Ending the great hunger: A Mayo tale

“Support for the team fell away at an alarming rate: hardly anyone turned up for some of the championship preparation games. In fact, the situation had got so bad that no one cared when or where the panel was holding their training sessions. Every other week, there was news of players being dropped from the panel or leaving through lack of interest. Injuries too were preventing any real progress being affected and, in the circumstances, the trip to Carrick-on-Shannon on June 23 to play Leitrim in the semi-final was one of hope rather than confidence.”

Everyone has their preconceptions about Mayo football but most base them around recent times. The All-Ireland losses in 1996, ’91, 2004 and ’06.

Depending on what kind of person you are, they are the butt of the joke; the sorry tale of perennial woe or, most likely, a bit of the two.

But that’s not taking account of the county’s history and the formative moments which has seen it evolve from the whipping boys of Connacht in the 1970s to a Division 1 team for the past 14 years. The losses have been cruel along the way but, taken in its entirety, Mayo football has been on a steady path since Liam O’Neill took charge in 1983.

Football in the county was at its lowest during the 1970s and early 80s. A national league title in 70 masked what was to come — a decade without a Connacht SFC title for the first and only time in the county’s history.

Even when Mayo beat Sligo in 1981 (0-12 to 0-4), the subsequent 2-19 to 1-6 loss to Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final devalued the title. Mayo’s players celebrated that Connacht final for a week, knowing the All-Ireland was a contest far beyond their reach. After the 70s they had no right to compete outside Connacht.

But that all changed in 1985.

O’Neill had played corner-back for Galway from the late 60s through to the late 70s and had the misfortune of playing on three losing All-Ireland final sides. He came to Mayo and inherited a squad far different from the one we’ll see tomorrow in Croke Park.

In his first year, they lost to Galway 1-13 to 1-10. Meeting a team of that calibre was a shock to everyone’s system, not least a youngster making his debut.

“I remember going in at half-time on a scorching hot day and one or two guys, who I won’t name, were nearly collapsing in the dressing room,” said Kevin McStay. “It was shocking that they hadn’t conditioned themselves at all. Liam O’Neill said afterwards that it would be the last time that was going to happen. He put enormous work into us. He was so far ahead of his time. I’ve often said he didn’t let us down, we let him down.”

But O’Neill also got a break. That year the U21s had beaten Derry after a replay in the All-Ireland final. Gabriel Irwin, Peter Ford, John Finn, Seán Maher, Noel Durkin, McStay and John Maughan emerged. Pure luck.

Maughan and Finn joined Frank Noone and Dermot Flanagan in creating an elite group of fitness fanatics within the squad which pushed the others on.

O’Neill gave them the tools. He travelled to America for the latest techniques. They focused on becoming faster and stronger and a new Mayo style emerged. Tough at the back, powerful around the middle and slick and stylish in attack.

The Sigerson Cup preparations also helped. Mayo had Peter Forde, TJ Kilgallon, Maughan, Flanagan and McStay involved with teams, so when O’Neill brought them down to Limerick for pre-season fitness tests and introduced them to weights at the end of 1983, only half the team were shocked.

However, the foundations were weak. The 70s had turned Mayo from a proud GAA county into a weak and mentally fragile. The organisation levels within the county had been neglected and it was only when O’Neill refused to wilt to outside pressures that the standards rose. McStay himself could have been lost in that mire.

“I played minor in 1980 and was considered to be pretty good but I didn’t kick a ball for another two years. There was nowhere to go after Mayo minors, club or county. It wasn’t that I was disinterested, just that there was nowhere to go.

“I was in the RTC in Galway. I didn’t know anything about the Mayo U21s. When I was 19, no one told me about and I wasn’t asked along to it. When I was 20, no one told me about and I wasn’t asked along to it. One day someone must have said ‘remember the lads from the minors a few years ago’ and I was asked in. That type of thing happened a lot.

“I played well with the U21s and one Saturday I was asked into the senior team. I never trained with Mayo. Never played with Mayo. But Liam O’Neill stuck me in at corner forward for a Connacht final against Galway the next day.”

With everything in place for 1984 they again tried to claim Connacht, only this time with the hope of claiming something more beyond. But the 70s haunted the squad. Even though O’Neill had infused them with youth, there was still baggage from the bleak years. Galway again shot them down in the final and again they went back to the drawing board. More work was needed. More training. More sacrifices.

McStay said: “The confidence in Mayo was bust. We spent more years trying to win the first one than we should have. We had a lot of good players coming through but unfortunately it took too long to get to 85.”

The start of that year began with a loss to Limerick in the Ford Open Draw. As has often been the case since in Mayo, judgment on the team was swift. County board chairman Paddy Muldoon said “the county’s ratings had dropped back to rock bottom”.

What came next forged the building blocks for the future.

From the backdrop of despair and with little hope Leitrim were beaten in Carrick-on-Shannon 2-11 to 0-5. Roscommon awaited in the final in Dr Hyde Park, a venue where Mayo had never beaten the home side in a Connacht final.

The build up centred on the late Dermot Earley, who had declared it would be his last game for the county, but the post-match talk was all about Mayo’s display in that 2-11 to 0-4 win. The team started to believe and the mighty Dubs lay in wait.

It was Mayo’s biggest day on the national stage since the 1951 All-Ireland final and they didn’t disappoint. The minors beat Meath in the warm up and the seniors fought back to draw 1-13 apiece with Dublin.

63,134 turned up for the replay where Mayo went down 2-12 to 1-7. However, the seed was sown.

“I remember after 1985 I missed my lift home and PJ McGrath was there for me,” remembered McStay. “He might have been the chairman or secretary at the time but I’ll never forget him saying to me ‘Mayo are back in the big time’.

“That was the feeling all Mayo fellas had. That was after the draw, a game we should have won, and we lost the replay but on a big day in Croke Park in front of a massive crowd we showed we could compete again. That Mayo team played a lot of semi-finals and the All-Ireland in 1989 but that day was the start of it all.

“John O’Mahony came in and did an amount of work with us on the mental side but Liam (O’Neill) set us on the road. He was the first to tell us we could beat teams outside of Connacht and there were a good few years there where we were in the top four in the country.

“The big thing was that the 10-year-olds in 1985 were adults in 1996. They knew there was something very exciting around playing for Mayo and going to matches. It was glamorous to play for Mayo again. It was fantastic to be part of it.”

But, as would be a recurring theme in Mayo, there were regrets too.

“I often look back though with a little bit of regret and think ‘did we do enough?’,” McStay says. “Maughan and Noone pushed it on to new levels but I wonder did the rest of us do enough to match them.”

August 15, 1993. Mayo 0-10, Cork 5-15. Jack O’Shea’s reign as the first outside manager in the county was abruptly ended. Mayo football on the road to nowhere. Again.

A trodden people had regressed until John Maughan came home in the winter of 1995 and revolutionised football forever in Mayo.

“Every year, no matter who wins the All-Ireland, you’ll always have someone saying ‘Derry are doing this’, ‘Kerry are doing that’,” said former Mayo midfielder David Brady. “This year it’s Donegal. Everyone tries to copy what’s successful. But I’ll never forget 1996. The amount of physical training was phenomenal. We were doing constant long distance beach work. We went the first three, four, five, six weeks without seeing a ball. It was an hour and 10 minutes inside and an hour outside in October, November, December, January, February.

“Kevin O’Neill said to me ‘no matter how good or bad a footballer we are, we’re going to be the fittest team in Ireland’. Ultimately it didn’t give us the big prize but our physical conditioning was exceptional.

“Combine that with Maughan’s organisational skills and attention to detail and you were never going to be too far away back then.”

For two years, they came closer than any Mayo team before or after. Meath beat them by a point after a replay in ’96 and Maurice Fitzgerald turned on the magic in ’97.

There were other benefits. Crossmolina and Ballina reached and won All-Ireland club finals. The boost from the county’s profile led to increased playing numbers, some clubs started to buy their own land and develop facilities for the first time and Mayo GAA became a far more professional unit.

It’s no coincidence that the county’s U21s won an All-Ireland 10 years on, beating a Cork side which boasted Ken O’Halloran, Alan O’Connor, Patrick Kelly, Fintan Goold, Paul Kerrigan and Daniel Goulding.

As a team though they never reached those heights again. Putting the emphasis on athleticism over football worked for a few years but others quickly followed the template and advanced it.

“We never pushed on. There was a lot of weights done. It was constant right up to games. Afterwards, did we bring anything new to the game? We stalled. Every other team pushed on that little bit more. I don’t remember once in all my time with Mayo having a different style of play. We just focused on ourselves.”

Athletes replacing footballers. Like it or not, John Maughan founded and exploited the principle.

“There were so many different types of footballers about at the time but everyone had to be at the same level, be it the goalie or the 29th lad on the panel.

“We all did the same training. It was a lot harder on the older guys. But I was playing with the finest athletes I ever played with. Colm McManamon, James Nallen, John Casey were all in phenomenal condition.”

The great debate about Mayo always settles on one thing — inconsistency. Two in a row has proved beyond Mayo since Liam O’Neill’s day. That’s why tomorrow’s game against Dublin will define James Horan’s career.

In June, Andy Moran said: “I honestly think back-to-back good seasons and getting that kind of consistency is the way to go.” Horan has outwardly preached the same gospel. But history, and not just Mayo’s, shows us that time is not a friend to a county team hoping to claim Sam Maguire as their own. It has to be the here and now, not the future. So when Horan is asked if he’s surprised by two Connacht titles, appearances in two All-Ireland semi-finals and a national league final in two years, he’s brutally honest.

“We expected a bit more. The much-chronicled 2010 and where Mayo was, there’s always been 20-25 footballers in Mayo capable of winning an All-Ireland. Always.

“Maybe all the inputs and everything that goes with that hasn’t been as good as it should have been. We’re confident we’re getting a lot of those inputs right.”

He’s highly thought after and has injected a brutality into Mayo’s style. They’re smarter, stronger and more efficient with the ball.

“You’d have to wake him [Horan] up in the dressing room at half-time. He was so laid back it was unreal,” recalled Brady.

“But once he crossed the white line he was a different animal, which is a lot like the way Mayo are playing now, with a lot of physicality. You’re hearing Kerry and Cork teams now saying they were never hit as hard by Mayo in the past. He’s got Mayo tackling like never before.”

McStay adds: “I have a feeling now that there’s more and more players buying into what he’s doing in Mayo. It’s not about me. It’s not about the individual. It’s about the team. If you have 20 or 25 lads giving their all and being honest you’ll be hard stopped.

“I like what I see from the players.”