Stephen Coen is among ‘a new breed of Mayo footballer’

It may be a bit previous to declare a pattern but this has definitely been a good decade for Mayo and All-Irelands. Before 2013, no Mayo minor team had won a minor championship title since the 1985 gang. And when Mayo collected this year's under-21 title with a win over Cork, they bridged a 10-year gap.

Captain Stephen Coen is one of the players central to both titles and has spent this summer on the fringes of the first team. He has been part of the squad since the summer of 2014 but the first two summers were, as he puts it, about "just learning the trade" whereas this year, he started in Mayo's first three championship games and has featured regularly in the team's solid, unflashy progress to Sunday's final.

Along with Diarmuid O'Connor, Conor Loftus and Michael Hall, he is at the forefront of a generation of young Mayo players accustomed to winning. The younger O'Connor has become an automatic starter for the Mayo seniors but Coen is happy with the integration into what is a very settled and experienced Mayo team.

“Ever since I was young and the lads in my age group in Mayo they would have been very ambitious,” he says.

“We never got too low on defeat or too high on victory. When we won we were delighted but we knew we weren’t the finished article and we are always trying to do that.

“Every cup you win is grand but you want to progress and move on. I think it was important for myself that I didn’t try and rush it because you can get frustrated. Especially when you have young fellas who are used to getting picked on every team and then they are right down the bottom rung of the ladder. I’m enjoying it; there are a lot of guys you can learn off.”

Coen featured in last year’s semi-final replay defeat to Dublin – “it was floating away from us . . . I only came on in the last seven or eight minutes.”

He knew a number of the city players from studying agricultural science at UCD and playing Sigerson alongside Jack McCaffrey, Michael Fitzsimons, Davey Byrne and Paul Mannion.

“I’d know them pretty well, nice guys. But we’ve no contact now at the moment.”

Coen’s college team played 10 and won 10: Ryan Cup and Sigerson. The collegiate competition is a strange one: a non-entity in terms of general interest but coveted fiercely by players who are already winning the top honours in the game.

“It is very hard to understand what it means if you don’t go to university. We just set out a plan, we had so many guys who are so ambitious on the team. They are all playing with their counties. When guys set out a goal they want to achieve it.”

It must be tempting for Coen to presume he is getting something of an insight into how the interior of Dublin’s senior training looks when he spends a winter season with McCaffrey and company.

He describes McCaffrey as “a brilliant guy, a brilliant leader” and acknowledges that his absence this year should be felt by Dublin before pointing out the same thing as everyone else: the champions have so much strength in depth that they seem to absorb big-name departures easily. Living in Dublin has also given Coen an escape from football.

“Not saying you’re well known in Mayo or anything, but it’s nice that nobody is really talking to you about football in Dublin. Sometimes you can get really bogged down with the whole thing and thinking about it all the time. It has its benefits. So it’s nice to be up there and away from it all.”

“It all”, though, is inescapable in Mayo at this time of year: days away from another tilt at the All-Ireland. Losing in September has become such a common Mayo story that it is hard to predict what will happen in the county if the opposite happens.

The national presumption, of another afternoon of acute disappointment on the cards flies in the face of the All-Ireland experiences of Coen. He belongs to a group of Mayo footballers which expects success. In their under-21 semi-final win against Dublin, Mayo went 1-4 to no score ahead only to find themselves trailing by four points late in the game. Two injury-time frees by Conor Loftus swung the game Mayo’s way.

“There is that sort of character in that group and there is that sort of character in this group too,” Coen says.

“There’s a new breed of Mayo footballer coming into it and there is great character right through.”

That led into this summer's senior campaign, in which Coen has been both starter and reserve. The least discussed strength which Mayo has is its bench, from the younger players through to Tom Parsons. Coen believes that the Galway defeat stemmed from a lack of collective hard work and that Mayo have rectified that sense.

“I don’t know: some days you have an off day and that was one of them. Thankfully you have a second chance to prove it right and it will be all worth it if we can get it over the line. There is a little bit of excitement but we’ve been here before.

“I suppose it’s a testament to the work that the lads have done in the last few years that this is becoming a habit so hopefully we can go one step further now.”

He doesn’t know if or when he will be called onto the stage on Sunday. But he is no stranger to winning All-Irelands and is just 70 minutes away from adding to an impressive collection – before he reaches 21.