Johnno, Clifford, and the Mayo dream - every word of Andy Moran's press conference

THE Media Room underneath the Hogan Stand was jammed with journalists eager to hear the words of All-Ireland-winning manager Andy Moran. The room with the tiered seating had been the venue for many Mayo post-mortems over the years, but on Sunday evening it was the centre of the universe for many.

It took the Ballaghaderreen man a long time to get in off the pitch and through the corridors under the stand, but eventually the door opened and he bounced into the room.

I had the honour of asking the first question and it was an easily-constructed one.

Andy, it's been a long wait. No more than ourselves, you've dreamt of this moment. Was it everything you thought it would be?

It's a bit surreal, Michael, but I think of your dad at home, and I think of other people that are sick at home and missing out on this, and it's, no, it's amazing. I think of the managers, the great people.

Johno (O'Mahony) got honoured here today, 25 years after he won with Galway, there are many great, great people who sadly are no longer with us. I just think of them guys, and I'm just deeply honoured to be representing the people of Mayo.

After that, I sat back and listened as Mayo's manager answered the queries coming his way.

Andy, you believed you'd get the job done today, didn't you?

I know the general narrative was that we'd no chance. We were looking at it and saying, hold on here now for a second, Louth beat Armagh, Louth beat Dublin, but we beat Louth.

We get no credit for beating Louth, and we thought this the whole way through. Even the Monaghan game, we won, and we still got no credit.

There was no credit given at any time, so we were like, 'everyone is writing us off here.' It wasn't back-to-the-wall stuff, but we'd had a hundred training sessions done up to this point.

We were quite confident that we could give it a good rattle at least, and then if we thought we were in it down the stretch, we thought we'd get the subs to come in and finish the job.

Can I step you away from the match for a minute, and just talk about the odyssey? You mentioned John O'Mahony.

He was honoured today. I know how close he was to you as a young boy, and all through your life, but there's been plenty of people as well over those years, plenty of teams that have fallen short.

Yeah, great people. Even last night I was thinking, Donie Vaughan, Liam McHale, guys that have suffered, not only losing, real heartache in all our finals, and blame for a lot of it, and I just hope that today brings a bit of peace to them guys.

I'm waiting for it to give me a bit of peace, but I'm sure on Wednesday and Thursday, I'll settle, but I'm just so grateful for all the players that have played, all the managers that have managed us over the last 75 years, we're just the lucky ones that have got over the line.

The match itself, a bad start, the character of the young lads, to turn that around against the reigning All-Ireland Champions, and drag them back it against the wind. Was there any doubt, or was there any bit of jitters after 15 minutes?

Absolutely, when David (Clifford) puts the ball in the back of the net; of course there's doubts. Donnacha (McHugh) was probably struggling for the first 15 minutes, and then had the most outstanding game, from my point of view, that you could have,

I think there's two massive moments. David McBrien comes up, like you're on about leadership, and gets his first point in championship history.

He's only scored two goals up to this point, but today he gets a hand-pass over the bar. Then Jack Carney does what he's done all year, and kicks a two, and then Ryan kicks a two.

Now we're back to five and the game has turned; Ryan starts pressuring, our press starts working. It's funny, we always thought, like last year I remember having a great conversation with Stevie O'Hanlon in Monaghan.

Stevie was a top-class basketballer, and I said, 'Is the two-pointer more valuable in Gaelic than it is in basketball?', and he said, 'Absolutely'. He said, 'You go from three to two in basketball, you go from one to two in Gaelic football'.

The two-pointers were huge, and we knew we had the shooters to hit them, and they hit them today.

You talked about Ryan O'Donoghue; it was like he was possessed. Is there any caution trying to teach a press like that, because if one fella is sold you're exposed.

I think the caution is what happened in Roscommon, if I'm being honest. I could never really talk freely about it before, but Kevin (McStay) and Stephen (Rochford) had a way of playing, and we were trying to change it. Then, when you try to change something and you feel on the pitch it's not working, and you get caught between two stools. When they've good forwards like Roscommon, that's what happens.

After that, we just made a commitment; we said we're just going after this. It didn't really work for the first 20 minutes against Meath, and then boom, it started, and from then on it's been really good.

How crazy is it going to be for the next week, month, maybe a year?

Jesus, I don't know, I've been waiting for this since 2003, probably even before that as a minor, always dreamt of being part of it, and now I'm kind of afraid of it.

So we'll have the craic tonight and go to Castlebar tomorrow night. I'm sure we'll have a great night tonight, but I'd be encouraging the young fellas to go easy, and just enjoy this.

Jack Coyne in his speech mentions people in Mayo putting their chests out, and young boys and girls living in dreams. He was your captain. Did you need that as a captain?

I wear a Chicago Cubs cap, and that's not for style; I wouldn't have any style. We went to Chicago, New York, and London back in October, November, to try to get our diaspora back involved.

One of the most generous men I've ever seen insisted on buying me a Chicago Cubs hat. I wear that just to remind myself of all the successful Mayo people, who went around the world and made millions of euros, hired heaps of people, hired all the Irish boys when they were going over.

If they can do it, why can't we do it on the football field? And today we got a few breaks, we had a bit of luck, but is that going to mean the world to Mayo people? You better believe it is.

But it's definitely going to do a lot for sales of alcohol over the next couple of weeks, that's for sure.

Mayo were seven down at one stage in the first half but finished strongly. That set the tone?

Yeah, we won that last split by five I think, and we were very confident, not in anything in terms of winning or losing, but in the work that we'd done.

We were doing an awful lot right in that first half; we finished really strong, and it was just kind of like, OK, where do we get a bit better?

We get McBrien a tiny bit more involved in the attack, because we thought they were leaving him.

If you look at the statistics and you see this guy who's never scored a point before, you leave his wing a bit open, so we wanted to get him a tiny bit more involved in the attack. All of a sudden he sets up Darragh's goal, which is brilliant.

We had been a tiny bit sloppy around our breaking ball and stuff like that, our positions, and we just needed to play with tempo, because we thought when we played with pace, we were really hurting them, and that was it, that was halftime, and away we went.

Where does this rank for you in life moments?

Oh, Jesus, I'm 42 years of age, 43 in November, I've been playing the Mayo seniors since I was 19. I was saying out there, my wife, she got her first birthday party this year. She's born on the third week of September, and it was always falling on the day as we lost an All Ireland.

She didn't get a 21st, she didn't get a 30th, she got her first one last year. Myself and Jenny and the kids have come along and put our whole lives into this. Jesus, I don't want to get emotional, but there's not much that's got to top this, you know.

You always used to say as a player when someone asked you, 'Do you really think Mayo and you will win an All-Ireland?', you would always say yes. How important is that attitude?

I think that is the key. I looked at the great Armagh team in 2002, it took them 20 odd years to get back there, Tyrone did '03, '05, and '08 and they went after it.

We've great young boys, Seamus Howard from Belmullet, John MacMonagle there from Castlebar, Hugh O'Loughlin from Kilmaine, we've other great young boys still coming.

Obviously Kobe's going to be a loss, but listen, I think we've got a huge area of development now going forward in the next three to five years and I hope the boys can, when they settle and we get them back in about October, I hope they can see that, you know?

When you came in as a manager, how important was that positivity

In Mayo I always thought we were a bit down on ourselves, like we got to an All-Ireland final against the greatest team of all time in 2017 and it was like the world ended.

I was like, 'these are the greatest players that ever played, they're probably better than us and we maximised ourselves and nearly got over the line.' To me that's achievement, it's not failure.

That gang of young players that we have are great, but the 25s, 26s, 27s, Enda Hession, Ryan O'Donoghue, Jack Coyne, Jordan Flynn. I had them in 2020 in the under-20s and I saw a talent that was far beyond the talent I had.

We were determined to get guys back and based in Mayo. David McBrien moves from Dublin. We asked if anyone knows a construction job coming up, can we get him somewhere in Mayo? He's had no job for six months, moved home to try to do this today.

Enda Hession moved home, Tommy Conroy, Donnacha McHugh, they've all moved home from Dublin, packed up their lives. That's the sacrifice they made to be here today, so listen, I had something to do with getting them home; it's probably bullying more than a positive attitude, but it made a massive difference to us out there today when the going got tough.

When the hooter went and the place was shaking, was that everything you thought it would be?

I just found it really, really strange; it's like I just wanted to go back into the dressing room and just chill for five minutes, do you know what I mean?

But it was just, 'Where's the wife, where's Jenny, where's the kids, and just spend a moment with them'

Was it everything I thought? It was better, like the moment when the hooter goes, maybe not, but going around the pitch and seeing the Mayo people - we must have been 70-30 in our favour there today, and the Hill was still full an hour after the game. It was amazing.

You spoke before the game about the kickouts and losing the lion's share of them and still being able to win games. Do you feel vindicated in your tactics now?

When you're an underdog, I think you have to do stuff differently. I think if you do stuff the same and you play around the arc, and you play Kerry around the arc, Clifford will just touch too much ball and he'll destroy you.

You have to get them up the field, keep the ball as far away from David as you can, so I think that's just common sense, and I think you'll find over the next five years when this thing settles, and people get really used to the new rules, I think there's going to be an awful lot of high pressure going on.