not yet fully completed but already he has secured the headline appointment of Niamh Fitzpatrick, who previously served for a season as psychologist under Rochford in 2017.
These appointments have added to a sense of renewal after the final season of James Horan’s second four-year stint as county boss all went a little bit stale.
There was also a sense that the relationship between the Mayo support – an energy source that was integral to the group’s celebrated resolve over the last decade – and the team had fractured.
This appeared obvious in terms of both numbers and noise for their All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Kerry.
McStay, in a reminder of his past life as a military man, puts that down to a form of ‘battle fatigue’ but has seen enough enthusiasm on the ground in the weeks since his appointment to believe that the supporters are ready to roll again.
And the team? At the open table element of Tuesday night’s press unveiling at MacHale Park, one journalist queried if McStay would have to address any possible resentment from players that might stem from his past views of them as a pundit.
‘It is for others to say, but I certainly set out to be fair and tried not to be personal.
‘That was my job, to critique games, to examine games, to analyse games but I hope I never played the man. In that respect, I don’t think it is an issue.’
In reality, this feels like a fresh start for all. Six of the team that started in Rochford’s last game as manager have retired (the Newbridge or nowhere qualifier defeat to Kildare in 2018) while question marks will hover over the future of other veterans like Kevin McLoughlin, Aidan O’Shea, Jason Doherty and possibly even Cillian O’Connor.
In Horan’s second stint, the spine of a new team was engineered but, ultimately, last year’s All-Ireland final defeat to Tyrone invited raw criticism which often became toxic. It also appeared to change the one county, one team vibe.
However, McStay is adamant that he is taking over a group with a future.
‘Sport is amazing like that at this level. You are always thinking this could be the turn. I am sure if I was a player and I see a new management team, a new voice and maybe some small little tweaks on how things are done, I would be thinking “I want to have a look at this”, even if that is out of curiosity if for no other reason, that you go in and see what is possible.
‘How many times have we said “well, that is Mayo gone now?” and then they are in an All-Ireland final three months later. ‘
‘The narrative might have been that Mayo under-performed last year but they lost to the two All-Ireland finalists.
‘I don’t think anyone can make the argument that Galway ran all over Mayo in that Championship game – it ended up a one-point game.
‘I don’t think anyone would say that Kerry bored holes in them. With 50 minutes gone, Mayo were still somehow in that game.
‘I take hope from that, I can only look at the positives, I have to start like that. I can’t be looking back. What is the point of looking back to 1951? What does it make you? Just more pain.
‘I think the Mayo story is one of the last great unwritten stories in Irish sport perhaps and I just want to bring these boys in the management team with me and try and guide us into a position in a team effort where we could maybe write those final chapters.
‘I don’t know. It is all in the future; two things will happen here; it will work out or it won’t work out and I don’t think there is any point in sweating the same stuff in between it.
‘You jump in, put on the belt and
We feel we can make a difference and that is the lure of management
you go for the spin at speed, get as much enjoyment and satisfaction out of it as you can and hope that the ball, on the big day, might bounce your way,’ he explains.
If that makes it sound like the ultimate thrill ride, he is getting on board with his eyes wide open.
This is a job that has chewed up and, to a point, spat out the most able and best-intentioned of men in the past.
Not least Horan, who effectively built two teams over separate four-year stints, reached four AllIreland finals and, yet, when it all finished, his departure at the end of this summer was as much wished for as it was mourned.
Meeting up with his predecessor is on McStay’s to-do list.
‘It is my intention to meet James and I know I will meet him. I have just been busy and I am sure he has been chilling himself after stepping down, but James is a Mayo man, he has huge ambition for Mayo as well and I am sure the insights he can provide me with will be very helpful.
‘So over the next week or two that will happen.’
‘Do I feel sorry for him? I feel sorry for every manager since 1951. I know what John O’Mahony put into this; John Maughan was six points up with 12 minutes to go in an All-Ireland final, Stephen had two own goals scored in a final, James has been in positions to win but these are the margins, they are tiny, tiny margins.
‘I totally understand that and, of course, I have sympathy for everyone going into it that did not get what they dreamed of.
‘Statistically that is probably what is going to happen here; I am hoping I am the outlier; our group is the outlier and we can change it to think like that. I can’t think any other way.’
His years on the media frontline – both with RTÉ and as a national newspaper columnist – meant he was not lured by the best efforts of journalists to commit to winning an All-Ireland as his headline goal at this week’s press briefing, but he knows that is where the bottom line is now set.
Horan was allergic to talk of curses, famines, holy grails and grand obsessions; the perfumed language employed to romanticise the pragmatic business of winning football games.
McStay understands why it is used, but dismisses the theory that somehow the past is responsible for stifling the future.
‘I don’t think there is an outrageous burden on lads going out playing football. I think it is overstated.
‘These guys are so strong mentally, they are in bubbles – half of them don’t relate to the history. It is 50/60 years ago, I can just about barely relate to it myself.
‘It is kind of romantic language, the snow slipping on the slates, the rain piling in from the Atlantic shoreline and all that.
‘That is grand but the business of winning football matches is a very serious business and the rain lashing in on top of us from the Atlantic is not really a concern. You just get on with it.’
And he will. Nine years after retiring from the army, having already scratched the management itch in mid-life by winning an
All-Ireland with St Brigid’s and a Connacht Championship with Roscommon, he is aware that there are other ways to welcome in his autumnal years.
‘It is half madness, it is half a disease,’ he laughs.
‘We are up here and we think we can make a difference. We feel we can and that was the lure of managing Mayo for me.
‘It wasn’t to tick a box, it was an idea I could bring something that might make a difference. We don’t know if it will or not, we will have to wait and see.’
He has been given four years to do that, but not only are there no written contacts in the GAA, ultimately it is the bad word of mouth that often determines the length of tenure.
The appointment of a new management team will relight the fire, but, as ever, the first to get burned
The players don’t relate to 60 years ago, I can barely relate to it myself
by it are those who lead if expectations are not realised.
McStay knows that is part of the deal.
‘It is but I think the board has an understanding of this enormous challenge, certainly the management team have a clear understanding of the enormous challenge.
‘In terms of the Mayo situation, there is a military term called “battle fatigue”.
‘They got to a stage perhaps where their hopes were raised dramatically for the Tyrone final and it didn’t work out and they found it very hard to gallop again.
‘But I have no sense of that at all, and you might think that I am not living in the real world.
‘Anywhere I go for the last three/ four weeks, Mayo people are missing their football again at intercounty level. They will get through the club scene and the next thing they want to be doing is following the team and they see a new management, a new squad, a slightly different way to James’ way – and that is an observation and not a criticism – and they will want to come and see if this thing is going in the right direction.
‘The hope is we can provide that for them.
‘I can’t promise anything other than blood, sweat and tears. I am very aware of my responsibility in this post – this is a very big job.
‘Mayo is such a fanatical county for this game; we just eat, sleep and drink football and that is what we do, and I suppose until that great itch, the grand obsession, is scratched, the obsession is resolved, we are always going to be chasing it.
‘But we are not going to give up or walk away from it.
‘Football, to a certain degree, defines us as a people and we will always be curious and interested in what is happening in football.
‘We would hope to be one of the market leaders and a big part of my job is to make sure that we are.
‘I have every sense that we are going to give this a big, big shot.’