Where does Mayo football go from here?

Where do we go from here?


As the County Board announces a review of the state of the game, we talk to three former Mayo players, John Casey, Martin Carney and John Healy about the way forward

Daniel Carey

EVERY second customer who comes into Casey’s of Charlestown talks about football. Sligo fans pop over the border and slag John Casey with the words ‘Up Longford!’ Mayo people ask the former county star: ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
What indeed? Last Wednesday, the executive of Mayo GAA Board met in the wake of John O’Mahony’s resignation as manager. The following day, they released a statement promising ‘a review of the state of the game in the county’. A series of meetings will be arranged in the coming weeks and months where clubs, delegates and members of the senior football panel will have the opportunity to express their views.
“It’s amazing it took a defeat to Longford to make people start thinking about this,” observes John Casey, who has noted a decline in the standard of club football. “We [Charlestown] won the county championship last year, but didn’t play well in the county semi-final and didn’t play great in the final either.” Respected GAA pundit Martin Carney suggests that the standard of club football in Mayo ‘is probably the lowest ebb it has been at in quite a while’.
Ballina Stephenites manager John Healy feels the state of Mayo football is ‘as bad as it was before John Maughan took over’ in 1995 and has called for ‘radical change from top to bottom’. He wants to see a major shake-up in the County Board - “They are in power far too long … I think it’s time that they stepped aside and let some younger people in there who might have a fresher approach.”

Coaching
MARTIN Carney, a former Mayo minor and under-21 manager, says players in county under-16 squads should be able to kick with both feet and be competent in the skills of the game. “Why isn’t that happening?” he asks. “At club level, a lot of emphasis is placed on winning at a young level and there’s not enough emphasis on player development, which is the critical thing in all of this.
“There aren’t players of sufficient quality coming through. They’re not coming through at club level because a number of them are inadequately coached and badly prepared. And even though they might be regarded as good players, by the time you get them in, they’re inadequate in so many aspects of the fundamentals of the game.”
John Healy says Mayo ‘seem to be years behind’ when it comes to coaching - which, he says, is ‘all wrong’ in this county. “We need to get top-class, former inter-county players coaching the kids at a serious level – and at a very young level – under-10, under-12,” he suggests. “We don’t have enough top-class players coming through at underage level. You should be trying to get three or four minors every year that’ll break into the senior team within a year, and it’s not happening on a consistent basis.
“If you take Ciaran McDonald and Kevin O’Neill out of it, we’ve had no scoring forwards in Mayo for the last 20 years. Why not? The simple answer is that the forwards at underage level are not coached properly. They’re not given enough time in the coaching structures to develop their skills - kicking for points, kicking for goals, proper game-plans, being smart on the ball, learning how to make space. I don’t think they’re being coached properly at a young level.”

Desire
JOHN Casey has noticed a ‘frightening’ drop-out rate among footballers between the ages of 15 and 18. In the mid-1990s, the Charlestown club had five 15-year-olds at the 40-strong Mayo School of Excellence. Three years later, four of them weren’t even playing football. Amidst all the discussion about structures, last year’s Club Star of the Year finds himself returning more than once to an intangible: personal desire.
“No person sitting you down in a room, no trainer on a football field, no head doctor or nutritionist will give a person what they need to succeed at the top level. The person needs it within themselves,” says the Charlestown man, who wonders if some players are content to simply make the county team. “And if they’re not performing, I don’t know is the back-up there to put people in in their place. The talent may be just not here in the county at the minute.”

Scepticism
HEALY, who has also served as Ballina club secretary, feels the planned review will be a waste of time - “I don’t think the County Board will take any heed of what the clubs have to say anyway”. For Carney, a member of the Mayo GAA Taskforce five years ago whose findings were ‘kicked to touch’, it may be a case of once bitten, twice shy.
“An awful lot of people would be extremely reluctant to get involved in a review,” he says. “And they would not be encouraged about the prospects of something succeeding, because what strangles an awful lot of initiative at birth is politics – GAA politics [and] the internal machinations of boards and of people with vested interests within boards.”
Casey wonders if the review could prompt ‘warfare at some meeting’, saying that although he’s a ‘passionate’ Mayo person, he wouldn’t air his views in such a setting for fearing of having his head taken off. “I think people will need to be searched going into that meeting!” he says.