‘I’m in this for the long haul’
eKevin McStay knows what every Mayo fan wants to win, and he is planning accordingly
IT starts again this evening. Take 73 of football’s great pilgrimage. This time the city that never sleeps hosts the county that never stops dreaming. Kevin McStay shakes his head at the very suggestion that in his second season in charge he is consumed only by the prospect that this journey will finally end on his watch.
‘Everybody involved knows what the want is within Mayo and that is the ultimate prize but you could not possibly live life thinking of the ultimate prize. You just can’t. The best way to get around this… and I know it is clichéd, it is not the line you want to hear and it is a line that I would be laughing at myself when I was on that side of the table… but it is game by game.
‘There are baby steps involved. We know that a good Connacht begets a good All-Ireland series most often so those are the steps we will take into it.
‘It is New York, of course we expect to win it, we expect to win every match we go into from here on in now because winning is the best medicine,’ he explains.
For all the soft words that Mayo football attracts, the notion of a great spiritual journey has invariably just turned out to have been a tale of baby steps, sometimes even great ground swallowing strides but always, always punctuated at the end by a kick in the arse.
That was pretty much the tale of McStay’s first season – a National league win, a Connacht ambush by Roscommon, inflicting a first championship defeat on Kerry in their own patch in over a quarter of a century and, then, as ever came that root up the posterior from a familiar source, beaten out the gate by Dublin in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
‘It was a tough defeat, but there’s two things you can do – you sit down or you get up and drive it on and I’m in this for the long haul.
‘I want to build a very strong Mayo set-up, a very strong Mayo panel, and then I want to be hugely successful with the group that we have, so we drive it on,’ he insists.
The sense is that 10 months on, he is content with where that drive has taken them.
A player-led independent moderated review was the starting point, setting out a route that has been somewhat different than last year, not least the overriding sense that this time they have not gone through the gears. They cruised to safety in the league which is all they wanted from it.
‘Freshness, and staying fresh for the months that mattered,’ says McStay, when quizzed on the main finding of that review.
‘‘We won’t go back on 2023, it was what it was but we will know a little bit more for 2024. So definitely the rhythm, starting back later definitely was one of them, building out the squad.
‘We arrived on our starting fifteen fairly quickly in 2023 and it didn’t change a whole lot as the league went on, so I think we are in a much stronger position now this season.
‘We used a lot of players for the League and we are very pleased with that, so I’d say those were the key learnings – and that we have to be better.’
The stats back up his assertion that they took a more holistic approach to the league this time. They used 36 players this spring (three more than last year) but the real difference was how fluid their starting team was. In securing their place in the final over the first six rounds last year, they basically stuck to the same team with just 19 players having more than one start, whereas this year they had 27 different players start over the opening six rounds.
That approach was almost certainly informed by that loss to Roscommon that saw them exit the Connacht Championship within a week of winning the league.
‘I’d say you’d have to say it probably did,’ he admits, when quizzed if that was the moment that their summer got derailed.
‘Number one, because it wasn’t planned for. And once the plan gets a wallop, you’ve to come up with another plan. We prepared as well as we possibly could for Roscommon, so there’s no excuse and we went into that game fully loaded, anticipating to win, as you must do obviously.
‘But when we didn’t, it was a fivesix week break to the next game and one of the consequences is now that you’re not in charge of the rhythm anymore. That’s going to be the fixture list.’
That is why there is no ambiguity about his preferred route to the All-Ireland series. He wants Mayo to be Connacht champions. And he also wants the value of winning Connacht to be enhanced.
Last December in his annual report, Connacht CEO John Prenty called for the winners of the provincial championships to by-pass the All-Ireland round robin phase and go straight to the All-Ireland quarter-finals, which is almost certain to morph into a proposal when a review of the format is conducted after next year’s championship.
‘I spoke with John for a while over a cup of tea here one evening. I thought it was a very good proposal. I am a bit traditional when it comes to the provincial championships, I hugely value any provincial medal I have at minor, under-21 and senior, I worked very hard for them and I really value them.
‘I am also a big supporter that the provincial championship should provide the best route to All-Ireland success.
‘Currently I still think it does as in rhythm wise because if you
keep winning you get the better schedule. But the proposal copperfastens the notion that this is a title well worth winning and anything that copper-fastens Connacht’s status I will be a big supporter of.’
Apart from the devaluing of provincial success, the squeezing of the season that sees more games played over a shorter timeframe has become a favoured stick for some managers to beat the new format with. McStay insists he will be led by the evidence.
‘It is not that far away from being fairly right, they are definitely heading in the right direction, players love playing every fortnight, it reduces the training and it keeps that excitement bubbling.
‘I am from an era where you won or you were done. Also, when you were actually winning games it could be five or six weeks between a game.
‘The data will be in after year three when they are reviewing it.
‘The injury situation will certainly be a big part of it, the marketing side of it will be a big part of it, the rhythm, the matches coming so quickly will be a big part of it and just the whole sustainability of it that’s all going to be churned out and examined. ‘But that’s all down the road. ‘I now live in the world of who do we play next.’