![\"Andy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/3860888_1_articleinline_69477_1256231_1_.jpg\" "\\"Andy")
Andy Moran celebrates scoring a goal against Kerry in Mayo’s victory in the 2017 All-Ireland SFC semi-final replay at Croke Park.\tPicture: INPHO\/Lorraine O’Sullivan<\/p>\nIn December 2015, just a couple of months after their revolt against the management of Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly, the Mayo senior football panel assembled for a meeting with their new manager Stephen Rochford. Rochford had never managed a senior inter-county team before, his players had just lost an All-Ireland semi-final replay for the second time in two seasons and back-to-back finals in the two years before that, but together they made it their aim to lift the Sam Maguire Cup the following September.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know what we\u2019re trying to work on and it wasn\u2019t to be the best team in the country on the first day, it was to be the best team in the country on the last day,\u201d declared goalkeeper Rob Hennelly after Rochford\u2019s first game in charge had seen Mayo thumped 1-18 to 0-12 by Cork in Division One of the National Football League.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s well known just how agonisingly close Mayo came to achieving their goal. And then to completing their mission 12 months later than scheduled.<\/p>\n
Few of the players did more to try and turn Mayo\u2019s dream into reality across those two seasons than Andy Moran, named GAA Footballer of the Year in 2017 just a few days short of his 34th birthday. He remains the oldest winner of the award.<\/p>\n
Last year it was the turn of Rochford, now an assistant manager to Kevin McStay, to feel the heat, if not from the players directly then from Mayo County Board officials who with an infamous statement decided to terminate the duo\u2019s management reign one year short of an agreed four-year term.<\/p>\n
When Andy Moran was appointed as their successor, no similar plan was hatched in the backend to reach this year\u2019s All-Ireland SFC Final, let alone win it. And the reason was obvious; Mayo hadn\u2019t won the Nestor Cup in four years let alone Sam Maguire, and their last All-Ireland quarter-final appearances in 2022 and 2023 had ended in eight and twelve points defeats to Kerry and Dublin respectively.<\/p>\n
It was assumed then that Mayo\u2019s first priority under Moran this year would be to win a first Connacht SFC since 2021. But it wasn\u2019t, insisted Moran, correcting the media in the wake of last month\u2019s dramatic knockout victory over Meath in Castlebar, where Mayo had previously exited this season\u2019s Connacht championship after a 10 points hiding by Roscommon.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople said to us at the start of the year what was our goal. I think ye wrote locally that our goal was to win a Connacht title. That was never our goal. Our goal was to try to get back to Croke Park and bring this promising bunch of young players to Croke Park and see how we get on,\u201d said Moran bullishly.<\/p>\n
That goal has been achieved \u2013 and some \u2013 to the extent that on Sunday next, Mayo will aim to win a third championship game in succession at GAA headquarters and raise the Sam Maguire Cup at the expense of defending All-Ireland champions Kerry. It begs the question though, why would a manager who as a player won eight Connacht SFC titles, including a famous five in-a-row, not have set a provincial title as the minimum target for his team this year?<\/p>\n
Andy Moran gave me his answer last week when we met for a chat beneath the shade of the MacHale Park stand.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year, after Galway here [Connacht Final], it was such a devastating defeat for us under Kevin and Stephen that it was so hard then for the boys to rise it because that was the ambition, it was the goal, and they were going to build from there, but you can\u2019t be setting just that target for yourself \u2013 there needs to be a target beyond the target as well,\u201d believes Andy Moran.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid we want to go well in the Connacht championship? Absolutely. Did we want that performance here against Roscommon? Absolutely not. But it happened and we could deal with it then because that wasn\u2019t the primary objective of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re in three different tournaments now. The National League is hugely competitive and it was so important for us, being a first year group trying to get young fellas through, to stay in Division 1. And we won five out of seven games.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, look at the provincial championships this year, Kerry were the only winners still standing in the [All-Ireland] quarter-finals. So it\u2019s really, really tough to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andy Moran celebrates scoring a goal against Kerry in Mayo’s victory in the 2017 All-Ireland SFC semi-final replay at Croke Park.\tPicture: INPHO\/Lorraine O’Sullivan<\/p>\n
Were Mayo to end their 75 year All-Ireland famine on Sunday, they would also become the first winners to have lost two championship matches along the way. But it\u2019s been a summer of speed bumps and wobbles right across the board, like how Down could lose a Tailteann Cup final to Division 4 minnows Wicklow and concede the highest score of the entire championship (3-33) against Armagh having begun it with the defeat of Division 1 champions \u2013 and All-Ireland second favourites \u2013 Donegal who could recover to hammer All-Ireland champions Kerry but also lose to Kerry\u2019s underlings Cork before exiting the championship to Dublin who had both hammered and lost to Louth before taking out All-Ireland fancies Galway who had beaten Westmeath who had beaten Dublin in a summer that seemed to make no sense at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were just having a chitchat around the table on the Wednesday before the semi-finals saying it\u2019s funny, Kerry, Louth, Mayo and Dublin have all taken good beatings, hammerings, along the way. It was a very unusual semi-final quartet because that doesn\u2019t usually happen,\u201d admits Moran.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re five percent off in the new rules and there\u2019s any sort of wind blowing, all of a sudden you could find yourself 10 points down. If you\u2019re Kerry against Donegal and you find yourself a man down, all of a sudden you can find yourselves 10 points down. If you\u2019re off like we came out in the second-half against Roscommon, against another Division 1 team, you can find yourself 10 points down very, very quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe peaking at the right time of the year, to me that\u2019s the thing. Have we worked out as management and coaches how to really peak? You come out of the National League, you do two weeks and you\u2019re in London, you do two weeks and you\u2019re against Roscommon. Where do you get the chance to actually get a bit of training? You don\u2019t. Did we time that wrong? When I reflect back in a month I\u2019ll probably say yes, but I\u2019ll have to go back on what we did, the training we did, staying in London, all that sort of stuff. But have we got a lot right along the way as well? We have. So it\u2019s just learning how this new system, this new format is going to work more so than anything.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no doubt about it, we\u2019ve had some soul searching to do along the way but the effort the boys have put in, I can\u2019t speak highly enough about them. The way they can play, the way they can run, that doesn\u2019t just come from turning up; they\u2019ve put in serious lifestyle choices around that. The major one for me is that some boys have moved from Dublin without jobs and have left good jobs to come home and play football for Mayo. What more can you ask?\u201d states the manager.<\/p>\n
It seems a fair assumption that if securing the Nestor Cup wasn\u2019t a primary objective of Moran and his Mayo players this season, then ending up among the last two teams standing in the race for All-Ireland honours is something they wouldn\u2019t have foreseen either. Or did they?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think if you go into a season and you don\u2019t expect to be there, you\u2019re not in the right spot, especially as one of the biggest counties in the country,\u201d says Moran candidly.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut have we progressed probably quicker than ye expected? Probably. But you know me Anthony, I\u2019m an optimistic man and up to that Roscommon game I probably did expect us to be at the tail-end of the championship. But then you get a reality check and you have to ease back into it and see where you\u2019re at.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say I didn\u2019t expect it. I\u2019m not saying I did expect it but I wouldn\u2019t say I didn\u2019t,\u201d adds Moran, giving every sense of a man who wishes the season didn\u2019t have to end on Sunday; that his team is only just finding itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cOmagh (v Tyrone) was the funniest feeling I\u2019ve ever had in my life if I\u2019m being honest because at 68 minutes I\u2019d have been very, very pleased going into that dressing-room. And at 70 minutes I couldn\u2019t be disappointed because if you were pleased after 68, you\u2019re telling the lads lies if you\u2019re disappointed just because Niall Morgan kicked an unreal two-pointer to win the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I remember coming out of that game and saying to the lads, it\u2019s moving now, it\u2019s beginning to click, they\u2019re beginning to come together, the team is beginning to move, and we could all sense that, not only the management, but the playing group.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had the 20 minutes against Meath which nearly put that to bed but the reaction of the boys, against Cork, Louth, all of it just kind of came together. But we think there\u2019s more in this group, we really do. And these boys will chase it down. Is that going to be good enough to come out with the victory? Let\u2019s just wait and see.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andy and his management team remained in Dublin following their side\u2019s semi-final victory over Louth to watch the other last four clash between Kerry and Dublin, which the Kingdom won but 2-18 to 0-20 but only after benefitting from several controversial refereeing decisions and the off-day experienced by some of the opposition\u2019s key marksmen.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought Dublin did really, really well. I thought they were defensively brilliant but they couldn\u2019t put enough on the board to put them through. But Kerry are Kerry and they found a way to win it,\u201d said Moran before asked about anything specific he might have learned from that match.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you ever going to be able to take the Cliffords out of the game? Probably not, but you can learn little things around it, how you can minimise them a tiny bit.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaudie goes up there and hasn\u2019t played a lot of football but he gets a lot of ball and that is him back in the game. Se\u00e1n O\u2019Shea gets a lot of minutes behind him and you learn how these boys are progressing through their injuries and they seemed fairly lively,\u201d said the Mayo boss, agreeing that there\u2019s always pressure on Kerry to win All-Irelands but that Mayo will place pressure upon themselves too.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would think that we\u2019re a really good team. We finished third in our league and we think this is a really, really good group. But we\u2019re not looking at the outcome, we\u2019re looking at can we keep this progress going, this line that we\u2019re on, can we keep it going into the final and improve our performance along the way. And if that\u2019s good enough to win the game for us, brilliant. But if it\u2019s not, we can live with that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In December 2015, just a couple of months after their revolt against the management of Pat Holmes and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-567438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}