I
October 1, 2011
Derry minor championship final: Glen 1-12 Magherafelt 0-6
GLEN had only ever won one minor championship in Derry in their history.
It was against Ballinascreen some 24 years earlier. Gregory McCloskey as captain, Gavin Murphy the goalscorer in a 1-7 to 0-5 win. They had Fergal McCusker, future All-Ireland winner, at midfield and Hogan Cup winning captain Terry Bradley at the heart of defence.
1987 looked like the start of something. Their seniors won a first Sean Larkin Cup, at that time still a prestigious competition among senior clubs in south Derry. Then they won a maiden Division One league title.
A lot of the minor team had won the club’s first ever U14 ‘A’ championship in 1984 and an All-Ireland Óg Sport (U15) the year after.
But they couldn’t get their heads above water for the Laveys and Bellaghys and Dungivens of the world.
The closest they came at senior level was bringing Ballinascreen on a second date in 1994, when Eamonn Burns was in Chicago so Tony Scullion played at full-forward and ran the show. Glen lost the replay by two points and that was it.
Had all those pieces fallen at a different time, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to wait until 2021 for their first senior Derry title.
Anything they’d won before 1987 was at intermediate or junior level.
Between 1988 and 2010, their haul amounted to a second Larkin Cup in ‘95.
But in 2011, Glen’s minor team had gone the entire season unbeaten under Enda Gormley.
From U14, it was drummed into them that they would be the first Glen team ever to win the John McLaughlin.
They came to face holders Magherafelt in the county final, played in front of a huge crowd in Slaughtneil.
Seven of the Magherafelt team had played in the previous year’s decider.
Conor Convery flicked home the first-half goal and finished with 1-2. His father Donal was coach in ‘87, as he has been to so many teams over 40 years. His own career was curtailed by a knee injury in his mid-20s.
Eight of Glen’s starting team in 2011 were eligible for at least another year. They left Slaughtneil as favourites to hold on to the Sean Brown Cup they’d just won. They did so for four years straight.
Enda Gormley was the last man on the bus, soaking every ounce of it in.
His words that day came to be prophetic.
“We’re looking at a big picture in Glen,” he said. “This is not about under 14 titles or under 16 titles or minor titles. We’re trying to do something the club has never done before.”
Glen went on to win the first of those four Ulster minor titles but the senior team was relegated to intermediate the following season. There was much still to do.
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II
January 1, 2015
Ulster minor championship final: Glen 1-17 Southern Gaels 2-8 (AET)
SINCE the St Paul’s tournament began in 1982, only four clubs had ever won the Ulster minor tournament and failed to convert it into a senior county title by the end of their time.
Killybegs had won it back-to-back in 1984 and ‘85. They won five Donegal titles in the decade that followed.
Ballinderry were consecutive winners at St Paul’s in 1996 and ‘97, adding further titles in 2001 and 2008. They won seven Derry senior titles from 2001 until 2013.
But nobody has ever come close to what Glen did there.
They had beaten a trio of Armagh champions in Armagh Harps, Killeavy and Silverbridge across the first three finals before coming up against Cavan champions Southern Gaels, an amalgamation of Gowna and Lacken, in the fourth. Thomas Galligan and Conor Glass fought out an aerial battle for the ages. Both would go on to win Allstars two years apart.
Glen were almost beaten that day. They’d had a lot of it their own way over the four years but when Darryl Buckley pointed in stoppage time, Southern Gaels led by one. The Watties came down the field and manufactured a brilliant equaliser for Jack Doherty, whose father Eddie was in goals in ‘87.
They got it to extra-time and Danny Tallon slipped in Mark Doole for the goal that finished it.
In the summer of 2014, the seniors had clambered back into senior football, putting seven goals past Ogra Colmcille the day to seal their return.
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III
October 6, 2019
Derry SFC semi-final: Glen 3-7 Slaughtneil 0-11
THE street value of a Larkin Cup might have depreciated since the days it was given to the winners of the South Derry championship but to The Loup and Glen, it had meaning in 2019.
It will always have attachment in The Loup. It is their cup.
Sean Larkin hailed from the village. He was an anti-treaty Republican leader who was executed by Free State forces along with Charlie Daly, Dan Enright and Tim O’Sullivan in early 1923. They were shot outside Stranorlar in Donegal by a firing squad and became known as the Drumboe Martyrs.
Glen knew Loup’s emotional attachment would ensure they’d want to win it. Problem was that the two teams were due to meet each other in the first round of the championship. So Jude Donnelly, then manager, had a decision to make.
“We made a decision that silverware was more important than worrying about the championship,” he said at the time. They won the Larkin Cup. It was the first adult trophy they’d won in 14 years.
Glen sat atop the league table all year but a last-day trip to Slaughtneil hovered in the background.
A couple of thousand packed tightly in to see how Glen would stand up when the challenge was presented to them. They didn’t. It was an unmitigated disaster. They capitulated and fell to an 18-point defeat. Slaughtneil were league champions again.
Two months later, the sides squared off in Owenbeg in a championship semi-final. The Watties had been there a year previous and fallen flat on their faces against a Lavey side that nobody was quite sure of. Doubts were beginning to creep in.
If there’s a day that swung the pendulum of public opinion, this was it. Slaughtneil had won three Ulster titles since 2014 and still had more to give. But Glen tore into them, played high-risk stuff. Their first goal came when Cathal Mulholland had the bravery to go low with a quickly taken 13-metre free.
They would win by 3-7 to 1-11. In the fourth minute of stoppage time, Emmett Bradley threw himself at the feet of his namesake Sammy. If that ball hits the net, it’s a whole different recovery mentally.
Among their subs were John McCamley, Declan Brolly, Seanny McGroggan and Philip O’Connell. Timing had just been unkind to them all. They’d been the men to hold it all together in the barren times, all of them gone before they got a county medal, but all of them invaluable.
At one stage O’Connell was living in Galway and travelling up every week for training and matches because he refused to leave.
Glen didn’t win the 2019 championship. Their first final was a 50-50 game against Magherafelt for which they were sitting ducks, elevated by the Slaughtneil game and facing a very different, more pragmatic opponent. It fell the other way.
But in that semi-final, they answered questions that they would have been starting to doubt they could.
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IV
November 7, 2021
Derry SFC final: Glen 1-13 Slaughtneil 0-7
FOR a long time before the final whistle, the people of Maghera were able to ease themselves into celebration mode.
Their performance in the first half had been so dominant that it began to border on the anticlimactic.
But how could it be? When it did arrive, tears poured on to the Celtic Park sod.
Having won that semi-final in 2019, Glen were drawn against their rivals in the last eight the following year. Slaughtneil had one big sting left. Shane McGuigan, kept to a single point the year previous, ran riot in Celtic Park. Left foot, right foot, from the sidelines and the 45, he painted a maroon coat back over the green and gold.
It’s exactly four miles from the gates of Watty Graham Park to the lane that takes you in to Slaughtneil’s Emmet Park.
Maghera’s faithful had been a long time looking over the fence, listening to the blaring horns coming in through Maghera as the John McLaughlin or the Seamus McFerran Cups were brought down the Ranaghan Road to Slaughtneil’s clubhouse.
Divided by their differences, they are united by their similarities, part of each other’s stories now.
Four days before the 2020 quarter-final loss, news had filtered out from Australia that Hawthorn were not renewing Conor Glass’s contract. Patience was required again.
To win the first at the expense of their neighbours was fitting. Not just because they were from across the fields but that they were the standard-bearers. To become the best, they had beaten the best.
The work was half done by the water break. Against the wind, they led by 0-5 to 0-0. Then Conor Glass bravely poked through for Danny Tallon to roof the net and it was over already.
The club had waited 74 years for this day.
Conor Carville walked up the steps, raised the John McLaughlin Cup and dedicated it to the men like his grandfather Mickey McKeefrey that had built the club. McKeefrey’s son of the same name, Carville’s uncle, had scored Glen’s first two points in that 1987 minor final.
A success baked across generations, the magnitude of which was possibly best summed up by Slaughtneil manager Paul Bradley that day.
“Heartiest congratulations to Glen. They’re parish rivals but listen, this one was coming. I just hoped it wasn’t this year, but it was coming.
“They’ll take beating. They’ll definitely take beating,” he said of their provincial hopes.
“I wouldn’t have said it outwardly but I would have felt today was a big game in Ulster, it wasn’t just a big game in Derry.”
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V
January 7, 2024
All-Ireland Club SFC semi-final: Glen 1-14 Kilmacud Crokes 2-10
THE greatest game that nobody saw.
Conor Glass was the first player to admit this week that the fog had properly affected the players in Glen’s win over Kilmacud.
Michael Warnock had hinted at it immediately after the game when he joked that Shane Walsh had asked at one point where the ball was.
It was a pity for the spectacle and for Glen because nothing about it suggests the outcome would been any different had the fog not dropped in for the day.
The path walked by the two most recent All-Ireland winning club teams has been almost identical. Kilcoo had to lose one to win one a year later. Kilmacud had to lose one to win one a year later.
To win Derry, Glen first had to lose a final in 2019.
To win Ulster, they had to get over a de-facto final against Kilcoo in 2021, a game where they seemed to have the Down champions in a sleeper hold on the canvas only to be thrown off by Jerome Johnston’s opportunistic goal.
A month later, a cramping Johnston was left on by Glen native Mickey Moran and poked the ball to the Kilmacud net to win the All-Ireland in the dying seconds of extra-time.
Glen fought their way back to the Ulster final to face the side managed now by Conleith Gilligan. The last hour of championship football he played had been against Glen on a day that belongs in this story.
It’s six years now since the Shamrocks went from three down to one up midway through the second half in Owenbeg. Glen’s younger, fresher legs served their very first notice in those final 20 minutes.
Those legs have been solidified by Ryan Porter. In the first ten minutes of the 2022 Ulster final, Glen blow Kilcoo away. 0-5 to 0-0. Same as in the previous year’s Derry decider with Slaughtneil, same as in the 1987 minor final, when they had 1-5 before ‘Screen scored.
Their minds have been steeled by Malachy O’Rourke. Kilcoo fight back. A point in it at half-time, still just three between them in stoppage time at the end.
Ryan Dougan rises on the last kickout and buries it 40 yards back down field with his fist. As Alex Doherty rolls the ball into the empty net, it’s Dougan on his shoulder, running for heaven.
The 16th man debacle wiped a lot of memories of last year’s final, as if there wasn’t enough disk space to remember that Glen should have won the game of their own accord.
But they held that belief themselves. The GAA’s Master Fixture list for 2023/24 was published three days before Glen beat Kilcoo in the 2022 Ulster final. Nobody was studying it in any great depth but at some point when the dust settled, the realisation hit that it was Leinster v Ulster in the semi-final next time.
Kilmacud waltzed through county and province. Glen kept their balance in photo finishes against Slaughtneil, Naomh Conaill and Scotstown to win the Ulster title again.
They had lost one to Kilmacud. The one they won will mean nothing unless they win against St Brigid’s on Sunday.
Their patience has been tested and stood up to it.
Right back to that afternoon in Slaughtneil thirteen years ago, and Enda Gormley’s words about the bigger picture, trying to do something the club has never done before.
They are one hour away, again, from a winners’ enclosure they never thought they’d know the look of.