SEAN MORANhears from midfielder Barry Moran who has battled back from a series of injuries to be one game away from All-Ireland glory

HE APPEARS to have been around for a long time but yet frequently not there. Barry Moran’s first championship appearance for Mayo was in a 2005 Connacht semi-final against Roscommon, as a replacement for Shane Fitzmaurice. His second appearance and first start for the county came later in the summer, in the All-Ireland quarter-final with Kerry.

He’s still only 26 and a bit young to be Oisín i ndiaidh na Féinne but only two of the team-mates who started that day in Croke Park were still around for the recent semi-final against Dublin. Nine of the Kerry team have since retired and one of their replacements, also making his second championship appearance, was Kieran Donaghy.

The years have flown by in a kaleidoscope of red and green and yet up until this season Moran had managed just 14 summer matches for the county. Cartoon characters appeared to have a better chance of getting through a season uninjured. He has it off pat, the mournful incantation.

“Ankles, medial ligament, lateral ligament in my knee, chipped a bone off my leg there last year, broke two bones in my hand – I could go on forever, hamstring, quads the whole lot. You name it, I’ve had it.”

It has influenced his career in ways other than merely curtailing it. From an early age he was identified as a centrefielder but throwing him in at full forward became an accepted option if circumstances demanded and during the many weeks of rehab it made sense to ease him through matches on the edge of the square when the sustained energy demands of life around the middle weren’t as easy to generate.

Empanelled by the under-21s when he was still a minor, Moran reached the 2004 final and was part of the helter-skelter comeback that saw Mayo draw level with Armagh half way through 11 minutes of injury-time – he scored the goal – but end up losing by two late points.

Two years later, still involved at the grade, he and seven of this season’s senior panellists played on the team that broke Mayo’s dismal run in All-Ireland finals by defeating Cork in the under-21 final.

He has thrived in the second year of manager James Horan’s reign but says that the first year, last season, was like the darkest hour coming before dawn.

“The first or second week in January last year we were in McHale Park going training and looking forward to another year and I went in for a tackle and I twisted, popped a bone off the tibia and the medial and lateral ligaments in my knee. I was out for about three months, tried to come back but just wasn’t up to pace. It was as simple as that.

“This time last year, I suppose, would have been my lowest ebb – the darkest place in my whole football career. I picked up another bad injury, dropped off the championship panel and the future was bleak in the sense of ‘where am I going from here?’ Obviously I wanted to be still involved but I didn’t know if it was going to happen or not.”

A strong county championship campaign with his club Castlebar Mitchels helped rehabilitate Moran’s ambitions and Horan was true to his word that he would welcome the player back when he had rediscovered himself in club football.

By then Mayo had moved on. From the despair of losing a qualifier to Longford in 2010, the county had picked up tempo. A former player and All Star Horan had demonstrated considerable aptitude for management by leading his club Ballintubber out of the intermediate ranks and then to a first senior county title.

The charming eccentricities of the county’s footballing persona were ironed out. Industrial hard work was only the starting point. A grafting defence with deep lying auxiliaries and a hunger for breaking ball replaced the manic mood swings of flamboyant attack and inconsistent delivery.

Moran knew from bitter experience that he couldn’t fulfil his career when only partially fit but it dawned on him, especially in light of the new game plan, that without total fitness he effectively had no career.

“James said at the beginning of the year,” he recalls, “‘we’ll be looking at you at midfield; that’s your main position but there might be times that you’re required to go in full forward’. Whenever that need arose I’d no problem going in there. As well as that the first couple of games in the league I wasn’t 70 minutes match fit so there were 20 minutes when I was going in full forward.

“Thankfully through the league I was able to build up a bit of steam and get the fitness up and since then it’s mostly at midfield he’s been looking at me.”

A solid early season behind him, Moran has shot into a higher orbit during the championship. His Connacht displays propelled him into serious contention for a centrefield All Star and his Croke Park performances – taking the critical late catch to disrupt Dublin’s comeback momentum and to set up Séamus O’Shea for Mayo’s insurance point – have kept him there.

In the first match in June against Leitrim, his parents’ county of origin, he clean-caught nine kick-outs. He says the depth within the panel is an incentive.

“It was something I’d highlighted,” he says about the need to do well in the opening championship match, “because everyone will always say it doesn’t matter what you do in the league; championship football is championship football.

“I knew with the competition I had there – Aidan O’Shea wasn’t back at that stage and you’d Jason Gibbons and the other lads only itching to get in at midfield – that if you didn’t have a good game against Leitrim or whoever you could end up being pushed to one side so it was important for me to get a good game under my belt.”

By now it’s a well padded belt – with room for maybe one more.