Football

Slaughtneil's time spent in barren lands guides their successful hand now

Shane McGuigan takes on the Cavan Gaels defence during Sunday's Ulster club final. He, like all of his team-mates, hasn't always had it his own way in the maroon and white.
Shane McGuigan takes on the Cavan Gaels defence during Sunday's Ulster club final. He, like all of his team-mates, hasn't always had it his own way in the maroon and white. Shane McGuigan takes on the Cavan Gaels defence during Sunday's Ulster club final. He, like all of his team-mates, hasn't always had it his own way in the maroon and white.

THEY may now be the most successful club team ever to come out of Derry in terms of the Ulster Club series, but it wasn’t always like this for Slaughtneil.

Other clubs have won more but all spread across different generations. No single group of players from the Oak Leaf county had ever won three Ulster football titles, and that’s before you factor in their hurling successes.

But when you think of leaner times, the mind is first transported back to late June 2009, on a greying Saturday afternoon in a quiet Dungiven.

It’s memorable partly for Slaughtneil playing in the most unfamiliar (and unflattering) red and white hoops, but mostly because the sound that greeted the final whistle was as close to a stunned silence as you might ever hear at the end of a Championship game.

Coleraine only had the smallest band of hardy supporters and they punctured the air with their cheers, but the rest of O’Cahan Park was enveloped in disbelief.

Slaughtneil had reached the county final the previous October but here they were, knocked out by a rank underdog, gone at the first hurdle.

It had been five years since John Brennan had guided them to their first ever county title and the intervening years, and the five that followed, passed with different measures of heartbreak.

Some of it was very raw. They lost two county finals and a handful of semi- and quarter-finals. On four of the five occasions that they threatened, they ran into a Ballinderry nut that they just could not crack.

They lost finals to the Shamrocks in 2008 and 2012, a semi-final in 2006 and a quarter-final in 2010. On each occasion the games went to the wire but every time, Mickey Conlan kept a clean sheet. Ballinderry didn’t concede a single goal in those five meetings and that kept the 2002 All-Ireland champions a step ahead.

In 2010 they played Coleraine and were the better team in Lavey but only drew the first day. When they reconvened in Glenullin two weeks later, there was less to separate them but the Emmet’s were still one up with 59 minutes and 59 seconds gone.

And then Richard Carey almost drove a hole into the top corner of Shaun McEldowney’s goal and their world was blown to smithereens again.

The image of the Slaughtneil players sat on the pitch in heartbroken silence, barely listening to the qualifier draw, is one that could not contrast more with the landscape now. Ballinderry ended it again in the quarter-final and it looked as though it might never happen for them.

Francis McEldowney, Patsy Bradley, Paul Bradley and Barry McGuigan seemed destined to finish with just one county medal each. Now they all have five, three Ulsters and a burning desire to complete the set.

The youth that’s filtered into the team, particularly during the Mickey Moran reign, had similar experiences on the way up.

While Gerald Bradley, Cormac O’Doherty and Padraig Cassidy were MacRory and Hogan Cup winners with St Patrick’s Maghera in 2013, their underage club years followed the trail of their seniors.

They say success breeds success but it was their all-conquering neighbours Glen who picked up four consecutive Derry and Ulster minor club titles between 2011 and 2014. On every occasion, they wrestled their way past a crestfallen Slaughtneil.

A couple of them were in finals, a couple in earlier rounds, but it was misery piled on top of misery for Slaughtneil.

The hurling was just as tough a tale at senior level. Kevin Lynch’s were their nemesis in the 2000s, and even on an incredible afternoon in Celtic Park when Slaughtneil scored three goals in the final eight minutes under Ger Rogan, they could only draw and lose the replay.

That pretty much every player on their team knows the experience of losing multiple big games is perhaps a significant part of what drives them now to keep creating newer and more ridiculous historical achievements.

A double-treble at provincial level is something that no club in Ireland could ever have dreamed of.

It’s hard to believe that Slaughtneil’s intentions could ever have stretched that far when Thomas Cassidy was putting the building blocks on the hurling and camogie dynasties, or men like Willie Hampson were driving the footballing renaissance.

There were a lot of elements already in place by the time Mickey Moran and Mickey Glover (later Michael McShane) came to the helms at senior level, but those men have had a very obvious influence.

Moran’s stands out particularly because, while you take nothing from the hurling managements, their success in the small ball code does owe a fair bit to their incredible physical conditioning, the most of which is put together at football training.

And the problem with trying to beat them at football now is that there is such a simplicity in what they do. There is no intricately woven system, no overly complicated tactics. The emphasis is on possession, patience and fitness.

They are so incredibly hard to beat because in order to get the better of them, you just have to be fitter, faster and better footballers. There is no other way around it.

Since the Corofin lesson in 2015, they’ve proven their ability to unpick any defensive system and stifle even the best of attacks. Their motivation to perform is the tap that never gets turned off. It’s gone far past the point of waiting for the day they go flat now.

Moran has also completely eradicated a few disciplinary issues that would have derailed them from time to time in the past.

Up until Paul McNeill’s red card against Kilcoo, which was rescinded, they’d had just one red card in a championship game in four years, so trying to rattle them clearly doesn’t work either.

They’ve come a long way since that grey Saturday in Dungiven, or those minor defeats to Glen.

Like all good teams, the misery has been harnessed and regurgitated. Just as they’ll be eternally remembered all over Ireland for this successful spell, when it comes to finding ways to win, the players themselves won’t forget those ten barren years.