A LOT of Chogyam Trungpa’s life story tells you he has no business being held up or quoted anywhere, but the source is the source.
The Buddhist philosopher, whose controversies you can look up for yourself, once said that “things get very clear when you’re cornered”.
Since the classic league final win over Dublin some 26 months ago, Derry have been trapped in a cold, dark corner with no light, no food, no nourishment.
What bodes well for them as Robbie Brennan’s wounded side come north is that on the last two occasions they were in pretty much this exact position, they’ve responded.
No team wants to need a cause all the time. To have to be angry and battered and bruised to rise themselves. Long-term, there is no future in that.
But right now it’s where Derry are at, and it’s a familiar abode.
When you think of their two best championship performances of the last three years, the circumstances have been pretty much identical to this.
Two summers ago, they’d been hammered by Donegal, only just squeezed through the group stage at Westmeath’s expense and had to go to Castlebar.
It wasn’t pretty but they stood up and fought that day, and got out of MacHale Park on penalties.
Last summer, it was when Galway came to Celtic Park that Derry lashed out. You knew within three minutes of the game starting that their energy was different.
All the structured stuff went out the window. They went man-to-man on the Galway kickout, refused to let it out short and delivered a performance that earned a draw which really should have been a win in a classic encounter.
The nature of the defeat by Armagh two weeks ago leaves them with no real choice other than to go the same route again.
A lot of emphasis now is placed on the numbers, and the numbers would tell you that Derry are performing pretty well in almost every major metric bar one – scoring.
That brings the mind back to Ciaran Meenagh’s comments before the start of the Ulster Championship.
“The more data and more information there is, probably the more confusing it becomes. It’s overwhelming. It’s a quagmire. At times you have to detach yourself otherwise you don’t have your own vision.
“I see last week someone talking about switching defence and the data around kickouts and you can bogged down in that, and down a rabbit hole and lose perspective. You could have twenty things in your head.”
This has to be a less-is-more Derry performance. You’ll do your homework and have your match-ups and know your setup on the kickouts but a far bigger percentage of it than normal will be purely about energy and feeding off the noise that comes rolling down out of the Tommy Mellon Stand.
It needs to be like that from the perspective of trying to match Meath’s energy.
That was where Derry really fell down against Armagh.
The numbers will tell you they had 29 shots to Armagh’s 27, that they won almost half of Blaine Hughes’ kickouts, that a lot of things statistically went well.
But the eyes will tell you things the spreadsheet can’t.
In the shops, there have been questions and fierce criticism for a handful of Derry’s established players.
Their sub bench tells you that they just don’t have the luxury of a cull. If they did, it probably would have happened by now.
The named team is full of positional switches. Having played all year in defence, Ruairi Forbes is named at 12. But if he’s not in the full-back line, Derry don’t match up as well. Expect that he’ll drop back.
Beyond that you’re either looking at a surprise shift of Conor Doherty to wing-forward or Eoin McEvoy staying in midfield with Dan Higgins and James Sargent – whose injuries mean he’ll make his Derry championship debut before playing a senior club game for Lavey – both in the half-forward line.
Niall Loughlin on the bench doesn’t seem right either, unless there’s a knock there. Lachlan Murray has carried a dead leg. Don’t be massively surprised if that’s a switch.
What we know about Meath is that they will not play slow football.
They scored 1-24 against Cork and still lost to a team that played the last 20 minutes shorn of Colm O’Callaghan.
They got turned over far too much. Their use of the ball with the spare man and how they allowed Cork to keep getting their short kickouts away was so bad that you almost couldn’t believe it was happening.
So Robbie Brennan has fixing to do too.
The team he’s named is equally difficult to decipher. Bryan Menton at six isn’t a norm but the profile of Derry’s half-forward line means that might stay in place.
This was Derry and Meath’s first fixture of the season and for one, it will be their last.
Derry controlled the opening 25 minutes in Croke Park. A lot of the rest of it they remained the better team too but they were undone by indiscipline and inefficiency.
Conor McCluskey had a decent handle on Jordan Morris and will renew acquaintances.
Ruairi Kinsella is a big loss but when you can spring a man like James Conlon back in two weeks ago and he kicks 0-7 from play, there is a bit of depth there.
Tradition doesn’t always count for much but if there’s any angle, there was a time that Meath hated playing Derry. They just could not beat them. Outside of the 1987 All-Ireland semi-final, in which Dermot McNicholl’s hamstring injury ruined Derry’s dream, Meath didn’t win a game between 1983 and 2006.
They’ve won three since then but Derry still have the upper hand in the last 20 years.
Relevant? Not hugely.
But when you’re cornered, you’ll look for anything.
Not eight weeks ago, Derry were being tipped for Ulster and Meath for Leinster.
Neither made their final and now one of them is going on their summer holidays on June 13.
The wickedness and sharpness of Derry’s nails when they’ve been cornered is just about the only thing that has stood to them since early 2024.
When Derry got angry, they got extra-time and penalties in Castlebar and they got a draw off Galway.
It’s not a cop-out to call extra-time again if you really think there’ll be extra-time again, is it?