‘That eight-year-old would have gladly just carried the water’: Mayo footballers in their own words

New publication Forever More: The team of ’26 tells the inside story of Mayo’s All-Ireland win. In this extract, players recall an impactful motivational tool employed by Andy Moran

Kieran Shannon

Mon Nov 09 2026 - 06:00 • 9 MIN READ

A few days before they would become forever more the men of 2026, Andy Moran spoke to his Mayo senior footballers about some boys.

His eight-year-old son Ollie from Ballaghaderreen. A lad way back in the day called David from Bethlehem. And what every single player in that room was like when they were kids themselves.

Darragh Beirne: Andy started getting emotional, talking about Ollie. He said, ‘Ollie has played 13 or 14 All-Irelands in the back garden this week and Mayo have never lost one!’ And that really struck a chord with me. Because at the time the outside noise was, ‘Oh Mayo have lost so many finals, this is going to be same old, same old.’ But when he brought up Ollie and how he was always winning, I got goosebumps. He was talking about us playing with the same freedom out on the pitch as Ollie out the back garden, telling us to be like children and imagining winning and what it would feel like to wake up on the Monday morning being an All-Ireland champion.

Rachel Sheehan [team sport psychologist]: A big theme for Andy throughout the year was encouraging people to play with freedom and self-expression. And when the lads went on a tour of the Brentford FC training facility while we were over in London for the Connacht championship game, they noticed a mural on the wall showing where the journey of their players had started out, and commented that the aesthetics in MacHale Park were mostly historical. So that triggered the idea of the lads getting a photo of when they were a kid that meant something to them. Then Billy [Barry McGuire, team lead video and stats analyst] put them together and they went up in the dressingroom.

Bob Tuohy: We each had our photo placed above our jersey. It was almost the last thing you’d see going out on to the pitch. It was like you were playing for that fella on the bike who grew up watching Mayo, dreaming of being out there.

Stephen Coen: I suppose it was a humbling reminder for everyone of where they’ve come from and how it’s a privilege to have got to this point, so just go out and enjoy it. It shouldn’t be a weight. When that kid was playing in the backyard, there was never any doubt or inhibition or insecurity. It was, ‘I’m going to kick the winning score in an All-Ireland final.’

Paul Towey: I loved that exercise. You get greedy as you’re playing football. I remember watching the 2016 and 2017 finals from the Hill and thinking, ‘Imagine just warming up with them, that would be absolutely insane!’ When James Horan called me in when I was still an U20, I thought it was a prank; I had to text Tommy [Conroy] to make sure it was the right number. But then you want to stay on the panel and make match day panels all the time, and then you want to start and hold your position. You’re constantly chasing the next goal. And you can feel low when it isn’t met. The photo reminded you that eight-year-old in his Charlestown jersey would have gladly just carried the water.

Ryan O’Donoghue: The picture I chose was from the opening of the new pitch in Belmullet in 2010 when the club hosted Comórtas Peile na Gaeltachta. Back then all I was doing was just playing football for fun, you didn’t have a care in the world. As I got older it got more serious and in recent years the fun had been taken out of it because we weren’t doing so well. That picture reminded you why you’re doing it. Belmullet. Family. Fun.

Eoin McGreal: My picture was of me playing for Carras; at underage our club Garrymore and Hugh O’Loughlin’s, Kilmaine, combine. Hugh and myself have played all our underage football together: with Carras, the Mayo U20s last year, even with the seniors then this year up in Omagh. And when I see that picture in our dressingroom in MacHale Park or Croke Park, I’m like, ‘What would that young lad do or say if he heard I was playing for Mayo? How could I let him down now?’ So I have to go out and play and compete with everything that I have.

Darragh Beirne: I didn’t have to go far for my picture. It’s been up in our sittingroom for over 10 years. It’s of me and my brother Adam and Cillian [O’Connor] back around 2012 at an U8 blitz in the town pitch in Claremorris. Cillian was my idol growing up. Well, him and Gooch [Colm Cooper]. My dad was always showing me videos of Gooch and Peter Canavan and of Cillian and Andy. Seeing how they’d make space for the shot. How Gooch would sell dummies and throw people the wrong way. I grew up going to every big game Mayo played and Cillian always led from the front, tackling, taking responsibility for all the frees. He’s someone I took inspiration from. I based my game off his.

Enda Hession: We never went on holidays. Actually, I’m wrong – we went on one to London for two days to see a relative. That was it. Our holidays were going to Mayo games in the summer. The old man would say, ‘If we’re going to every Mayo game, you’re not going abroad!’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s sound. We want to go to the Mayo games!’ That’s why I picked a picture of me at some underage blitz in Garrymore with my brother and sister and one of my best friends, Liam Horkan, all of us togged out in our Mayo jerseys. I remember coming out of all those final losses disappointed, but at 14, 15, 16, I was nearly ignorant of that. I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m definitely going to win an All-Ireland here.’ And myself and Horkan would say the same thing over and back to each other. ‘I’m definitely going to win one here.’ I was so sure of it.

David McBrien: They were some of the best days of your life, following that team. Going with your mates on the train or getting a bus up. As a defender you always looked towards Leeroy [Keegan], Boyler, Brendan Harrison, Zippy [Keith Higgins], Donie Vaughan, Ger Caff [Cafferkey]. All of them. You loved every one of them.

Sam Callinan: I absolutely adored Lee Keegan. He was everything I wanted to be as a player. I was never going to be a Cillian O’Connor or an Andy Moran but I thought maybe I could be a Lee Keegan – athletic, spiky, standing up and being a leader on the biggest day.

I suppose I was something of a late bloomer. I was a bit of a tubby fullback until at 13 or 14 I started to kick on a bit. But I’ll always remember watching the 2016 final replay at home on TV. And like every kid in the county I was devastated. And my mom said, ‘At this rate you’ll be playing next time they win it!’ Back then I would have been on the club’s B team. But I had the thought, ‘Yeah, maybe the next time Mayo win it, I’ll be playing.’ And I remembered that day when that exercise came up and again when Andy referenced it in the lead-up to the final. How inconceivable it would have been to a third party that Sam Callinan would be one day on a Mayo team that won an All-Ireland. And how special it would be telling my 12-year-old self that I was going to be a player on the team that finally gets over the line.

Diarmuid O’Connor: I took my picture off an old home video we had when I’m about four or five in the sittingroom, kitted out in the old Genefitt Mayo gear, singing ‘Mayo, Mayo, Mayo.’ Not the most imaginative of songs.

Stephen Coen: I’m in a white Peter Burke goalie jersey with a green-and-red clown hat. It would have been taken around the time of the 2001 national league final when we beat Galway. Noel Connelly from our club [Hollymount-Carramore] was captain. That’s my first memory of supporting Mayo.

Aidan O’Shea: Marty McNicholas from our club scored the winner in that league final. People laugh and joke about the size of Breaffy now because obviously it has sprawled a bit with the size of Castlebar but historically we’re a very small club. Marty was the first player from our club to play senior inter-county. He was a lefty, like myself, and showed me that dreams could become reality for someone from Breaffy. And obviously I was obsessed with MacD [Ciaran McDonald]. I’d run around the pitch with the socks up as high as I could get them, trying to look like him. He was godlike.

Paddy Durcan: I used to love Ciaran Mac. I remember when I was nine or so, running on to the pitch towards him after Mayo had beaten Tyrone in the 2004 quarter-final. You could do that in Croke Park in those days.

Matthew Ruane: I’d go to games in MacHale Park and walk and run along on the stone seats and jump from one row on to the next. They’re still there today. And I still sometimes do that now. But the standout memory was being at the 2006 semi-final against the Dubs. The mill by the Hill. Ciaran Mac kicking that point, smiling and wagging the finger. I completely fell in love with it then. The whole idea of playing for Mayo, I was hooked on it from that day on.

Donnacha McHugh: My first standout memory is of the 2012 semi-final win against Dublin. It was my first time hearing ‘The Green and Red of Mayo’ blasting out around the stadium after a game. I remember being up in the upper Hogan with my dad, looking around and getting some idea of what it meant to everybody, but I still didn’t properly understand at the time. I was just delighted we were getting another day out in Croke Park. And that team went on to give us a lot of days out in Croke Park. I had a season ticket from 2012 on right up to when I was called up to the panel myself and I’d say for almost 10 years there myself and my dad and his sisters Breda and Carol went to nearly every league and championship game. Sometimes your heart would be broken but even those games with Dublin that we lost were class. I used to always keep a close eye on Keegan marking [Diarmuid] Connolly. Their individual battles were worth the entrance fee alone.

The photo I picked was from a schools final back when I was in fourth class. My first time playing in MacHale Park. When you get older, it can become more high pressure. There’s more outside factors. But the photo and Andy’s message all year was to remind us to have that childlike mind. Go out and try to play out in front, be aggressive. Get the better of your man. Just go out and enjoy it and play free.

Moran had one more story from their childhood to tell them before they hit the training ground that Tuesday before the All-Ireland final and again in his meeting with them the night before the game itself.

“You’ve heard the one about David and Goliath, lads? How Goliath was this giant, fearsome, invincible, while David was just this shepherd boy with a sling and five stones. Tell me: Did anyone expect David to win? One person did. David. And that’s all that mattered. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. David believed. And it’s the same now. The only people in the world who think we’re going to beat Kerry in this final are in this room. And that’s all that matters. We’re just like David. We have the belief, we have the game plan, we have the gumption, and we have the ammo, and when the chance presents itself, we’re going to swing with our sling and we’re going to knock Goliath out.”

Watching and listening to Moran was a boy from Claremorris not much older than David was that day in the valley of Elah. One with his own sling and stones, mad to let fly that Sunday.

Darragh Beirne: I thought it was such a great analogy, just like the one about Ollie. Once he said that, I thought, ‘We’re on here. This is on.’

♦ Forever More: The Team of 2026 – The Official Inside Story of How Mayo Created History – In Our Own Words’ as told to Kieran Shannon (Reach) is out this week

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