JOHNNY McBride’s home house address is Killybearn Road, Cookstown, Co Tyrone.
On up the road was the home of Benny Vincent, who drove the buses for Derry teams for years.
The Ballinderry River sits a few hundred yards out behind them, marking the border between the two counties.
“The way we go in our lane, at the bottom of it there’s a burn that separated Tyrone and Derry. But there never was any complication on my side anyway. We were very clearly on the Derry side!”
He recalls the priest on the altar in Cookstown, wishing Tyrone well before the ’95 All-Ireland and adding that they had a parishioner to support in the minor final too.
It was typically Ulster that Derry and Tyrone were close to killing each other in worst-tempered of Ulster semi-finals that year, yet threw their weight into supporting their neighbours in Croke Park that September, when no silverware came back north.
At the time of their meetings around the turn of the century, Chris Lawn was living in Ballyronan, the village on the Derry side of the border that houses bits of Loup and bits of Ballinderry.
He runs Lavery’s Bar now at home in Moortown, just on the Tyrone side, and has regular punters from Ballinderry.
So if there are two men who do not need told of the fire that exists for the Derry-Tyrone rivalry in those particular loughshore communities, it is those two.
Like most things Ulster football, it was at its best in the nineties and noughties.
The sun lived in the sky above Clones and a derby lived below.
Jody Gormley’s left-footed winner in ’95. Peter Canavan going it alone to seal the deal in ’96. Brolly’s kisses (and Mattie McGleenan’s) in ’97.
As much as there have seldom been one-point games, picking a winner was a fool’s errand during the years after Derry’s All-Ireland and before Tyrone’s.
It was a heady mix of electricity and toxicity, and that was just in the stands, where the supporters were indistinguishable in terms of colour scheme.
The barbs would separate them.
‘There’s no Sam in Tyrone!’
‘There’s no London in Tyrone either!’
As with football in general, the whole tenor of the rivalry was changed in 2001. It was no longer kill or be killed.
‘The Congress of Change’, as it was dubbed at the time, had moved after many years of debate to offer a second chance to anyone beaten in their provincial championship.
It would almost double the number of championship games in 2001, and it would double the number of Derry-Tyrone meetings that year.
* * * *
TYRONE had provided their very first indication of what would follow over the next seven years when they had dethroned Ulster champions Armagh in the Ulster quarter-final.
Derry didn’t have to show very much to get over Antrim, but there were two very different narratives coming into the semi-final.
Tyrone, still under Art McRory and Eugene McKenna, were starting to blood the younger generation that had won All-Ireland minor and U21 titles under Mickey Harte.
Their neighbours were regarded as the more experienced side, with Anthony Tohill, Gary Coleman and Dermot Heaney still there from ’93.
What Derry didn’t really expect is how direct Tyrone were that day. Stephen O’Neill played at full-forward and they landed bombs on him. Derry scored 14 times, Tyrone scored 10, but it was goals from Ger Cavlan, O’Neill and Brian Dooher that won it.
Tyrone hit 2-1 in three minutes to go from level to seven up, but needed a late save from Finbar McConnell to deny Paddy Bradley what would have been a winning goal amid a dramatic fightback.
Both McBride and Lawn remember one detail in particular though, and the impact that it would have when the teams met again in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
“In the first game Canavan left Paddy Finn [Paul McFlynn] sleeping,” says McBride.
“If you watch that video, he steps out and hits Paddy Finn the wildest, hard frontal shoulder. You could argue there was nothing wrong with it, it was one of those sorts of ones, but it was really, really hard.
“I mind [Eamonn] Coleman challenging me and a couple of other boys about being f***ing yella, that there should have been something done. I was sorta saying ‘aye, I would have been a nice thing walking out by you having got sent off for decking him and saying ‘ah yes, I got him!’’”
Lawn’s voice drops deep when he’s asked if he remembers the hit.
“Awww, I do surely! Cleaned him. It was a belter, like.”
And then he delves into his affection for Coleman.
“He was something else. I loved him, I thought he was class. He didn’t give a shit.”
Tyrone nudged their way past Cavan in the Ulster final, and Derry would blaze past the Breffnimen once the wheels had found their pace on a road hitherto unknown.
Antrim, in another repeat meeting, were a struggle. So were Laois. But the headlines after the 1-14 to 2-7 win over Cavan suggested that Derry had found their old swagger.
The night they beat Cavan, the draw threw them back in with Tyrone for the first ever series of All-Ireland quarter-finals.
“It used to be you’d sit for three or four years on the Sunday night, people glued to the TV to see who the qualifiers would throw up. It sort of lost its appeal after a while,” recalls McBride.
The premise had been to give teams a second chance, but no premonition would have accurately predicted how the last eight would turn out.
Derry and Tyrone, Meath and Westmeath, and Galway and Roscommon all met in the last eight having already played each other in their respective provincial championship.
Tyrone, Roscommon and Meath had won the first duels, but Derry and Galway would both turn the tables and Meath would need a replay to make the last four.
“You were itching to get them again, and I’d say Tyrone maybe didn’t want Derry from the point of view of it being the first year of the back door, and them thinking it’d be hateful to get beat by a team you’d already beaten,” says McBride.
“There’s no doubt, I can remember the build-up and we were very, very worried about it,” agrees Lawn.
“Yes, we won an Ulster Championship but we were definitely in transition. The novelty of the quarter-finals, it was hampering us a bit. Our discipline and lifestyle mightn’t have been great and personal preparations from a few wouldn’t have powerful maybe.
“When that’s in a group, people know about it. The players coming through, those younger boys, Art and Eugene bled most of ‘Mickey’s team’ and gave them their debuts.
“I don’t think the dynamic was right with Eugene and Art and these younger boys. To them, this was a new regime. Art and Eugene had identified these brilliant players but I don’t know if their message was getting through as well as it could have.
“We had won Ulster and struggled to beat Cavan. Whenever it was announced it was Derry and Tyrone, and taking it back to Clones, we were looking to get a run to Croke Park. I had a feeling things just weren’t going to go our way in that game.
“Derry had nothing to lose, which is ideal. They still had some players on that team, and take the likes of Paddy Bradley coming in, him fresh and bouncing. In hindsight, they were primed and in a far, far better place than we were.”
* * * *
FORTY-nine days after the first meeting, it was back to St Tiernach’s Park. The sun burned another hole in the ozone layer, but the game itself never caught fire.
With the questioning words of Eamonn Coleman from after the first game ringing in his ears, McBride had eyes for Canavan.
The Errigal Ciaran man had been booked in an early tussle with Sean Marty Lockhart, and from there the Derry men were all at him.
Five minutes before half-time, Canavan laid a ball off and McBride laid hands on his jersey. Canavan threw a slap, McBride went to ground and Pat McEnaney went to his linesman. Red card.
“Ach, he didn’t hit me awfully hard. He definitely hit me, but it was a stomach punch. He was goaded into it, there’s no point telling any different,” admits McBride.
“There was a photo went around, I was holding his jersey down in, he just came up with a punch. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a game ender.
“He was caught by the linesman along the dugout side. He was running, everyone was doing it at that time. Canavan was their key player, everybody knew it, and every time you went past somebody there was a bit of holding or getting in the road.
“I grabbed him, he hit me a bit of a body punch. In fairness, it’s not one I’m that proud of.”
Tyrone carried little threat in attack thereafter. It was 0-5 to 0-3 at half-time and both sides would only marginally better those tallies in the second half.
Paddy Bradley, having been denied the first day, got up above McConnell to fist home a dropping ball that gave Derry daylight. There wasn’t the same edge because, rarely, the game never quite lent itself.
When McBride stole off Dermot Heaney’s shoulder, steadied and cut the posts in two, it was the final score in a 1-9 to 0-7 victory.
Derry went into the last four and Tyrone became the first ever Ulster champions not make an All-Ireland semi-final.
“I know Peter was in horrible, horrible form after that, and for a while,” says Lawn.
“I know he had contemplated – and thank God he didn’t – quitting the county scene. He was in terrible form after it, he felt he’d let himself and everybody else down.
“There’s none of us has come through it unscathed, we’ve always made plenty of mistakes.
“The obvious talent he had, he could look after himself too. I know that from the battles I had with him at club level.
“Defensively, Derry got the match-ups 100 per cent and their experience overall was a key. Then you have the youthful exuberance of Paddy [Bradley], and the likes of big Enda [Muldoon] as well, coming in bringing his club form into the county scene.”
As he walked down Clones street to grab a pint before heading back to the bus, Lawn knew the drill. On the good says, there’d be men looking to buy. On the bad days, there was little in the way of eye contact.
Nobody was buying pints that day.
* * * *
TWO weeks later, Chris Lawn was sitting at home on the Derry side of the river, watching an All-Ireland semi-final he thought he’d be playing in.
“I was sitting in Ballyronan watching that match thinking ‘these f***ers are gonna do this!
“Back then, not like now, the rivalry – it was brilliant. I don’t know if hatred’s the word, but it was brilliant. It was class. Both sets of players really got up for a Tyrone-Derry match.”
Instead, it was Johnny McBride who was out on the Croke Park sod.
It was the Loup man diving on the breaking ball, feeding it out the back door and starting a move that would see Enda Muldoon score one of the great goals in Derry football history, soaring above Gary Fahy on the half-turn, the ball launched like a missile past Alan Keane.
Three years earlier, they had met Galway in an All-Ireland semi-final as Ulster champions and been wiped.
“Slow painful death is never easy and, having to watch it is never pleasant. Watching the great Derry team of the nineties in the final throes of its football life yesterday certainly was not a pretty sight unless you were a Galway person”, wrote Eugene McGee after that harrowing loss.
It is often contended that Derry’s best chance of a second All-Ireland was in ’94, when they lost that classic Ulster tie to a Down team that went on to win its second title in four years.
Yet there would still have been significant speedbumps, not least a Dublin side that would surely have learned from squandering their half-time lead in the previous semi-final.
Derry’s best chance of a second All-Ireland was actually in 2001. With 14 minutes to play in the semi-final, they were four points up on Galway. But with the line in sight, would stumble and Matthew Clancy would break out his inner Marco Tardelli, steaming away from the Hill 16 end having rifled from a tight angle into the roof of Owen McCloskey’s net.
Galway would go on to enjoy one of the most comfortable All-Ireland final wins of all-time against Meath, a county that Derry had a notoriously brilliant record against.
“If you look back, even now, you look at ’94 and 2000 even, the final Armagh beat us in, Oisin McConville scored a 45’ and you’re going ‘Jesus’,” says McBride.
“It’s not that anybody was relying on it, but Derry might have been a team that could have benefited from it just prior to the back door coming in. They’d been very close from 1990 to 2001.
“After 2001, Derry dropped back a bit. We got to an All-Ireland semi [against Kerry] in 2004 but I don’t feel like we were real contenders, whereas truth be told, personally I’d say ’01 was the only chance I could have had an All-Ireland.
“We were four up in the 56th minute, it’s a game you should never have been losing. All we had to do was have 13 or 14 behind the ball, commit an odd foul, be cynical,” he laughs.
“When you watch it back, I was marking Declan Meehan. He’d given a one-two on the Cusack Stand side and then grabbed me by the jersey and swung me around out over the sideline. Nowadays that’d be a foul but at that time they didn’t give those things.
“I think there was a stat where we didn’t get the ball out over the Galway endline for the last 15 minutes. It’s one that definitely was left behind.”
Derry would be touted in some quarters as the ‘Kings of the Qualifiers’ in its early years, using them to plot a route to the 2004 semi-final, the last 12 a year later and a quarter-final in 2007.
Tyrone would be its real kings though, winning two All-Irelands in 2005 and 2008 after provincial defeats.
The Sunday night excitement about the qualifier draw has long dissipated. Relegation to breakfast radio on Monday mornings is a low-key but visible sign of how it has changed.
Twenty years on, the rivalry too has suffered as a result of Derry’s significant decline. There’s little edge or unpredictability about it these days.
Derry could have been two-nil up on Sams had they capitalised on the opportunity the first set of qualifiers presented them in 2001.
Instead, the barbs have had to change.
‘We had her first, and two of yours don’t count’.
‘Aye, but there’s still no London in Tyrone’…
