OF ALL THE social revolutions that hit Ireland, the humble bicycle is often the most underrated.
With a bike, a man could branch out of his own parish for the purposes of dancing, drinking and courting. It’s a hidden revolution, but necessary for the dilution of bloodlines and DNA strains.
If you were to take a lot of the stuff around the club finals to heart, you’d almost believe we were back in the pre-bicycle era, when men and women were terrified of venturing to the next parish, De Valera’s vision of comely maidens at the crossroads.
Club teams, the embodiment of the little parish, are actually far more cosmopolitan.
For example, take the closing stages of the All-Ireland semi-final in the gloom of The Marshes. With the clock ticking down, Glen were a point up.
Instead of retreating for a Kilmacud kickout, hoping to contain the Dublin side, they pressed up. With Crokes trying to weave their way out of the press, Conor Glass (a mother from Loughgiel), who might have still been playing Aussie Rules in Melbourne if fate worked different, punched the ball out of Andrew McGowan’s grasp. Ethan Doherty netted the loose ball.
On the line, Glen manager Malachy O’Rourke from Derrylin, Fermanagh, but long domiciled in Ballygawley, Tyrone, allowed himself a rare moment of animation, punching the sky.
Until almost immediately when Shane Walsh of Kilkerrin-Clonberne, Galway, lobbed in a speculative shot that ended up in the net for Kilmacud.
In the end Glen held out, and O’Rourke is into his third All-Ireland final, having won a Sigerson Cup as a player in 1989 with St Mary’s College, and losing last year’s club final.
***
Funny how fate works. O’Rourke’s coaching journey has led to this point. An All-Ireland as a manager would crown a phenomenal career spent pouring belief into teams and clubs that were bet-down.
He wouldn’t be in Glen only for those days in St Mary’s. ‘The Ranch.’ In O’Rourke’s class was a conscientious student teacher called Bronagh Kelly. Her accent was Dublin but her roots were in Belfast and Slaughtneil, south Derry.
With a tiny male population in the college, they cobbled together a fine team with the likes of Jarlath Burns, Benny Tierney, Pascal Canavan and John Rehill to win the Sigerson Cup against all odds.
Bookwork fell behind for the young Malachy. Bronagh was too generous to be one of those ‘arm over the homework’ types and helped him out for the classes he missed.
Belfast was all new and not-so new to her. Her father and mother started life in a lovely bungalow in Glengormley. Her grandfather, the solicitor Oliver Kelly, had been an Antrim county board chairman for 12 years.
In 2002, it was uncovered that the same Loyalist gang who murdered Pat Finucane had intended to kill Kelly.
Bronagh’s father John joined the IRA at 18. He took part in the Border Campaign of the ‘50s.
He was arrested in December 1956 and jailed until 1963. When he came out, he was involved in setting up Citizen Defence Groups that were established to ward off Loyalist mobs who were burning entire streets out around the interface areas.
Such groups felt overwhelmed and beleaguered with security forces often aiding Loyalist rampages. An appeal was back-channelled to the Dublin government for help.
Guns, in other words.
They received £100,000 for a shipment that never landed.
Some years later, Kelly was a co-defendant in the Dublin ‘Arms Trial’, with ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, as they were accused of conspiring to import guns.
The trial ended in a fudge, but afterwards a few ministerial scalps were taken.
By then, Kelly had to relocate to Dublin, married to Philomena McEldowney of Slaughtneil. They lived in Blanchardstown. It was comfortable. Green spaces abounded. On the green out front, Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh trained the Dublin-based Kerry players for the ‘Golden Years’ period.
But then John Kelly went to a rally in Enniscorthy and made a speech that was recorded by the Gardaí. He was soon in Mountjoy doing time for IRA membership.
“I went to school down there, but I always felt I had this thing that I had in some way missed out, maybe I had a chip on my shoulder that we had to live there whereas all the rest of the family were up here,” Mulholland told this writer a year ago in the kitchen of the Glen club as they held an All-Ireland final press night.
“So when I got out of school, I went up to the Ranch and I never looked back.”
***
The two kept in touch. Bronagh settled in Maghera where she got a job in Glenview Primary School and jumped head and shoulders in with the Glen club, while O’Rourke took up employment with St Joseph’s secondary school in Enniskillen.
She would track his progress, winning Ulster titles here and there, telling people: ‘See that fella there? We used to run about together at college.’
On the day of the 2018 All-Ireland final, Bronagh bumped into Malachy and his wife Judith in the Croke Park Hotel. She asked a favour. The Glen club were celebrating their 70th anniversary and needed a guest speaker.
It’s usually the sort of thing that would bring O’Rourke out in a rash, but he owed her.
On the night he was chatting to various people and learning all about their underage success when he asked how many senior championships they had? After all, this being the epicentre of south Derry and home to the famous footballing academy of St Pat’s Maghera.
None. Not one. Nada. Zilch.
Not even that, but they hadn’t even experienced a final. The only bunting ever went up around Maghera would greet the teams of St Pat’s and the Orange Order.
For his speech, O’Rourke remembered an old yarn about a tennis match between Jimmy Connors and Vitas Gerulaitis in January 1980.
By then Connors had beaten Gerulaitis 16 times in a row. For once, Gerulaitis got the better of him.
O’Rourke tapped into Glen’s underdog status as he delivered the punchline, ‘And let that be a lesson to you all! Nobody beats Vitus Gerulaitis 17 times in a row!’
The room dissolved in laughter.
***
Away from the ballrooms, the work was going in.
Corner-forward on the All-Ireland winning Derry team of 1993, Enda Gormley was living in Belfast and playing for Bredagh in the Down leagues. But he never won anything with his home club and it bothered him.
So he made the journey down to Maghera a few times a week and opened up conversations around how to change the culture in Glen.
He soon realised he didn’t actually know a huge amount about coaching, so he attended courses and brought others with him.
One of them was a local teacher and former player, Stephen Murtagh. He was all-in from the go.
“The boys laugh at me at school. I had been talking for years about ‘the five-year plan.’
“And boys used to say, ‘Fuck sake Murtagh, is the five-year plan done yet?’ It’s 15 years in operation now.
“But that is the thinking. It was always a plan that these boys would play senior football. The by-product of putting in successful processes at that age was that they won U14, U16, minors, U21 multiple times along the way.
“But the process was, ‘Let’s start something that creates habits, that creates positive mindsets, a culture that is best practise.’”
Gormley did a course with Setanta College about the basics of strength and conditioning.
Despite what some crusty county board figures think, the driving motivation of strength and conditioning work is for injury prevention. So Glen adopted the activation warm up that best protected players against serious injury, most notably cruciate injuries.
Anyone who has done it will recognise that it is extensive. And it is boring. Almost all clubs have used it at times and binned it because coaches have a morbid fear of being labelled as ‘boring’.
But Glen use it. They brought in Chris McNicholl of Dungiven to show young players of 14 and 15 how to do prehabilitation work.
He would demonstrate the squat, only players would do it with brush shafts across their back rather than heavy weights, shown how to activate their major muscles.
Nowadays, McNicholl is the lead physio for Ulster Rugby. Of all those that passed through Murtagh and Gormley’s hands, none have ever suffered cruciate injuries and in general, injuries are almost unheard of.
“Everybody is looking for the magic bullet and people ask questions like, ‘Who is your strength and conditioning coach?’” says Murtagh.
“Glen don’t have a strength and conditioning coach per se. Some of the lads go to Ollie Cummins, some go to Ricky Martin, there’s loads of them such as the Performance Lab in Cookstown.
“What they have had for the last 15 years is good habits ingrained on them. Which makes it easy for them to follow those programmes, keep up with the best practice all along.”
What does that mean to the lay person?
“The communication lines between the U14, U16 and minors were great. If you were to go to an U14 and U16 session, you will see that they were doing the same thing,” says Murtagh.
“If Danny Tallon was an U16 and going to do a minor session, he would have been getting the exact same training with Enda Gormley in the minors, as he was getting from me in the U16s. We were doing tackling drills, religiously and repeatedly.
“There is no secret to this. It’s the basics, doing them well and doing them regularly.”
Of the Glen team that faced Kilmacud Crokes in Newry, ten starters and seven subs had passed through the hands of Murtagh and Gormley.
They’ve won the last three Derry titles. They’ve won the last two Ulster titles. They were beaten in last year’s All-Ireland club final.
***
Back to Glenview School, where Bronagh Mulholland is teaching.
Of the Glen starting team, all but one – Michael Warnock went to a nearby Bunscoil – went to Glenview, including Bronagh’s sons, Cathal and Eunan.
Think of the Derry team that won the Ulster title in 2022: eight of that team’s starters attended Glenview, given that the likes of Slaughtneil’s Chrissy McKaigue, Brendan Rogers and others also went there.
As much as we highlight the spread-out nature of a club, consider this.
Beaver Crescent and Beaver Drive overlook the Glen pitch. The two Mulhollands had company on the estate with Conlann Bradley and Emmet Bradley, Ryan Dougan, Jack, Ethan and Alex Doherty. Conor Carville came from just over the road.
They connected through school and football. But for a time their favourite pastime was ‘Green Machine’ go-karts that they would pedal the bejaysus out of before reaching the bottom of the park, lifting the handbrakes and enjoying the feeling of being ‘sideroads’.
Boy’s Own stuff. Feeling fear before they even knew what it was all about.
They needed every ounce of it to get back to where they were after last January’s All-Ireland final defeat to Kilmacud.
Winning Derry was no given with Slaughtneil and others investing even more time and effort to stop Glen.
The Ulster series was fought tooth and nail; tight wins over Cargin, a one-point win over Naomh Conaill, and then a two-point gap over Scotstown in the pouring rain, Eunan Mulholland scoring 0-3 and winning Man of the Match.
And then the semi-final in the fog of Newry. Redemption against Kilmacud, with a distinct lack of triumphalism.
Onto Croke Park now. The All-Ireland final Take 2, with St Brigid’s of Roscommon in the way.
The weather forecast is for a complete downpour and 44 mile-an-hour winds blowing straight at Hill 16 by the time the ball is thrown in.
And at that stage, Bronagh Mulholland will have cleared off out of the ground, away to find a quiet church to light a candle and say a prayer, timing her return for the final whistle.
At this stage, she’s probably done enough.
