JOHN Brennan always gets asked: ‘How do you win?’
Of course, that’s the million-dollar question. How do you take a group of lads of all shapes, sizes, ages, interests, professions, levels of commitment, ability and dedication and turn them into a championship-winning team?
He’s done it 10 times, with five clubs in three counties, so I ask him: “How do you win?” and it turns out there’s no big secret.
“Winning a championship is a personal thing,” he says.
He sees things crystal clear when it comes to football. You look at a player, you look a team and then set it up according to its strengths. Organise them, get them fit and make them believe, but winning has to come from within each individual.
“There’s only one person can win you a championship medal and that’s you and you have to be prepared to give 100 per cent,” he says.
“You must go out there with a personal vendetta. You stand beside the other boy and say: ‘No way are you going to get the better of me, ever’.
“You have to live it. You don’t be seen out drinking, you keep yourself to yourself, which I have done for years. People say I’m a loner. Well, yes I am, because I think a lot to myself.
“If you want to win a championship as a footballer you live a championship-winning footballers’ life. If you’re not prepared to live that life, you’re not going to win.”
Cargin’s seven-point win over St Gall’s in October was Brennan’s 10th club championship win. His first came with his native Lavey in Derry in 1988 and he won again with the Gulladuff outfit in 1993.
Antrim championships followed with Cargin in 1999 and 2000 and Brennan completed a remarkable hat-trick by switching to his late wife’s native Carrickmore in 2001 and taking them all the way in Tyrone.
Back in Derry, he took this year’s All-Ireland club finalists Slaughtneil to their first senior title in 2004 and also won with the Loup in 2009. After a two-year spell as county manager, Brennan returned to Cargin and begins this year chasing another hat-trick after the loughshore men won last year and in 2015.
Well into his 70s, he is fit and fresh.
“I feel as good as I did 20 years ago, thank God,” he says.
“I look after myself and I enjoy the oul football because I live on my own and my family’s all reared.”
Pigeon-hole him as ‘old school’ at your peril. ‘Old school’ methods are a thing of the past, especially in this era when men travel the country on the managerial merry-go-round.
“You have a vision and people may say it’s old school, but it’s not,” he says.
“You can’t stay old school, with the full-back on the edge of the square and all that. The big full-back days are gone and the big full-forward days are long gone. You have to adjust to the times.
“When I was at Lavey I brought in the handpass because we were a smallish team. People say ‘you bring your own style’ but you don’t - you look at the players you have and you devise a system to suit them.
“I wasn’t playing the same system with Slaughtneil as I’m playing with Cargin or Lavey. You change and you see who you have and devise something that’s suitable for them. “People say I can get the best out of players and I can, but you must talk to players.”
Managers up and down the country are red in the face talking to players. More often than not, words go in one ear, out the other and off into the wide blue yonder.
Those who don’t know John Brennan might presume that his tactics include roaring about pride of the parish, bouncing water bottles off the walls and throwing tables. Far from it.
“Early on it would have been like that,” he says.
“That Lavey team would have been very much blood and thunder.
“Carrickmore were a bit like that too and Cargin had it and I had to refine them.
“I told a county manager if you would stop talking, or talk less and talk sensible you would win a championship and that would counteract all the talking.
“I find now that I don’t have to talk.”
If he doesn’t have to talk it’s because he has put the work in well in advance. While everything is tailored to fit, there are some rules that apply at every club.
Here’s one: “Never appear out on the pitch with a bit of paper.
“Smart-ass players will soon catch on that it’s a weakness. You have to show confidence and there are a lot of managers going in there now who are not articulate they can’t express themselves.
“They mean well and have it in them but they can’t get it across. But if you have that confidence in your ability then you don’t give a s***e what anybody thinks.”
Here’s another: “You don’t socialize with the players.
“I remember the Downey’s (Seamus and Henry). I’m their uncle but they never were friendly with me until they stopped played and I’m Henry’s godfather.
“I could never be friendly with them because I couldn’t show that because they were my nephews that they were better than somebody else.
“When I was at Slaughtneil I was in the chairman’s house once and I don’t think I know where one of the Cargin men lives.”
Brennan lives in Lavey and he played for the club and for Derry too, but rugby was his passion. He was introduced to the game during school days at Magherafelt’s Rainey Endowed and went on to play for Rainey Old Boys and Ballymena. After leaving school he worked for BT and rose through the ranks to become a senior executive.
‘What has British Telecom got to do with Gaelic Football?’ you ask. Well, you’d be surprised.
“BT brought in this thing called ‘Total Quality Management’, they bought it off Harvard University and I had to roll it out to different groups,” he recalls.
“I felt like a hypocrite because I didn’t believe 90 per cent of it myself but you can extract 10 per cent out of a lot of stuff.
“One of the terms was ‘corrective action’ and I came straight from work to training and I told them: ‘Right boys, we have to take corrective action here’.
“The boys had some craic about that: ‘What the f**k is he talking about? Corrective action? F**kin’ oul eejit...’”
Of course you can talk to players all you like, and train them all you like but if they go out through the gates of the field and straight to the pub and home via the Chinese then all that effort amounts to little or nothing. Brennan has his own ideas on diet too all of them make perfect sense.
“Plastic cutlery has to banned I’m talking about carry-outs,” he says.
“There’s a wee lad at Cargin, a good wee player, but he’s no size and I told him: ‘you need to get a bit of decent food into your system and start doing a bit of work to get yourself built up or you’ll not be fit for senior football’.
“The next thing I had his mother on: ‘Are you saying I’m not feeding my son well enough?’ But you have to eat the right food.
“I told the Derry boys one time: ‘Imagine if you mixed that Chinese or Indian or whatever with Vodka and Red Bull and beer in a container and had a look at it… That’s what’s in your system and you’re going to bed with that lying in you. Your system is being poisoned’.
“It’s as simple as that. Anybody knows that if you want a bit of energy you need red meat and steak, protein, chicken, fish… We had a dietician in one time and they came up with these beans and shoots and I told them: ‘there’s no food value in those things’. You need something satisfying and fulfilling.
“If we have a championship match in the evening I get the boys together at 5 o’clock for some pasta and chicken, a bit of decent food. You have to get things right if you want boys to go hell for leather in a match when they need a point in the last minute.”
Some of his knowledge is innate and some has been picked up along the way. None of it has come from coaching seminars.
“I’m proud of what I’ve done and I did it all on my own,” he said.
“I went to one course and I walked out, I thought it would be out on the pitch and I went in and everybody was sitting with their ties on I would have had to do a course to know how to put a tie on.”
He’s more comfortable in a tracksuit and spends evenings now in Toome as Cargin go through pre-season training, Brennan won’t push them too hard until the days begin to stretch.
“Training has to follow a graph,” he explains.
“You can’t have a hump that you’re way up and then by Easter you’re down there and then you’re back up again in June and then there’s the July holidays and you’re back down below the line.
“You have to take it gradually and then, by the time you hit the championship you are at your peak.”
Almost 30 years on from his first championship success, he is still going strong and showing no signs of slowing up. That win in ’88 with his native Lavey would take a lot of beating and he’d like to repeat it before he retires, but every championship is special.
Beating St Gall’s with Cargin last year is up there, so too is the win in Tyrone with Carrickmore a 1-7 to 0-9 win over defending champions Errigal Ciaran.
“That was before Tyrone had won the All-Ireland and there was 11,000 at the match,” he recalls.
“Jesus Christ it was hammer-and-tongs. The atmosphere was brilliant. Talk about intense? Two neighbouring clubs and I remember after it they were saying: ‘That’s our year over, we beat them so-and-sos up the road. I love the championship.
The Loup also won by a point in 2009 and his breakthrough victory with Slaughtneil in 2004.
The natives still pay homage when he runs into them.
“I met a boy from Slaughtneil and he says to me: “Will you take a drink?”
“I says: ‘I will, I’ll take a whiskey’ and he handed me a bottle of whiskey. A bottle!
“They enjoyed it, they were over the moon.
“I think I had a good influence on them because they didn’t know how to win and they thought everybody was down on them.
“I got them into a reasonable way of going and when I got them that first championship it transformed them. I take credit that I had a good input you get them to believe that they are your own worst enemy because they had the talent.
“I was at the local supermarket one day and I met a big man. He says: ‘Brennan, you did well with the football with our boys, but you destroyed the hurling’.”
Well, maybe not. On Saturday the Slaughtneil hurlers, now Ulster champions, face Cuala for a place in the All-Ireland club final. The footballers are already there and you can trace that success back to John Brennan.
He taught them the most valuable lesson of all, how you win.
