‘I know a young fella 19 years of age doesn’t want to hear this’ - Crossmaglen’s Caolan Finnegan on brain tumour diagnosis

IF the wind was his friend, Caolan Finnegan could kick a point in Cross from his front door.

When Crossmaglen people talk about going to Cross as if it’s somewhere else, they don’t mean the town or the bar or the bookies. They mean the football pitch. Cross is football and football is Cross.

Liam and Janette Finnegan have reared five boys in Lismore, where the green steel fencing and stand at Cross peeks in at them through a gap behind the end row of houses.

It’s never quiet. Lunchtime on the first Wednesday afternoon of December and the club car park is hiving, seemingly for no reason at all.

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Janette has come to know the sounds so well that she could pinpoint the exact moment she had to turn on the immersion for the boys to get a shower at home after training.

Caolan is the youngest of the five. Just turned 20 on November 28, he sits at the kitchen table with his Mum and girlfriend Emily.

Crossmaglen have produced just about every type of footballer in the last 30 years but the one thing they’d all admit they’ve often lacked is a player like Caolan Finnegan.

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You could count on your fingers the number of 18-year-olds that have forced their way into championship-winning Cross teams.

Finnegan did that because he brought goals with him.

When Silverbridge threatened to be unneighbourly in front of the TG4 cameras last year, it was his run and low finish off Cian McConville’s delightful diagonal ball that put it away in stoppage time.

McConville had given him his very first taste of it at U14 when he handed over a late penalty for the 10-year-old Finnegan to smash into the top corner.

Granemore hadn’t conceded a goal en-route to the 2022 Armagh final.

Twenty minutes in, Rian O’Neill wins a free on the 45. Wind at his back, it’s a tapover. Every man switches off bar one.

Finnegan is only back on sporting a makeshift white-and-black bandage to cover an early cut to the head.

He is miles from goal but he wants the green flag. Takes off from out on the sideline. Three runs. In behind, check right, check left again. O’Neill puts the ball on a plate.

Going away from the net, 15 yards out, Granemore defender Cathal O’Hare tight to his back, his shot has hit the roof of the net before anyone else has even thought about a goal.

“I just go for goals, until I can’t get one. Always. If you score a point, nobody’s gonna remember ya. If you score goals all the time, everyone will remember ya. Goals…” he tails off.

Stephen is the eldest brother, retired now, but wing-back on the 2011 and 2012 All-Ireland winning teams.

Ronan, an All-Ireland minor winner from 2009, was a young winner of those same club medals but that bit young to force himself into those teams. He played his part, not least a brilliant assist on his debut for Francis Hanratty’s goal in the All-Ireland quarter-final in 2011.

Patsy and Liam, the twins, are besotted with it. They’re turned 22 in October, biding their time but getting there.

It was in the days after Ronan’s wedding that the symptoms first displayed.

“My ankle was all swollen for a day, and then it was just grand the next day.”

It made no sense for a swollen ankle to come and go just like that.

Nor did the numbness and pain in his shin that followed.

Initially medical professionals thought it was nerve damage, told him to come back in a few weeks if it hadn’t gone away.

The wedding was June 3. Cross’ championship opener in Lurgan against Clan na Gael would take place on August 12, ten weeks later.

It wasn’t that he ignored what was happening in the time in between. The tiredness, the dizzy spells, the pain climbing up through his body.

He went back to the doctors but nobody clocked it.

And like any 19-year-old, he just thought he’d wake up some day and be grand again.

The Thursday night before they played Clan na Gael, he took a ball to the back of the head in a shooting drill.

The pain wasn’t your normal ball-to-the-back-of-the-head pain. He cursed his team-mate out of it and went home with another blinding headache.

Come the Saturday afternoon, a minute into the second half Clan na Gael goalkeeper Ryan McGuinness mishit a kickout straight into Finnegan’s hands.

30 yards out, there’s another fluttering green flag calling his name.

For a fraction of a moment, he hesitates.

It’s almost imperceptible until you watch it now with the benefit of hindsight, but it’s there alright.

“It felt like three or four seconds I stood with the ball,” he recalls.

“I don’t know how I didn’t get smashed. One of their lads thought I was knocked out.

“I started thinking ‘what is going on?’ I got taken off. I felt like my head was about to explode.”

The dots just weren’t joining.

He was exhausted, sleeping constantly, waking up wrecked despite getting 13 hours a night. Bits of headaches, nothing two paracetamol wouldn’t put right.

They were putting it down to his body adjusting to being up at 5am to go to work in Dublin, having decided to start an electrical apprenticeship.

When it got too much, he left the job but the tiredness didn’t relent.

The leg that was bothering him, he connected back to a bang he’d taken in a game for Armagh U20s earlier in the year.

Combined with an in-built aversion to complaining, every symptom had an alternative explanation.

But that day against Clan na Gael, they could really see it from the terrace. The goal chance and his hesitation stood out a mile.

Caolan texted his father after the match to say that something was right.

“I said to Liam, ‘that’s not Caolan Finnegan out there’. He always goes for his goal, always,” recalls Janette.

“You told your Daddy you had the ball in your hand and you didn’t know what to do with it.”

The text was simple: ‘I want to get this sorted out’.

Cross played Sarsfields fifteen days later.

By then, Caolan Finnegan was awaiting surgery to remove a tumour from his brain.

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TWO for Raheem Sterling and one for Nicholas Jackson.

Sitting in a side room in Daisy Hill Hospital, Caolan is glued to his phone, watching Chelsea dismantle Luton.

If it involves a ball, the Finnegan boys will devour and dissect it.

It’s a Friday evening, August 25.

Janette is at home packing a dinner up for them to go and lift Emily and go down to Newry themselves and meet Caolan and his father.

Ten days after he’d played senior championship football for Crossmaglen, it’s just Caolan and Liam in the room when the doctor pulls up the CT scan of his brain.

“I was watching the match on my phone, the doctor was looking at me and I wasn’t taking it in.

“Then Da started shaking. I knew then there was something wrong. I knew there was something wrong.”

The details of that weekend are a haze but somewhere along the way, they were taken into a side room where the reality of it all dawned.

“The doctor said ‘I know a young fella 19 years of age doesn’t want to hear this’ and showed us the scan. He said: ‘This is what’s in your brain, Caolan’.”

He was taken by ambulance straight to the neurology unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital. The family say their treatment in both hospitals was “five star”.

By the following Monday he was on the operating table.

The family was warned of the danger that if anything went wrong, he could be left unable to walk, talk or potentially be completely paralysed down his right side.

Wheeled in early morning on September 4, they opened up the left side of Caolan Finnegan’s skull and Dr Tom Flannery removed 90 per cent of the tumour.

When he came around that evening, he woke up smiling. Recognised Mum and Dad straight away.

Emily came back to visit the following day. It took a while for the ward doors to be opened and through the window, she could see her boyfriend up walking around the place, unaided, 24 hours after major brain surgery.

The Finnegans pride themselves on never complaining. Get up and get on. That was the way they all played football because that’s the way they’ve always lived.

There is still a road ahead of him.

Last month, he finished his first round of intense chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that will continue for at least six months.

He found the tinny smell of the radiotherapy sickening. He’d take a deep breath as the beam came around towards his nose, holding it in until it was safe to breathe. Small victories.

In a video of him ringing the bell at the end of his first bout of treatment that was shared by the club on social media, the bashful, boyish smile is back. Quiet but confident.

‘A big day for Stringer!’ read the caption. His friends had noticed a likeness to former Irish scrum-half Peter when Caolan was still awaiting his growth spurt at school.

It came in good time. He won a Colleges Allstar with St Colman’s just last April, played for Armagh minors and U20s in the last few seasons, and looked destined for big things in the Crossmaglen attack.

The last few months have cost his 78kg frame very little, if anything. Two or three kilos at most he reckons, without going to the bother of checking.Sat at his kitchen table that’s covered every morning in his exercise bands, he removes his cap to show the scar shaped like the rim of a hurling ball on the left side of his skull.

In the weeks after the surgery, his friends would come to the open window, pass through a packet of buns and sit talking from outside to in.

They were besieged by kindness. In the end, Caolan had to give his phone to Patsy and let him do the replying to text messages and WhatsApps.

“How we can thank the people here, the support we got? We’ll never be able to,” says Janette.

“Cards, messages, mass bouquets, oils, prayers…We just want to thank everyone from our hearts. Far and near, we really appreciate it.”

Liam, a former Monaghan and Donaghmoyne player whose brother Gene also starred for both, took into prayer and the rest followed, unwilling to discount anything that they thought might aid them.

Caolan’s looking a dog now that he can take out with him on his daily walk.

Janette’s not so keen.

“I’m afraid of me life of dogs. Who’s gonna clean after it? They’re mad for this dog but it’ll be me and the father left with it, and me afraid of me life!”

When Emily inevitably brings the dog, there’ll not be a word about it. Because they love to see her coming.

He talks of football with both desire and realism. Not next year. The year after? Maybe. Hopefully.

“Depends. I’ll see…”

“I’m buying him golf sticks, he’s not allowed back to football – make sure and take that down!” his mother interjects in the way any mother would.

Crossmaglen’s championship journey ended back where it started, facing Clan na Gael.

They retained the Gerry Fegan Cup with the young man that had started the campaign wearing the number 13 stood away in the corner of the terrace with his father, wrapped up in layers to the point of being unrecognisable.

His immune system was too low to be any closer.

That he was there at all was typical of his refusal to bend to this thing. Caolan has amazed doctors at every step.

He recalls how two doctors reviewing his brain scans looked at each other when he told them he’d played championship football a week earlier.

Up walking the day after the operation, home after a week, fighting hard against everything his body throws at him.

They know no other way in Lismore.

On January 9 they will go back to the Royal to learn what the next step on Caolan’s journey is.

Come what may, he’ll power on.

“When we got the news, we said we’d accept it and we’d beat it,” says Janette.

“That’s what we’re doing. At the minute, we’re still beating it. We’re a positive family and that’s the way it is.

“It was hard to accept but we’ve no choice. We’ll fight it and beat it.”