ANDY MORAN got home for an hour on Tuesday afternoon. It must have been like finding a doorstep in a thunderstorm. The official homecoming had begun the night before in Castlebar, and the emotional trip to the home club of team captain Jack Coyne was later that evening.
For a precious time, Moran got to sit in his own house and revel in familiar comforts. But the truth is that little is familiar in the world of the Mayo manager and his players now.
The county they left last Saturday was transformed by the time they returned to such heartfelt acclaim on Monday afternoon.
This is the new time in Mayo, a world renewed, as if someone had turned it off and back on again.
Comparisons have been drawn between the 10-point defeat this side suffered to Roscommon on April 26 and the team that out-played, out-fought and out-ran the defending champions 13 weeks later, as a means of illustrating their unlikely rise to the top of the footballing pile.
Mayo’s 10-point defeat to Roscommon
Mayo looked frankly hopeless in the second half of that defeat in McHale Park, but before throw-in last Sunday, many were still unconvinced by the extent of their improvement.
It took the most seismic win in modern GAA history, perhaps the most dramatic of all time, to prove to the rest of the world that they were Ireland’s best.
From day one, though, Andy Moran had no interest in what the rest of the world thought. His concern from his first meeting with the players was convincing them that they were good enough, not just to wear the shirt or to compete, but to win the prize that had been tantalising and tormenting a county for 75 years.
Early impressions
Moran is at the core of this story, a man appointed in the aftermath of the messy departure of Kevin McStay, and he was the obvious but also popular choice given his enormous standing with Mayo supporters because of his long playing career.
From the day he was interviewed for the role almost a year to last Sunday, Moran was evangelising, and his gospel was one of belief, trying to convince the squad that they were as good as he believed they were.
When he gathered them together for a first meeting in August, he showed them clips of Kerry’s masterful All-Ireland final performance against Donegal.
He paused it at certain times, freezing big Kerry players in the frame, and he asked his new players questions they couldn’t yet answer.
‘Why couldn’t Jack Carney be that? Why couldn’t Jordan Flynn be that?’ he demanded.
Within weeks of those first discussions, a crucial early decision was made: Jack Coyne was appointed captain. He had captained the county’s Under 20 team, and he had been an All-Star nominee in 2025, as well as one of the bona fide successes of the Kevin McStay years.
But the move was still a surprise, given big figures like Jordan Flynn and Ryan O’Donoghue in the dressing room.
It proved an inspired choice, but it was one that Moran took in the full knowledge that Coyne commanded huge respect in the dressing room, and may well have been the players’ choice for the role anyway.
As well as his footballing skills, Coyne’s standards impressed the management but also set the bar among the playing group. Coyne is now nationally known thanks to his magnificent acceptance speech a week ago, but his impact on the playing group has been important for years.
Coyne takes a look at his acceptance speech
Fit to fight
The story of Moran opening a random door and bumping into Paddy Tally before Monaghan played Derry in a challenge match has been well told over the last week.
From that accidental meeting, circumstances unfolded that concluded with Tally joining Moran’s new set-up as a coach.
Along with Colm Boyle and later in the season Keith Higgins, two more revered former players and team-mates of Moran, it made for a high-wattage management team.
But there were other crucial figures behind the scenes, especially in strength and conditioning.
The victorious management team have been generous to previous regimes for the work they did that contributed to last Sunday, but fitness was an immediate priority for Moran and his new set-up on taking charge.
Moran is a gym owner, and his professional background is in fitness, so he has a natural interest in conditioning, but to play the type of game that he wanted – what would become known as Moranball – he needed his players supremely fit.
Two figures have been mentioned in recent days for their influence in this regard. The first is Conor Finn, the county’s head of athletic performance. The work he did in getting the players fit but also keeping them healthy has been cited by a number of sources as critical to the All-Ireland win.
Contrast Mayo’s health status last Sunday versus Kerry’s. While Jack O’Connor’s summer conversation was dominated by medical bulletins, and he gambled to damaging effect on the fitness of a handful of big names in the final, Mayo’s only injury absentee last Sunday was Stephen Coen.
Another name has been mentioned in conversations this week, too: Barry Solan. Best known for his work as a senior S&C coach at Arsenal, Solan also had a distinguished turn in that role with Mayo in James Horan’s groundbreaking first spell in charge of the county.
Solan worked with superstars at Arsenal
Latterly, he has pursued a career in the Middle East.
And while he had no strictly formal role in Mayo’s preparations this term, sources say his closeness to Andy Moran – both Ballaghaderreen men, they are lifelong friends – and his Mayo connections were an undoubted factor in the story of their year.
Hard calls
The heavy defeat to Roscommon has been an obvious inflection point that got plenty of focus in telling the story of Mayo’s win.
And Moran did make big changes to his team after that defeat, starting Jack Livingstone instead of Robbie Hennelly in goal, and trusting that Darragh Beirne was ready to form a devastating attack alongside Kobe McDonald and Ryan O’Donoghue.
The work that Paul ‘Papa’ Durcan did to prepare Livingstone for the step-up was huge, according to sources. Durcan was a shrewd choice as goalkeeping coach.
He and Moran knew each other from Sligo IT, where they won a Sigerson Cup together in 2005. Durcan brought All-Ireland-winning experience from Donegal in 2012, and Moran trusted his advice when it came to making the big call around the No1 shirt.
In the days after that defeat, this reporter had a conversation with a friend of Moran’s, someone who has known him a long time.
‘Andy is the nicest fella you’ll meet,’ they said, ‘but he’s a tough man, a very tough man. Don’t doubt for a second that he’ll do whatever he has to in trying to turn this around.’
Moran has spoken about the toll that defeat took on him, and he spoke to James Horan at length as he sought to deal with the aftermath of the loss.
Unsurprisingly, Horan wouldn’t reveal what they spoke about when he was asked this week, but Moran is known to have prized the advice highly.
Moran, Durcan and Higgins with Sligo IT
No more wandering
During the 2010s, when Mayo’s pursuit of the All-Ireland took on an Old Testament hue, the bus from Lucan became a staple of the legend. Twice a week, the Dublin-based players would gather in the western suburb of the city and be taken by minibus to Castlebar for training.
They wouldn’t return to the capital until the early hours of the following morning, then climb out of bed and go to work after four or five hours’ sleep.
It was presented as an example of the sacrifice the players made, but while they were doing that to take on the greatest team of all time, those Dublin players were all within an hour of their training ground, guaranteed their eight hours of sleep a night.
Contrast what Mayo were doing with Kerry. Tadhg Morley once told a story of being told by Eamonn Fitzmaurice that he needed to relocate from Dublin, where he was starting his teaching career, if he wanted to make a go of his inter-county dream.
The romance of the minibus appealed to those falling in love with the Mayo saga, but it attracted a mixture of bemusement and derision from their rivals.
No surprise, then, that Andy Moran encouraged all of his players to base themselves in Mayo. His management team were equally keen on the idea, as they knew the toll that travelling took on their team-mates in the 2010s.
He joked after Sunday’s final that someone needed to give David McBrien a job, but the centre half-back really did give up his career to return home in recent months.
Moran wanted players in Mayo
Can you hear the people sing?
Moran’s annoyance at a question about hype after the semi-final win against Louth is assuming legendary status in the story of this final, but it’s what he said before the match that bears repeating now.
The subject was the relationship between the team and its supporters, one that was sundered by the tepid 2021 final loss to Tyrone.
‘I think 2021 was what 2021 was, and it’s taken a long time to get people back in our corner,’ Moran said then. ‘And I don’t think it’s fully there yet.’
That’s the illuminating context for his reaction to a reasonable question about how supporters would react to reaching another final.
Because fixing that connection has been a priority for him, especially following the dispiriting Roscommon defeat in front of barely 15,000 fans.
That attendance was suppressed by a misguided ticketing policy by the Connacht Council that charged €35 for stand access for children as well as adults, but the outcome did nothing to convince the doubters that this project was going places.
He’s been wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap on the sideline throughout the summer, and it was assumed this was a nod to that team’s famous 108-year wait for a World Series in baseball, their drought ending in 2016.
Mayo’s 75-year wait – and its end – is now a global story, and Moran wearing the cap looked like a performance psychology gesture, reminding the world – and his players – that even the longest wait can end.
Moran wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap
Not so, according to the manager after Sunday’s final. Instead, he wore the cap ‘to remind myself of the Mayo people, successful Mayo people who went around the world and made millions of euro, hired heaps of people, hired all the Irish boys when they were going over’.
Moran was given the hat by a successful businessman on a visit to the US, with the Mayo chief shrewdly following the approach of the likes of Jim McGuinness in mobilising Mayo’s vast diaspora to the cause.
But getting the home legions onside was just as crucial, and long before throw-in on Sunday it was clear that he had succeeded. The Mayo support swamped Kerry’s by at least three to one, and it could have been as much as four to one. Winning brought that relationship to uncharted places.
A new Mayo
On Wednesday afternoon, the team from the excellent Mayo Football Talk podcast visited a house in Islandeady, outside Castlebar, to record an interview with Sean Rice. He is 89 now, and for decades was the most authoritative voice on football in Mayo through his reports and opinion writing in The Mayo News.
Sean came into the minds of many of those he inspired when Mayo won. Few have borne testimony to the county’s oscillating fortunes as closely as he has.
And seven days ago, he could sit in his living-room and marvel at a dream materialising before his eyes. A little bit of heaven fell to earth, claimed for his people by Andy Moran.
And what lies before the manager, his players and their people now is a world unknown, teeming with possibilities, inspired by one unforgettable day, and the years of toil that made it real.
