“COME on boys, let’s push on here.”
Ballinderry are three points down in stoppage time against Glen. The coming force of Derry football has one of the great ruling powers by the throat.
On a beautiful autumn eve in Owenbeg, the sun is just dropping between the corner of the stand and the old changing rooms.
Conleith Gilligan stands right on the edge of its shadow.
They heed it. He nails one himself. Ryan Bell lands a colossal effort from the sideline. Three down becomes one up.
And then, just like that, it goes away again. Beaten by a point.
From the edge of the light, Conleith Gilligan steps into the darkness of the shadow.
Retirement.
An All-Ireland club winner in 2002, seven-time Derry SFC winner, two-time Ulster club champion and with two National League medals to show from an Oak Leaf career that spanned 12 seasons, football has been life.
He’ll be 39 in December, yet he was still the top scorer in Derry club football this year. The crowd departed that afternoon talking about how he was still pinning the thing together for the Shamrocks.
It’s hard to believe that this was a man that started out between the sticks because he couldn’t make the Ballinderry under-14 team in his final year. Pragmatism kicked in.
“I thought it was better than not playing.”
That team was so strong that in most games, he didn’t have anything to do. The ball never came his length. But he worked on it with Mickey Conlan, who was a couple of years ahead. They spent hours at the pitch kicking in and out.
By the time he was 15, Gilligan could throw a ball out on a flat surface and ping it 50 metres off either foot. It was some asset.
And he learnt to deal with the pressure because the odd time he did have something to do, it tended to be in big games. That’s where he made his mistakes.
He’s not sure if that’s the genesis of a lack of self-confidence that he carried on the pitch until his late 20s comes from not making that team as an outfield player.
“Especially early on with Derry, the biggest fault I had was that I doubted my own ability all the time.
“People will look at that and think ‘it’s a load of nonsense, he was always cocky or this, that and the other’.
“But when I missed the first couple of shots, or a man got out in front of me, I’d immediately start to have the conversations in my head.
“When a sub started to warm up, there’d have been something on my shoulder saying ‘that’s gonna be you took off now’.
“When you get into that mindset, more often than not it did happen. I struggled earlier on with Derry to hold down a permanent place. I played a good game and then I couldn’t back it up with three or four good games on the bounce.”
He was “27 or 28” by the time he finally got the better of those demons.
By that stage, he was playing at a level he’d never dreamed he’d be at.
*****
‘Some boy Coleman rang.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘He said he’d ring back.’
FOOTBALL was never obsessed about in the Gilligan household.
The youngest of the two boys and four girls, their mother Adeline and late father Joey always encouraged but never pressurised the children in anything they did.
Whether Conleith wasn’t making the U14 team or coming home with an All-Ireland club medal, the conversations were never too polarised.
“Even as I got older, when I came in from senior matches and Daddy was there, you’d come into the house and if you’d played well, he would maybe have said ‘you did rightly today’. We’d have talked briefly and it was gone.
“And if you were beat, he’d have said ‘Ah, tough oul day today’, and that was it. There was no dissection of games.
“He went to all the games and I know he’d have been really, really proud,” he said of his father, who passed away two years ago.
“I could tell after wins, him and Mum, how proud they were, but he’d never have told you that you were deadly or said you were the best player on the pitch.
“Equally, he’d never have said you were bad. Everything was kept very level. That was important.”
The young Conleith never got discouraged. There was nothing else to do in Ballinderry, so he kept going.
He made his championship debut in ’98, doing goals against Glenullin when both Mickey Conlan and second-choice Robert Fitzpatrick were injured.
It was in winning player of the tournament when the Shamrocks won the the All-Ireland 7s later that year that he finally made his mark.
“I’d spotted a couple of other goalies hitting the short kickout and going, and then I started going. [Damian] Barton said then he’d give me a wee run outfield, that he thought there was something there.”
Club stalwarts likes Malachy Wilson, Marty Bradley and Eugene Bradley, Kieran Rocks (whom he particularly learnt a lot from watching), were retired or retiring.
The opportunity was there. He took it.
His first senior start outfield was a 1999 league game against Castledawson, where he found himself up against the outstanding young talent of Adrian ‘Iggy’ Heaney, who sadly died six years later at the age of 26.
They reached the county final but were beaten by Bellaghy. The young guns weren’t quite ready then, but heading to Celtic Park to face the same opposition a year later, they thought they were.
“We lost it by a point (0-9 to 0-8). And then there’s that feeling ‘are we ever gonna win one?’”
He’d go on to win seven, playing a remarkable 109 championship games and missing just two – one through injury, and one through a suspension that still eats at him. Across the 20 years since his debut, he’s scored 19 goals and 362 points in championship football. You couldn’t begin to calculate the league tallies.
Derry wasn’t on the radar early on, but one night at training Eamonn Coleman sidled over to Mickey Conlan and started to ask questions. Asked for Conleith’s number. “I think he’s gonna ask you on to the panel,” Conlan told him.
“I remember the excitement that night, wondering ‘will he ring?’ I came home the next day and Mummy said ‘some boy Coleman rang’, she didn’t know who he was. ‘What’d he say?’ ‘He said he’d ring back’. ‘Did he leave a number?’ ‘Naw’.
“So I sat in the house that evening waiting for the phone call, but he never rang.
“And I thought ‘f***, he’s rung, I wasn’t there and he’s not gonna ring back, what am I gonna do?’
“So I got his number and I rang him. I says ‘you were looking me?’ And he says ‘aye, I meant to ring you back but never got around to it. I hear you’re going well, come up to training and we’ll take a look at you’.”
*****
THAT first Thursday night at training was like stepping into another world.
‘Look at the f***ing size of Tohill’ was among his first thoughts as he sat down in the old changing rooms at Owenbeg. And he’s always had a liking for Fergal McCusker since that because he was the first man to come over and welcome him in the warm-up.
This was just before the 2000 National League final against Meath, for which he didn’t make the squad. But a couple of bumps and scrapes opened up the number 23 jersey for the following weekend, when they played Cavan in the Ulster preliminary round.
“With 10 minutes to go, somebody roared to me to warm up. I nearly took diarrhoea with panic. Next thing I’m coming on.
“I remember running nearly away from the ball and somebody kicked it my direction and I won it. I didn’t know what was going on.
“There was nobody beside me, I turned and got away. I didn’t know where I was going and I was panicking, I was about to lose the ball, and I think one of the Reillys pulled me down for a free.
“I lay down in a panic thinking it was a free against me. Tohill grabbed me, and he was shaking me going ‘that’s the stuff’.
“There was a picture of it in the paper the next day, which was nearly more important than what happened, you were in the paper with a Derry jersey on you, and you were at university!”
He had his first inter-county medal soon after when Derry won the league final replay against Meath, although it equalised any ideas of getting a fat head when he was brought on and taken off again 15 minutes later.
His Oak Leaf career ran until 2012, and part of him still wishes he’d gotten to work with Brian McIver again, but his time was up.
Derry had pushed them hard in the previous year’s Ulster final, but there was a gulf in class ten months later as the Tír Chonaill men flexed the good of their winter pursuits.
“Every single time they turned the ball over, Paddy McGrath ran to the far 45’ as quick as he could. I spent 50 minutes running after him until I was taken off.
“I had no impact on the game and that was really when I knew the game had changed. Why was I running after a corner-back?
“I could live with him going forward, but the problem was that when we turned it over, the ball was being kicked to where I wasn’t. At that stage I kinda knew the game was up.”
Yet at least he went out on his own terms, as he’s doing now. When Paddy Crozier first took over, he cut Gilligan from his squad, but the Ballinderry man fought his way back in to win a second National League title in 2008.
Damian Cassidy discarded him again the following year, except he stood by the decision over his two years in charge.
When he stepped away for good at the end of 2012, he had the cushion of Ballinderry. But now that he’s calling time on that, the darkness of the unknown void is there.
“This time it’s a wee bit different in that the anguish is ‘is it the right time? Should I have stayed another year?’ Yes there’s anguish.
“Having spoken to people before I made the decision, they all told me the same thing – there’s no right time.
“If your gut tells you to go, then you should go, because if there’s any wee doubt there at all it’ll come out. Once you have that niggling doubt, it’s time.”
*****
AS the tea-a-holic goes for the third king-sized pot in the quiet of Fullan’s Café in Portglenone, his mind is starting to turn towards the Ballinderry U13s’ upcoming game with Faughanvale.
Coaching has drip-fed its way into his demands. He was along with John McKeever in Coalisland for nearly two years, as well as bits and pieces elsewhere.
Adam is playing under his Daddy now, and recently there was a great snap taken of Conleith walking away after imparting some advice as the son kicked a late free to draw an U14 championship final with Slaughtneil.
The two daughters, Ava and Ellie, are big Shamrocks themselves. So now Conleith and wife Joanne, not of a GAA interest initially but who wouldn’t miss a game now, are going through now what Conleith’s parents went through for the bones of three decades.
“It’s not as bad for me because I understand it, but it’s worse for Adam’s mummy when somebody’s hitting him and nipping him, and she’s looking to kill somebody one of these games and probably will.
“My own mother stopped going to matches I played in years ago and never went back, because she couldn’t handle the games and the hitting.
“Even now when I’d call in after a match, she’d never ask how the match went. ‘No hurts th’day?’ That’s the thing she would have said.
“Going back the last 10 years, when the season was over the first thing she’d say would be: ‘That’ll maybe do ye now?’ I’d palm her off.
“She hasn’t asked me that question this year yet, but I know she’ll be very, very happy to hear.”
As will any defender that ever tried to mark him.
His Derry career was solid, but his club career was truly spectacular. He would put the first county title in 2001, when they finally broke their Bellaghy hoodoo and went on to win the All-Ireland club title, right at the top.
He hit 1-19 that season, and went on to better and better that tally. The year after he quit Derry duty, Ballinderry finally got the second Ulster club title they deserved.
The 2000 and 2010 county final defeats are at the other end of the scale. But true to the grounding his parents gave him, nothing’s ever too high and nothing’s ever too low.
But perhaps above any score he ever took, his free from 47 metres when the game hung in the balance that day against Glenswilly in the 2013 Ulster final stands out.
It was the embodiment of his career - a combination of leadership, pure practice and a cool head.
“It wasn't a bad run for a failed goalie,” he tweeted on Thursday evening.
Not bad at all.
