ON Saturday, Cargin travel to Pairc Rossa. An Antrim SFC opener, and a target on the back. The end goal? Become back-to-back champions. But day one is derby day, and ample reminder that championship is a marathon.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way if you put your ear to the ground two years ago. Manager Ronan Devlin was some sort of mad man for following in the footsteps of Derryman Damien Cassidy.
The four-in-a-row mission failed, and buried in the rubble was little other than an assortment of creaky knees, botched hamstrings, and foreheads with the semblance of stress. Finished footballers. Good riddance.
That was 2021.
Fast forward to 2022, the most successful year the men’s senior footballers have ever had.
“When I came in first, people would have said ‘they’re done’. ‘They’re too old’. ‘What are you going there for?’.
“We’ve a lot of lads at the right age, at 24, 25, 26,” said Cassidy’s former assistant coach Devlin.
“Damien was always going to be a tough act to follow, but you’re never going to copy what he was doing. There’s definitely a contrast in styles.
“I was in there for four years where I got to know the boys, and that leaves it a lot easier to implement ideas.”
Last year’s county final saw them 3-05 0-06 down to St Mary’s Aghagallon at one stage in the second half. In Devlin’s head surely those questions and doubts crept in. Maybe it was a mistake after all. Were the pessimists just realists all along?
“Even when we eight down, I didn’t sense massive panic. That’s not to say I wasn’t panicking, but the lads knew we’d been here before.
“They know what to do. We played on the front foot, and we actually should have won that game in normal time.”
A three-point success eventually transpired, the cup delayed by 20 minutes or so, rather than taken away for a second successive year. In Cargin, you don’t know when you’re beaten. A never-say-die attitude and club culture that Devlin condenses into “an obsession with winning”.
Runners-up in the league, the champions see the early season competition (which began in March) as “completely unrelated”. The smell of championship is in the air. Training is noticeably more intense, and the manager claims he no longer needs to “motivate lads”.
Their maiden Ulster success over Naomh Chonaill matters little now, as the man at the helm is all too aware. A trip to O’Donovan Rossa’s is a daunting task. Devlin doesn’t want to be that game at a time kind of guy, but he falls into the cliché trap regardless. Perhaps all the best ones do.
“I wouldn’t look a million miles ahead. We’d obviously love to win Antrim, and we’d love another run in Ulster, but our main focus is to beat O’Donovan Rossa’s.
“We have to win, or we make this group very difficult for ourselves. They’re a dangerous animal anywhere, and we have to travel to them.”
You get the impression there’s life in the old dog yet.
