WHEN SUNDAY COMES, Kevin McStay picks up the thread of his inter-county career with Mayo, 33 years after Galway knocked them out of 1990 Connacht Championship.
As he comes out onto the whitewash to face Roscommon, you wonder if his eyes might stray to the patch of MacHale Park grass where he lay in utter agony, just one week after that loss.
With Mayo gone from the championship, there was no need to pamper players with a long lead into the club championships. Instead, the opening round was slated for the following weekend. Ballina had Castlebar. A biggie.
Castlebar’s Henry Gavin, the Mayo captain in 1985, made a lunge for a dirty ball skidding across the turf. McStay went in too, but as he slid on his backside, his left leg went up into the air. Gone. Broken. He was just 28.
That was him finished with Ballina Stephenites, though not finished with another sporting wing of Ballina. Others had plans for the man who was too restless to do nothing and his friendship group orbited the tight-knit basketball community anyway.
Ballina were a fly in the ointment for the old money of the Super League, with the likes of Burgerland Neptune in Cork attracting crowds of 6,000.
Away from such razzmatazz, Ballina would raise dust and tempers in their tiny hall in Killala. With his brother-in-law Liam McHale, they had the most outrageously gifted Irish-born player and could count in Kevin’s brother Paul, and the American import from Cleveland, Deora Marsh.
Kevin himself had played for the Ballina Braves and had an aptitude for the sport. The McHales and company had already won a National Cup. Now they were going in for Super League. Their coach and player, Terry Kennedy, knew they needed some shape put on them though, and brought in the Army Officer as physical trainer of the squad.
When McStay looked at Marsh, he couldn’t believe the athlete he was dealing with. That size. The strength. The grace.
All the same, what if he could cut out the smokes and the taste for brandies?
McStay chased Marsh around the halls doing laps, some good old-fashioned GAA muck and gutters stuff, only inside, and in sneakers.
‘Hey man!’ Deora would shout over his shoulder, ‘I might look like a Kenyan, but I ain’t!’
Basketball was always Terry Kennedy’s sport, but during Covid, he got roped into helping Ray Dempsey out in Knockmore and they never stopped until they had the 2020 and 2021 county titles wrapped up.
The secret sauce tempted James Horan who brought Kennedy in to get a closer look at these coaching influences. Kennedy knew he needed a bit of help for the indoor sessions conducted at Breaffy. Who else would he turn to but Deora?
The Ohioan never left Mayo. He just loved it too much and got swept along with the romance of the football team’s crusade to win Sam Maguire. Around the games, he became a visible and regular presence, so he knew all the players to see. When Kennedy would be explaining a point to a player, Marsh would sidle up afterwards, giggling and asking, ‘who were you talking to, T?’
From that coaching culture, Kennedy recognised early on that McStay had something.
“Kevin is an astute fella. He’s very smart. He knows basketball very well,” says Kennedy now.
“To me, the reason he is doing so well with Mayo is he has the other fellas doing all the work and he is watching and he would see something and have ways of working it out. He is that kind of person, I think.
“The Army Officer background, it is all about discipline and procedures. The basketball background, he would have seen the way it was run defensively, what presses to apply, the way the transition is worked. And while it is on a bigger scale when you bring it onto a football pitch, it is the same principles, in a bigger area.”
The early 1990’s might have been the high watermark for basketball in Ireland. Ballina were a scrappy bunch, using their brawn and bravery as well as possessing the finer things in life too. Their hall, what Marsh once described as, “the little box,” could only hold 500. Some nights there was well over 1,000 in there.
The spirit of those times could be best summed up in a passage from Kieran Shannon’s seminal account of Irish basketball, ‘Hanging From The Rafters.’
‘Ballina’s appeal and identity was rooted in their ferocious passion and physicality,’ he wrote.
‘They may have lacked the mechanical sophistication and polish of Vincent’s or The Mon, or the breathtaking flair of Neptune or Demons, but they were still compelling drama because as their coach Terry Kennedy would say, they were more a family than a team.
‘And that family was more ‘Sopranos’ than ‘Brady Bunch.’
When it came to giving the pre-match speech before they played Neptune, Kennedy handed the locker room over to McStay.
Football’s evolution has been shaped by basketball for the greater part of 50 years, but the shape of plays has never more resembled it than at this stage.
“Even Dublin, the way they are running screens to get players free. I know it’s meant to be a personal foul, but you can run screens off the other side of the pitch to get others open. Or isolating players. It is all coming in to football. Especially intercounty teams,” says Kennedy.
“Basketballers have to think very quickly and that has come into football now. Your handpassing, the decision-making, you have to be very quick on it now because the defence is getting more technical.
“Whereas blanket defences, double-teaming in certain areas, it’s like seeing that you are one pass away, or two passes away from getting a move off.”
Coaching philosophy is one element for McStay. Another is his rationality and refusal to get drawn into the emotion of a situation.
Even when he won the All-Ireland club title with Roscommon’s St Brigid’s, he stepped down almost immediately.
That didn’t come as a surprise to his selector, Benny O’Brien. He stayed on with Liam McHale and they helped themselves to two more Roscommon senior championships. Now, O’Brien would admit that they only had to hold the wheel straight, all the values had already been installed.
“Kevin would have a very high moral compass. There is no doubt about that,” says O’Brien.
“But then the practical side of it, the way engineers tend to be, it’s either 1 or 0. It’s black and white. He would feel that everything is quantifiable and you can measure it. And he feeds all of that into his decision-making process.
“I will give you an example. We had a lad in Brigid’s who had a very poor disciplinary record. Kevin was wondering how he would handle him.
“But he just went up and told him, ‘Every time you get a yellow card, I am going to take you off.’
“And he did that, it happened in three or four games and then it stopped completely.”
Throughout Mayo’s league campaign, McStay was careful to smuggle in a player here and there for the starting line-up, auditioning them for further down the line. Once the championship comes, he wants to be able to introduce his options and be confident that the performance levels won’t drop.
“I have no doubt it is a couple of years’ project, but I would say if anyone could get them there, he will,” says O’Brien.
“He has had the FBD (league) and the pre-season. Phase One. Then he had the league. Phase Two. And then he moves into Connacht as Phase Three and then the All-Ireland is the Phase Four.
“He will box each one off as he goes along and he will have goals set up within each of them, what they are trying to achieve and where they are trying to get.”
The old connections don’t fray. They grow stronger as the years pass. McStay has Liam McHale still alongside him. The Army General alongside the man that players adore and will trade jokes with.
The easy-going demeanour cannot take away from McHale’s coaching ability. Once upon a time, McStay insisted that McHale is one of the greatest coaches in the country.
As a young man, McHale would sit up and watch NBA games recorded off Channel 4. He would prowl the living room, recreating the moves of Larry Bird and others so that he could try them out for himself.
For some, McHale might fade into the background of a coaching team that includes Donie Buckley and Stephen Rochford. But on the training field, he is prominent.
“For us in Brigid’s, he got a group of players that suited him down to the ground in terms of, technically, they were very good footballers,” explains O’Brien.
“And Liam brought in his basketball background to it. A lot of the stuff was about peripheral vision and creating space. If you consider a basketball player, if he could create in a very tight space, six inches to a foot of space to get a shot away. Well then, expand that to the GAA pitch.
“And he was doing a lot of basketball, I won’t say ‘moves’, but ‘sets’ and that sort of stuff.
“The other thing about Liam is that everyone is his friend. He is a coach and he would sit there and chat with you, telling yarns and stories. He is brilliant to have around a dressing room.
“Every player that he ever met and coached, they all loved him.”
If ever McStay was going to get the Mayo job, he wasn’t going to turn his back on McHale. Publicly, he always courted it.
“I don’t know if it was a personal thing with him, to do it, but I would sense that the Mayo job has always been the dream job for him,” adds O’Brien.
“He missed out on a couple of occasions and I always got the sense he always wanted a shot at it and see what he could make of it.”
Mayo football is the endless obsession of so many, but you suspect some are more consumed by it than others.
One time on a transatlantic flight, McStay stood up at the start to talk to the former journalist, Liam Horan. They went through every facet of players, performance and structure of the county for hours, before the announcement came for passengers to take their seats as the plane was about to land. They had stood talking the entire time.
The greatest illustration of this comes in McStay’s own book, ‘The Pressure Game.’
‘When my time with Roscommon came to an end and my health was beginning to be questioned, and the stress levels were ridiculously high, Verona (his wife) and I finally had long conversations,’ he wrote.
‘Do we need to do this?’
‘Is it time to have a bit of time for us?’
‘I had given it three full, jam-packed years with Roscommon and 20 years managing teams before that. Verona and I decided that it was time to retire for good as a football manager.
‘And, here’s the mad bit.
‘If there was a knock on the door tomorrow or the telephone rang, and the man on the other end asked if I was interested in taking the Mayo job, what would I say?
‘I’d tell him yes, and I’d spend the next few hours getting up the nerve to explain to Verona.’
And here he is. All he ever wanted.
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