AT SOME POINT, the players had to shout stop, according to Derry captain Conor Glass.
They had gone all of 2025 without a single win. After back to back Ulster titles in 2022 and 2023, they went into freefall after their 2024 league final win under Mickey Harte.
Harte left. Paddy Tally came and went. And they went back to Ciaran Meenagh, the trainer that had been with the group from 2019 to the end of 2023 to take over.
They put in a good pre-season that included a foreign camp in Tenerife last December. But the first league game this year and a loss to Meath left them reeling.
The second game was against Tyrone in Celtic Park. They got the job done and immediately felt the weight lift off their backs.
“There was a lot of scar tissue as such, so regardless if it was a one-point victory or a ten-point victory that day, as Derry people, we just wanted to get over the line,” Glass recalls.
“You could just tell by the celebrations after, it just meant a lot to us. Not only as players, but as Derry fans in general.”
When he says scar tissue, it’s a theme that recurs among this Derry group.
Heading into the 2024 championship as league champions, they felt they were well set before they were caught by a Donegal ambush in Celtic Park that they are still reeling from.
Even under Tally, they tried talking it out and bringing everything into the open.
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“And the more you sat down and started breaking things down in a meeting room, it just wasn’t working,” he says.
What they needed was just a win. Didn’t matter how it arrived or considerations of style.
Instead of opening up their wounds and letting them bleed, manager Ciaran Meenagh just put it to the team. All the criticism and barbs were deserved. So what were they going to do about it?
A high-wire policy. It paid off in the moment and they followed it with wins over Kildare and Offaly before a 20-point stuffing of Cork when it appeared they would sail back into division 1.
Ultimately, a loss to Louth undid their good work in a tight division.
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Conor Glass was at his brilliant best in @Doiregaa's draw with Galway today 🌟
They head into the Ulster championship this Saturday with an opener at home to Antrim.
After two years of facing Donegal in the first round it represents a reprieve. They are also on what is being termed with some accuracy the ‘softer’ side of the draw, with the winners of Cavan and Monaghan waiting in the semi-final.
Any chance of them going soft though, does not seem likely.
Asked for an example of how Meenagh ‘challenges’ the Derry dressing room, and he takes you inside their meetings.
“It’s in video meetings, showing you instances or actions that aren’t accepted. It’s pointing you out in front of the whole group and saying this can’t happen again,” the former AFL player with Hawthorn says.
“It’s usually the leaders and the older players that take that brunt. But it’s challenging the younger players too, because once they’ve seen that the leaders are getting challenged, they can’t fall into that trap as well.
“It’s pushing standards on the pitch, too in terms of training. It’s players holding those standards, driving other players, not accepting mediocrity in terms of actions. It’s a combination of things. It’s not an easy thing to deal with. It’s not a quick fix either. It can’t just happen overnight.”
He adds, “You have to challenge yourself. You can’t accept mediocrity. That’s what high-performance environments are probably about. I experienced it in a professional environment.
“It’s probably a wee bit different because that was our full-time job as such, but this team, our squad, thrive on being challenged, thrive on hard work. That was what we were brought up on. That’s what we got our success from in 2022 and 2023. That hard work. Raw doggedness in that any time we train we’re going 100%.”
That’s a glimpse of life at the elite end of Gaelic sport.
It’s easy to disregard that Glass is no longer a professional athlete, but instead the proprietor of Café 3121, a Melbourne-style place in Maghera, as well as married to Neeve and father of Con.
The differences in professional and amateur are both subtle and seismic, he believes.
“It’s your job in Australia. It’s literally your job. You spend every day trying to focus on that, the players, your coaches.
“GAA is a wee bit different. You’re doing it for the love of the game. You’re doing it for – I don’t have to go over all that stuff, but it’s a very different thing to be pushing.
“It’s a hard one to navigate too, especially with younger groups, because if you go after players in a certain way, they can just step away and go back to their clubs.
“It’s a hard dynamic to get a hold of, and that’s probably something I’ve struggled with over the last two years, navigating that, because I’ve never experienced it.
“I have never experienced and dealt with defeat, losing week on week. If you think about our club teams, if you think about Glen, Slaughtneil, think about school, we’ve won minor, we’ve won under-20s, we’ve won seniors.
Glass beats Brian Fenton to a high ball. Leah Scholes / INPHO
Leah Scholes / INPHO / INPHO
“We were winning in 2023, so dealing with losing each week it’s so tough, and that was something we weren’t used to.
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“I think our next success will probably be the sweetest because we’ve had so much hard work, so much heartbreak over the last 24 months. So yeah, it’s a hard one because there is so much scar tissue and as I said, it’s hard to put into sentences now because I could chat for hours about it.”
Always a natural media performer, you get more out of Glass than the average, ‘Ah, sure lookit’ merchant.
A conversation about preparation and training sessions reveals that in three training sessions spread out across the week, one might be performed at 80%, another at 70% and then one at matchday pace. The distances covered on matchday will be 10 kilometres, with around 2.5 kilometres of high-speed running.
“Above game intensity is the terminology that we use,” he says.
“It’s a terminology a lot of teams use. So you’re doing drills that, say a game you’re covering 150 metres per minute, you’d be doing 160 or 170, that sort of stuff.
“We’re just looking to try and keep bodies on the pitch one week’s training is not going to change it. We’re just looking to build a bit of momentum, build a bit of robustness in the bodies, getting bodies back onto the pitch too.”
A defining season looms for this generation of Derry player. They sound ready.
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'There was a lot of scar tissue' - Conor Glass and Derry come back into the light
AT SOME POINT, the players had to shout stop, according to Derry captain Conor Glass.
They had gone all of 2025 without a single win. After back to back Ulster titles in 2022 and 2023, they went into freefall after their 2024 league final win under Mickey Harte.
Harte left. Paddy Tally came and went. And they went back to Ciaran Meenagh, the trainer that had been with the group from 2019 to the end of 2023 to take over.
They put in a good pre-season that included a foreign camp in Tenerife last December. But the first league game this year and a loss to Meath left them reeling.
The second game was against Tyrone in Celtic Park. They got the job done and immediately felt the weight lift off their backs.
“There was a lot of scar tissue as such, so regardless if it was a one-point victory or a ten-point victory that day, as Derry people, we just wanted to get over the line,” Glass recalls.
“You could just tell by the celebrations after, it just meant a lot to us. Not only as players, but as Derry fans in general.”
When he says scar tissue, it’s a theme that recurs among this Derry group.
Heading into the 2024 championship as league champions, they felt they were well set before they were caught by a Donegal ambush in Celtic Park that they are still reeling from.
Even under Tally, they tried talking it out and bringing everything into the open.
“And the more you sat down and started breaking things down in a meeting room, it just wasn’t working,” he says.
What they needed was just a win. Didn’t matter how it arrived or considerations of style.
Instead of opening up their wounds and letting them bleed, manager Ciaran Meenagh just put it to the team. All the criticism and barbs were deserved. So what were they going to do about it?
A high-wire policy. It paid off in the moment and they followed it with wins over Kildare and Offaly before a 20-point stuffing of Cork when it appeared they would sail back into division 1.
Ultimately, a loss to Louth undid their good work in a tight division.
They head into the Ulster championship this Saturday with an opener at home to Antrim.
After two years of facing Donegal in the first round it represents a reprieve. They are also on what is being termed with some accuracy the ‘softer’ side of the draw, with the winners of Cavan and Monaghan waiting in the semi-final.
Any chance of them going soft though, does not seem likely.
Asked for an example of how Meenagh ‘challenges’ the Derry dressing room, and he takes you inside their meetings.
“It’s in video meetings, showing you instances or actions that aren’t accepted. It’s pointing you out in front of the whole group and saying this can’t happen again,” the former AFL player with Hawthorn says.
“It’s usually the leaders and the older players that take that brunt. But it’s challenging the younger players too, because once they’ve seen that the leaders are getting challenged, they can’t fall into that trap as well.
“It’s pushing standards on the pitch, too in terms of training. It’s players holding those standards, driving other players, not accepting mediocrity in terms of actions. It’s a combination of things. It’s not an easy thing to deal with. It’s not a quick fix either. It can’t just happen overnight.”
“It’s probably a wee bit different because that was our full-time job as such, but this team, our squad, thrive on being challenged, thrive on hard work. That was what we were brought up on. That’s what we got our success from in 2022 and 2023. That hard work. Raw doggedness in that any time we train we’re going 100%.”
That’s a glimpse of life at the elite end of Gaelic sport.
It’s easy to disregard that Glass is no longer a professional athlete, but instead the proprietor of Café 3121, a Melbourne-style place in Maghera, as well as married to Neeve and father of Con.
The differences in professional and amateur are both subtle and seismic, he believes.
“It’s your job in Australia. It’s literally your job. You spend every day trying to focus on that, the players, your coaches.
“GAA is a wee bit different. You’re doing it for the love of the game. You’re doing it for – I don’t have to go over all that stuff, but it’s a very different thing to be pushing.
“It’s a hard one to navigate too, especially with younger groups, because if you go after players in a certain way, they can just step away and go back to their clubs.
“It’s a hard dynamic to get a hold of, and that’s probably something I’ve struggled with over the last two years, navigating that, because I’ve never experienced it.
“I have never experienced and dealt with defeat, losing week on week. If you think about our club teams, if you think about Glen, Slaughtneil, think about school, we’ve won minor, we’ve won under-20s, we’ve won seniors.
“We were winning in 2023, so dealing with losing each week it’s so tough, and that was something we weren’t used to.
“I think our next success will probably be the sweetest because we’ve had so much hard work, so much heartbreak over the last 24 months. So yeah, it’s a hard one because there is so much scar tissue and as I said, it’s hard to put into sentences now because I could chat for hours about it.”
Always a natural media performer, you get more out of Glass than the average, ‘Ah, sure lookit’ merchant.
A conversation about preparation and training sessions reveals that in three training sessions spread out across the week, one might be performed at 80%, another at 70% and then one at matchday pace. The distances covered on matchday will be 10 kilometres, with around 2.5 kilometres of high-speed running.
“Above game intensity is the terminology that we use,” he says.
“It’s a terminology a lot of teams use. So you’re doing drills that, say a game you’re covering 150 metres per minute, you’d be doing 160 or 170, that sort of stuff.
“We’re just looking to try and keep bodies on the pitch one week’s training is not going to change it. We’re just looking to build a bit of momentum, build a bit of robustness in the bodies, getting bodies back onto the pitch too.”
A defining season looms for this generation of Derry player. They sound ready.
Check out the latest episode of The42′s GAA Weekly podcast here
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