“Cathal Cregg and I had a shorter discussion, as he basically told me that he didn’t rate me and that there was no big decision to be made between studying for his doctorate and playing football for a team I managed. It was tough to hear, but I had to take it on the chin.” The Pressure Game’, by Kevin McStay, with Liam Hayes, published 2019, www.HEROBOOKS.digital
WHEN deciding to write a memoir about his years on the inter-county circuit with Roscommon, Kevin McStay could easily have airbrushed Cathal Cregg’s quite damning assessment of his managerial abilities from the 236 engaging pages.
One of the great strengths of the book is that he doesn’t spare himself from criticism.
It just so happened Cregg’s decision to opt out meant he missed out on a Connacht title in 2017 before McStay had the grace to invite him back onto the Rossies panel the following year.
The affable Mayo man, who resigned as Roscommon manager at the end of 2018, has granted several interviews to discuss the book – but it’s the first time anybody has asked him about this paragraph that jumps off the page.
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“That paragraph is a very fair paragraph,” McStay says.
“It reflects exactly the conversation we had. The thought of revealing myself in that manner has never bothered me.
“I know what I can and can’t do. A player is entitled to his opinion. If a player in Roscommon didn’t rate me, that’s fine. I would point to my record and say I’ve trained three or four different clubs to county championships, I won an All-Ireland with St Brigid’s, I coached the Ballina Basketball Club to a cup and a league. I’ve been around a fair while. I know what I’ve done.
“I’d 10 different conversations on the phone with 10 different players but I remember that one. I thought: ‘Wow. He doesn’t rate me...’
McStay adds: “During our time we won a Connacht title, which was a massive win. We got promoted out of Division Two, we got back into Division One. We were the first Roscommon team to qualify for the Super 8s.
“Cathal didn’t play in 2017. He’s a decent player and I did ask him back in 2018... But this is the cut and thrust of it. The highs are high and the lows are low and all sorts of things are going to be thrown at you.”
The fact that McStay has no intentions of returning to inter-county management perhaps allowed him to write with greater freedom than if he'd fancied another crack at it.
“I didn’t have that constraint. I made a firm decision, I sat back and thought about it. I’m in my late 50s and, on the Mayo job, I knew that ship had sailed. It wasn’t going to turn around for me, and they were the only two counties [Roscommon and Mayo] I was interested in managing.
“I certainly recognised my naivety at times. That’s what reflection does. I certainly recognise the stresses that were there at that time, major stresses on the odd occasion. That’s just the stress of elite level football. There’s no hiding place. You’re on the sideline in Croke Park and you’re losing by 12 or 13 points, it’s not nice. It’s a public gutting, so it’s tough going.
“But the Roscommon job was everything I thought it would be – the ups, the downs, we won, we lost, we lived. That’s what we did for three years.”
Since reclaiming his seat on The Sunday Game panel, McStay feels he has a greater appreciation of what life is really like on the inter-county sidelines.
His punditry was always of a measured kind but riding the inter-county wave out west has undoubtedly deepened his knowledge.
“As pundits we think things should be quite easy for managers to get right,” he observes.
“That is from the comfort of watching on and having five or six hours to go back and look at the tape. But now you’re thinking: ‘Now, how would I have managed that situation? Could I have figured that out?’
“You might think Mickey Harte or Jim Gavin are the calmest men in the world [on the sideline] but underneath that, there is managed chaos going on. There are so many different decisions that have to be made – you have to see them, you have to understand them and can you resolve them?
“And, by the time you’ve figured out how to resolve it, the fire is blazing somewhere else, whether that is a red card or a concession of two quick goals, or a yellow card.
‘Do I take him off or can he play with the yellow?’
‘Is the referee on him?’
‘Will we sub him off quick?’
‘How injured is a player?’
‘Can he play on?’
‘Between 16 and 26, you’ve 11 men behind you – when is the best time to bring them in?’
‘Who do you bring in?’
‘Where are the problems?’
“It just goes on and on…But it is a great experience. When it’s going well, when your county is high on the possibilities of summer and Croke Park, the possibility, just the possibility… and, in fairness, we could say on a lot of occasions: ‘Yeah, we had that possibility.’”
The Mayo native, who lives in Roscommon close to Hyde Park, decided to call time on the Rossies job at the end of the 2018 season.
McStay’s three years in charge was, by any measure, a very successful period in the county’s history.
But with the clamour – inside and outside the panel – for a more defensive approach in 2019, the former Mayo footballer was not interested in coaching it. So the reins were passed to Anthony Cunningham.
“I would never put a ceiling on a team, but you have to recognise realities as well,” McStay says.
“The reality under my watch was we could not compete consistently at Super 8s level.
“We could compete at just about every other level. We could win Connacht, we could win a Division Two and the local FBD Leagues. We were six, seven, eight, nine, 10 in the rankings.
“I brought them as far as I could bring them. That’s not to say they couldn’t go further because, in fairness, a year later they won Connacht again and did better in the Super 8s than we had done.
“They were competitive against Tyrone, they beat Cork and they were hockeyed by Dublin. That’s slightly better than the Super 8s I as involved in.
“But you still have to say they found it difficult to really compete… To make that improvement there was no doubt there were members of the team who wanted to play much more defensively, and that’s totally acceptable. Whether it’s my belief, my philosophy or my naivety – whatever way you want to put it – that didn’t particularly appeal to me."
He adds: “To think that we didn’t coach defensive play, how to tackle, how to work the body would be crazy… we just didn’t have that type of player. We didn’t have big, athletic defenders who embraced contact or liked hard, physical contact.
“So the game we played, the game that was going to suit us was – we had very accurate forwards and we’d very skilful players who knew how to work openings.
“The idea that we’d get into an attritional battle with Donegal or with Mayo or Galway was madness because in my estimation and the group that I was coaching would have found that incredibly difficult. And that’s the decision we made. And, secondly, as a coach, as a manager, I had no interest in playing blanket defence. I’d no interest in coaching it...
“There is no joy for me, never mind the players. To be going up coaching that twice and three times a week and repeating this process thousands of times every night absolutely did not appeal to me.”
'The Pressure Game' is an honest-to-goodness, refreshingly old-school football book that depicts brilliantly every conceivable emotion of managing an inter-county team and deftly delves into his family life, his own playing days and a tumultuous career in the Irish Army.
McStay's memoir just about ticks every box there is to be ticked...
