SKILLS Peadar Gardiner
Oisín McGovern
FORMER MAYO footballer Peadar Gardiner has been added to the Mayo ladies senior football coaching team.
Mayo manager Michael Moyles confirmed to The Mayo News that his former Crossmolina team-mate had accepted an invitation to come on board in a coaching capacity ahead of the start of the championship season.
The Mayo News understands that Gardiner, who had been working with Maurice Sheridan and the Mayo Under-20 footballers in recent months, took up up the role with the ladies following Mayo’s exit from the Under-20 championship at the Connacht final stage.
He also coached the Belmullet team which reached last year’s Mayo SFC Final.
Moyles and Gardiner won an All-Ireland club title together with Crossmolina in 2001 and also played inter-county football together.
Gardiner will work alongside defensive coach Ger Cafferkey for the rest of the 2022 season.
“The two of them are deep thinkers of the game, very enthusiastic coaches, and the girls feed off that,” Moyles told The Mayo News Football Podcast.
“What we are trying to do is improve ourselves all the time, not just on the field, but our management team, and bring the standards higher all the time for Mayo ladies football. That’s what we said we would do from the very, very start.
“We’d expect standards of the girls and we’d also expect standards of ourselves, and I think having the likes of Peadar Gardiner and Micheál Schlingermann, who’s our goalkeeping coach, raises the standards all the time,” he added.
“We’re asking the girls to commit an awful lot of time to Mayo football, so I think this is the least they deserve is to have people like Peadar, Ger, Micheál, Greg Regan, people like this involved.”
Moyles said that Gardiner would work on tactical set-ups and skills, while Cafferkey would be ‘on the field a bit more’.
“The girls have got massive benefit from that and will continue to do so,” he added.
