ALL WEEK, THE phones of the directors, players, coaches, management, turnstile operators and tuck shop ladies have not had the chance to cool with people calling on the off-chance there might have been a stray ticket for the visit of Shamrock Rovers to the Ryan McBride Brandywell Stadium.
Not just event-junkies and one-game-a-year merchants either. Proper, Derry City people who normally would not miss a game, but weren’t hot enough on the draw when the tickets went out on general release for the top of the table meeting.
How hot were they? Well, Virgin Media are broadcasting the game. They asked for two tickets for a competition. No dice.
The level of ambition, optimism and exuberance around the club is matched by the fanbase. Declan McLaughlin, one of the 14 Directors of the club under the generous Chairman Philip O’Doherty, can recall a time when it felt like this before.
“From ’85 to ’90, it was just a mess, a juggernaut in the city,” he recalls.
His father, Hugh, a veteran of the early ‘70s gerrymandering than left the club out in the cold with the IFA, brought him along at eight years of age when League of Ireland football arrived.
His mother, Margaret, was a volunteer who sold matchday tickets in the ‘60s.
“It’s there. In the blood,” McLaughlin says.
“I was brought to the Brandywell and I was absolutely smitten. It has never left me.
“Travelling around the country in the 1980’s was absolutely fantastic. Everything in the city was red and white. The excitement of seeing foreign players! Pascal Vaudequin came to the Brandywell. Owen Da Gama, Nelson da Silva, that was all in the first few years, how exciting was that for an 8-year-old.
“And then you moved on from that to a few years later when you had Peter Hutton, Paul Curran, Liam Coyle, some of the best players in the League of Ireland all coming from the terraces, from the Brandywell area.
“So when you come from Derry, there was that pride. That sense that, ‘we are away up here, we are not wanted in the Irish League,’ and then we went to the League of Ireland and were welcomed with open arms.”
The joy flowed out from the ground and around the town.
“Everything in the city, every hour, every day, every person, was focussed around Derry City and it changed the mood of the city, changed the economy of the city.
“Since then, we just became a normal football club with ups and downs and there was never fewer than 1,000 people going to the matches. But now, in the last five years, things have really changed in that the community is really behind the club, there is massive support and interest.”
Back in the days when health and safety was a nasty rumour, occasionally the crowd would tip into five figures with many bums occupying the perimeter walls. Most weeks, it was a sell-out of around 7,000.
When things were tight, a frequent occurrence in an area of economic neglect, some supporters could cheer on the Candystripers from ‘Skint Hill’, an area of the city cemetery looking down on the pitch. Sometimes there were hundreds up there. There will be a few on Friday.
McLaughlin insists they could have done that kind of business for this game. No doubt.
During his press conference on Monday, City manager Ruaidhrí Higgins talked about how he relishes this time of the year; the evenings drawing in, floodlights firing and the big Brandywell atmosphere.
Rovers are four points clear at the top from Derry. But a win in the President’s Cup in February felt more than just tokenism, as they followed it up with a 2-1 victory in Tallaght on 3 March.
Stephen Bradley’s side won 2-0 in the Brandywell on 1 May, Jack Byrne netting the second after goalkeeper Brian Maher’s careless clearance went wrong.
A Rory Gaffney goal secured all three points for Rovers then at the end of June in Tallaght, so there’s plenty for Derry to get their teeth into.
“Nowadays, tickets are like gold dust. People have been looking for tickets for this match for the last six weeks.
“And the reason for that is there is such an atmosphere, such an electricity in the ground. Part of that is because of the communal desire to be there. To win, to be part of that.
“Even in Stephen Kenny’s time, 2005, 2006, when we were dominating Irish football, we didn’t have capacity crowds. We were hitting 2,000 or 3,000 people at that stage.
“Now this week, we could have sold maybe 7,000 tickets to the Rovers game. Certainly.”
The next step is well underway. There remains a minor detail of two, but essentially the Derry City and Strabane Council will give the go-ahead for a new stand behind the goals at the Celtic Park end.
It will be ‘standing-seated.’ Essentially, there will be an additional capacity of 2,500 standing with seats locked back. If they host a European game, the seats fold down.
The overall cost will come in at over £1 million. Chairman Philip O’Doherty who made his considerable fortune in founding and later selling E & I Engineering for €1.86 billion, will pay for it all himself.
On these nights, the most favoured son of the Brandywell, Liam Coyle, can usually be found doing co-commentary for Radio Foyle.
However, he is already booked to do a charity walk up Croagh Patrick for a local charity – ‘Destined’ – that provides support for those with learning disabilities. He will be joined by some of his former team mates, including strike partner of old, Gary Beckett.
Like everyone else, he can feel the expectation among the fanbase. The Law of Attraction has been invoked enough times around this team. Last year’s FAI Cup win over Shelbourne wasn’t hardly toasted before O’Doherty spelled out what was expected of Higgins by saying, “The cup is fabulous and we’re a cup city, but we need to win the league. That’s the golden prize, really.
“We’re coming for the league next year. That’s the plan. I think we need to target winning the league.”
The league win in 1989 wasn’t the culmination of some long-term ‘project.’ Coyle made his debut with a hat-trick against Cobh Ramblers. He finished the season as a treble winner and Young Player of the Year. Northern Ireland capped him against Chile for a friendly and he was called a ‘Fenian bastard’ by those supposedly supporting him.
“The thing about ’89 is we were not known as a top side,” explains Coyle.
“Derry has gone into this season as second favourites, just off Shamrock Rovers. So there was a level of expectation that they would be the biggest challengers.
“The thing about it is, Derry City have a big budget now, so they are where they are. In ’89, people expected us to be strong, but not as good as we turned out to be.
“I think we caught people by surprise. Jim McLaughlin had brought up a few of his Shamrock Rovers players in. Noel Larkin, Kevin Brady and so on trying to integrate them into players who are already there. You don’t know how it is was going to work out.
“It wasn’t as if Jim had two or three years, the way Ruaidhrí Higgins has had. Jim had to put a team together and it so happened that we won the treble.
“Over the last 18 months or so, it’s been building towards this, bringing in players and trying to get them settled in.”
Everything changes. The playing panel in Coyle’s time was something like 13 players used all season for 1988-89. That grew to 16 when they won the league in 1997.
Now, there is a squad in the 30’s. Brothers Shane and Patrick McEleney, Michael Duffy, Ben Doherty and Evan McLaughlin give a local dash to the flavour and there’s a number of Donegal heads dotted around the place.
But it’s a cosmopolitan side now. It hasn’t weakened the yearning, devotion or connection with the fanbase.
“It’s been so long since they have won the league it doesn’t matter who is playing. They only want to see a team that is competing and winning leagues,” adds Coyle.
“Years ago there would have been a parochial thing, a tribal thing that we wanted as many Derry boys as we could and the fans all behind it.
“Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be that pool of players that there was in the past. But the fans won’t care.”
