Kevin McStay has delivered Roscommon’s rebirth

Whatever happens tomorrow, McStay will be among a select few managers that can look back on Championship 2017 satisfied that he was right and almost everybody else was wrong, writes Dara Ó Cinnéide.

As a snapshot of stoic man making a lonely stand in suitably gloomy weather, Kevin McStay braving the hailstones post-match in a deserted Hyde Park in March probably doesn’t resonate as much as Brian Lenihan, bailout-bound, beleaguered and alone in an airport in 2010, watching the snow thaw, realising that ‘hell was at the gates’.

For a start the Roscommon manager had Marty Morrissey for company and whatever about the original sin of McStay’s Mayo provenance, player defections and his team’s imminent relegation to Division Two of the Allianz League, nobody was laying the ruination of a country at his door.