'I always hang the jerseys' says Mayo GAA club manager

Meet five people who’ve been at the beating heart of a Mayo club championship weekend:

Part One:

Name: Mark Concannon

Role: Hollymount/Carramore intermediate team manager

We typically train the 48 hours or the night before a championship game, but we keep it to about 40-45 minutes. As a manager, you really are sweating that you don’t fatigue the lads or pick up a late-minute knock.

We have this ritual all year where two players have to make sandwiches for our meeting before a league or championship game.

The way we sort it is we have a penalty shootout on the Tuesday night and the first two lads to miss in the penalty shootout have to make the sandwiches for the meeting on the Friday.

I will usually take that meeting and I’d try and keep it to 15 minutes. I know I have their attention for 10 minutes. Anything over that, they’ll be falling asleep.

In general I never go into too much detail on the opposition. I’ll only name the team and make small adjustments based on opposition and areas we think we can find some success.

I’ll leave them with a motivational message in terms of what we want to achieve on the Saturday, but it’s quite low-key. There’d be no roaring or shouting or anything like that.

While you’re naming the team you might be in a situation where you have to have some individual discussions with lads who haven’t made the 15. Some lads who are starting will need a lot of detail on the job they’re expected while some players don’t want any information.

We’ll usually have a quick logistics meeting with the management team after that just to go through final preparations. We have no kit man, so we make sure that’s all nailed down.

I usually get to the pitch an hour and 40 minutes before a game and start setting everything up. I have a ritual where I always get the food the day of the game; the wine gums, oranges, bananas, water, and I always hang the jerseys. I just feel it gets me in the right zone. Then I’ll take the warmup with one of the coaches.

At half-time, I make the players meet in the D, and I let the captain lead them into the dressing room together. I’ll give the players three or four minutes to themselves while I talk to the management team, then I go in and lead the discussion. You can only actually impact two or three things, so we really try and focus on the high priority topics that we can impact in the second half.

Once the game is over I try and be quite concise in my post game analysis. From my experience, the last thing I want to do is have open heart surgery after a game.

If they want to go for a few pints, they can go for a few pints. I try and get them to stay together for at least a couple of hours. I think it’s important for a team to come down together rather than splitting off into individual groups.

Hollymount is a good place to do that because you have the local pubs right outside the door, so we typically have food organised for both teams in one of the pubs and we alternate every week.