Kevin McStay’s management team comes under fire at Mayo county board meeting

The Mayo footballers suffered an underwhelming season under the leadership of the former corner-forward.

The two-time Connaught title winner took charge of the green and red county in 2022, and has struggled to achieve any success in his two years in charge.

The Mayo footballers bowed out of the 2024 Senior Football Championship in June after losing to Derry on penalties in front of a 13,955 crowd in Castlebar.

That loss was another nail in the coffin for McStay and his squad, who have let leads slip and fallen short of victory on a number of occasions in the last couple of years.

Following the loss against Derry, McStay blamed bad luck and being on the wrong side of thin margins as the reason why his team haven't been able to progress.

"We lose the Connacht final with the last kick of the game," McStay told the Irish Examiner back in June. "We draw with Dublin with the last kick of the game and we lost today with the last penalty of the game. That is tough. That are the margins that are involved.

"We are getting the wrong side of those margins too often and you know until we are a little bit more ruthless and clinical and stretch out our leads when we should stretch them out our lead. And we should stretch them out and not give everybody a chance to catch up with us. So maybe there is the work on."

Now, at a tense county board meeting that took midweek, a number of delegates voiced their disquiet over McStay's management style and claimed that "the players are up in arms" over the way things are being done.

According to Mayo Live, Garrymore delegate John Farragher called out members of the senior management team for not yet producing a season's review and claimed that players and supporters are ‘not happy’ and want change.

"A lot of people are not happy, they want change," Farragher reportedly said.

"And questionnaires sent out to players, I’m hearing players are not happy. This sends out alarm bells. What I’m saying, if you lose a dressing room…you can forget about it.

"I can tell you, I go to a lot of games and the supporters, the genuine people going through the turnstiles are not happy," he added. 

Another delegate, Louisburgh's John Gibbons, echoed the sentiment, and added: "People are not happy with our selectors, our coaches, people are not happy. And that’s out there and it’s out there big time."

Mayo Live also reported that county chair Séamus Tuohy asked those present to ‘trust the process’, but the unease aired on Wednesday brings to the fore rumours that have circulated for weeks about potential changes to McStay’s management team, as well as unsubstantiated claims about disgruntlement among some players with the set-up.

Tuohy is also said to have assured delegates that no member of the Mayo panel had come to him with complaints about McStay's management.

In relation to the review’s completion, Tuohy added: "I think it’s important we don’t wash our linen in public."

Regardless of the county chair's request, delegates are said to be anxious to finalise a management set-up for the 2025 season.

McStay, who narrowly lost out on the Mayo job back in 2014 when Pat Holmes and Noel Connolly were jointly appointed, won't want to see his tenure at the helm of his home county end in such a sour manner.