LOOKING BACK NOW, the memory of it all seems ludicrous.
London’s footballer had beaten Sligo ten years ago and recorded their first championship win since they beat Leitrim in 1977. Naturally, it was the big story of the day. The Sunday Game set up a Zoom chat with their manager Paul Coggins and a host of their players.
Despite being several cans deep into the evening, the Exiles put on a stern face. To look too giddy would have gone against everything Coggins had put into that group. As a player, he was a busy wing-forward in the Brian Dooher mould and as a manager, he had consulted with some of the sharpest minds in football in Ireland as to how to push London forward.
The signs were there. They had taken James Horan to the hell of extra time in his first game in charge of Mayo in 2011. Leitrim scraped by with a point to spare in 2012.
When they beat Sligo, riding their luck with a seven-point cushion early in the second half to win by a point, it wasn’t a surprise to them.
Their public face showed that. They faced the laptop screen with Coggins ringed by the cultural architects in Lorcan Mulvey, Mark Gottsche and others with grave expressions on their faces. They would later follow it up by beating Leitrim and made the Connacht final.
Back in The Sunday Game studio, Eamonn O’Hara was distraught.
“Kevin Walsh made big calls this year and last year. But every one of them has come back to backfire against him,” he began his analysis.
“For me, I think he lost the players throughout the year. These players deserve an awful lot more to be quite honest with you. They have worked hard, they have trained extremely hard and I know that first hand.
“But they deserve better training sessions. They deserve better quality in terms of their tactical awareness and that hasn’t come. And Kevin Walsh has a lot to answer for.”
If there was a context to it, it related to O’Hara himself.
At 37, Walsh had asked him back into the panel at the end of 2012, but Walsh felt at his age he would have been a “busted flush” by the time March came around. Walsh went with the panel he had but later drafted in some players, including the former Mayo player James Kilcullen.
But the night before the London game, Kilcullen was playing a Mayo league game for his club, Ballaghaderreen. He only travelled over on the morning of the match and came on as a second half substitute.
It was, O’Hara insists now, the thin end of the wedge.
“I made comments based on what I knew and I think people made comments about my comments,” he recalls.
“And they knew nothing about Sligo football. They didn’t care what I knew about Sligo football. Certain pundits were asked their opinion and they were using words like ‘sour grapes’ because they thought I wasn’t asked back into Kevin Walsh’s plans.
“A lot of opinion and comment was made despite not knowing anything of the situation.”
All that being said, an evening across the table from Des Cahill with Sligo away to London might have been a cushy soft launch to his punditry career. Instead, he ended up calling for Walsh to step down. That happened after Sligo lost to Derry in the qualifiers.
“I was afforded the opportunity to work with RTÉ. I don’t think anyone expected us to lose to London. Nobody in RTÉ expected us to lose to London except for myself,” O’Hara maintains.
“Because, I knew. I knew what was going on in the background and the whole logistics of the trip. That attitudes were not right going into it.
“Ultimately, we lost to a 14-man London with a lot of my friends playing. But I was asked to give my opinion and my honest and humble opinion in terms of what was wrong with Sligo football.”
From there, to now. Sligo are buoyant. Sligo are vibrant. They have a Connacht final to look forward to in Castlebar this Sunday against Galway.
They are coming off the back of two consecutive Connacht titles at U20 level; their only wins at this level, and face Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final later today.
At school’s level, St Attracta’s won Connacht this year at ‘A’ level. Summerhill were playing a grade up and won Connacht, beat the famed St Brendan’s of Killarney in the semi-final before losing to an incredible Omagh CBS team in the Hogan Cup final.
A few weeks ago, after a late point from substitute Dillon Walsh pushed them past Galway in the U20 final, captain Canice Mulligan was making his post-match speech and captured a mood in the county.
“We’d a tough road to the final. Three away games. All the big dogs. But Sligo are now a fucking big dog so it doesn’t matter. Sorry, apologies!”
What happened?
Well, there was no straight line. No line in the sand moment. The words ‘root and branch’ weren’t tossed around by corporate types advancing their theories on Sligo football.
The loss to London wasn’t that bad when taken in the fullness of time. Already, work was going in behind the scenes for years before that has produced the talented crop of players the Sligo public are enjoying, with a strong Ulster flavoured management team of All-Ireland winners in manager Tony McEntee of Armagh, and Donegal’s Paul Durcan and Colm McFadden.
Ok, yes, alright. We must not forget that they were playing their football in division 4 this spring.
But the last provincial title was achieved under Tommy Breheny in 2007, O’Hara memorably delivering a bullet to the net in the final win over Galway. That spring, they had spent their league campaign in the basement of the then Division 2B, picking up just three wins.
Around that time, Mark Breheny was flourishing as a player under his older brother. He would later become one of the teachers that spruced up the footballing culture of Summerhill, but the spade work was already underway.
“I think you have to rewind it back to 2006 and ’07 when there was a Development Officer at the time, John Clifford,” Breheny outlines.
“He came in to the county board at the time. The schools weren’t going well at the time and that was a crunch moment where he and the committee got a coach, Liam Óg Gormley who was promoted to go into the schools and try to get that whole thing up and running.
“So it was outside coaches coming in to help the teachers around the schools. Small schools around Sligo but especially the likes of Summerhill and St Attracta’s. They are the two big schools, one is outside Sligo and one is inside Sligo town.”
He continues, “In fairness, the thing started to build from there, teachers started to get more enthusiastic, involved and invested in school’s football.
“And with Sligo winning Connacht in 2007, that was again feeding into what young fellas were seeing and they wanted to be part of that.
“It probably stemmed a bit from that period. And there’s been a fair few Connacht final appearances for Summerhill and St Attracta’s in the last ten years or so.”
Looking at their track record, Sligo were never all that far away.
They won promotion in 2009 from Division 4, beating Antrim in the final.
12 months later and the same two met in the Division 3 decider, Sligo again claiming silverware.
Managerial beginnings can always be unpromising. The first day that Jim McGuinness went out to manage Donegal senior team was a Saturday night when Ballybofey was battered by sheets of rain.
Sligo were leading as the game went down the stretch. In the press box, Martin McHugh was on punditry duty for Highland Radio and made the point that going to Division 3 may not have been a bad thing for Donegal football.
That was until McGuinness forced a gamble. Neil McGee’s hamstring was tightening so he was moved to full-forward. He bagged a goal that tied the game. The mood in the press box changed as 1992 All-Ireland winning manager Brian McEniff skipped a few steps and let a few yahoos out of him, punching the air.
The following year, Sligo beat Galway by five points in Salthill, the first time a Sligo team had won a championship game on Galway soil. They lost to Mayo in the final by two points. Mayo would later meet McGuinness’ Donegal in the All-Ireland final.
But there was a sense of ‘The Big Push’ every year. They needed something a little more earthy.
The development has taken time and has been coloured by some philosophical debates.
“I have been asked my opinion on what we should be doing in Sligo. And I felt we were always copying the same template of what a Mayo, or Tyrone or Dublin are doing,” believes O’Hara.
“I always was of the mindset that we should be creating our own template to suit Sligo. We don’t have the quality, never had the abundance of it, but always had a lot of average footballers.
“And I felt, ‘how do we bring the average footballer up to a level, while we are not punishing the quality footballer?’
“It’s always talked about an ‘elite’ and having an elite group, honing in on having the top 10 players in Sligo to work really hard and hone their skills. But from numbers 11 to 35, let that be another phase in your development and then over time, those guys would develop.”
O’Hara wasn’t content to shout from the sidelines. Dessie Sloyan had been in charge of the U20 team for a couple of seasons before he asked the Tourlestrane man to come in and help for last season. He had already put down a stint as selector with the county minor team.
After a couple of months, O’Hara had seen enough to turn around to Sloyan during a training session and make a bold proclamation.
“I said to Dessie, ‘We can win three-in-a-row with these boys.’”
They are two-thirds of the way intro that aspiration.
The work has gone in. The mentality has shifted. There may be varying opinions on how it has all turned for them, but the main thing is, that it has.
“I think it is more to do with a timeline rather than what work has been done. But it has come together and the group feeds off each other,” says O’Hara.
“They have no fear because they are playing the Mayo or Galway county players at their age group with Jarlath’s, or Roscommon CBS and whatever. And they are beating them at schools level.
“Me growing up, Mark Breheny growing up, you always had a fear of the big teams. We were never fancied.
“But this group have none of that. They look at it as Canice Mulligan does, see themselves as ‘the big dogs.’”
With a serious bite.
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