IT’S towards the end of the hour-long interview when Tiernan Lynch pauses.
Sitting in the boardroom of Larne Football Club’s training centre, formerly known as ‘The Cliff’, and on the cusp of guiding the east Antrim club to its first-ever Irish Premiership title, Lynch scoffs at his own reputation in the local game.
“You look at what Stephen Baxter has done, you look at what David Jeffrey has done and [David] Healy – I haven’t done a f***ing thing in the game, and I’m fully aware of that,” he says matter-of-factly.
It’s a harsh self-assessment – but he believes it to be absolutely true.
He was part of the Glentoran backroom team that won two Irish Cups in three seasons (2013 and 2015).
He became Larne manager when the club was on its knees and returned them to senior football by playing a brilliant, expansive brand of football.
And he has won three Co Antrim Shields in a row.
But validation will only come if he manages to get Larne over the line in what has been an intriguing title race this year.
Even then, he’ll probably say he doesn’t measure up to the serial winners of Irish League football.
That’s the working-class in him. Straight out of the New Lodge Road, one of the many hard-bitten areas of north Belfast.
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IT’S a dank Wednesday morning with grey skies above Inver Park. The Larne players are engaged in a seven-versus-seven game on a small area of the pitch. It’s quick and intense.
The Lynch brothers – Tiernan and Seamus – oversee the game.
The management and players soon migrate to the training centre, a five-minute drive away, for lunch and a bit of down-time.
Once you enter the training centre’s doors, you’re immediately overwhelmed by the bright red and white in the corridors and various rooms.
The mood is friendly and relaxed as the players tuck into chicken with tomato sauce, wraps, rice and salad.
Glen, the affable S&C coach, is on hand in the gym at the back of the lunching area.
This is what a full-time operation looks and feels like.
In the six years he’s been Larne manager, Tiernan Lynch has seen it all.
From having crumbs on the table in a dilapidated stadium to the financial muscle of local businessman Kenny Bruce of Purple Bricks, it’s like night and day at Larne Football Club.
Inver Park is unrecognisable from what it was just a few years ago. New pitch, two new stands, new floodlights.
Everything looks new.
“There was no pride in the town, no pride in the football club, it was almost an embarrassment,” says Niall Curneen, a Larne native and now general manager of the football club.
“And then this story came about with Kenny getting involved. It just snowballed.
“This was as much a community project as it was a football project for Kenny – in fact, it was more of a community project for him because he wanted to invest in the club so everyone in the area could have the benefit of it. Football was genuinely secondary.”
Curneen adds: “We now think like a business; we’re always trying to be creative. We’re much better structured in terms of resources off the pitch. We’ve got a clear direction. We started with a five-year plan – Aspire2Inspire – where we were very specific about our objectives.
“People told us that we were mad to commit that to writing but we’ve achieved about 97 per cent of those objectives and we’ve now created another five-year plan off the back of it. Kenny brought his business experience and plugged it into the football club.
“We’ve got all the parts of the football club going in the same direction – the senior team, the scholarships, the academy, the women’s football – it all gave the club momentum.”
You imagine Tiernan Lynch to be like the cat that got the cream, perhaps a small bit of a swagger about his stride in 2023 – a far-cry from the days of him traipsing up and down the main street in the town trying to persuade local businesses to sponsor the ailing football club.
But there’s not the merest hint of this. Lynch’s background prohibits it. Almost like a trapeze artist, Lynch feels both exhilarated and vulnerable about the high-wire nature of football management.
“I’ve been very lucky with Kenny and the relationship that we have,” Lynch says. “Always supporting me, always going the extra mile for me.
“When you’re watching Sky Sports and Jose Mourinho gets sacked and he’s now having to work out how he’s going to spend his £10m or £15m (compensation) - and I’m thinking, if I get sacked I’ll be on the ‘dole’.
“I’ve a wife and four kids, a house, a car – it’s not as if there are hundreds of football jobs out there. Again, the working-class in you says you’re going to survive… but you also think, do you deserve to be here? Do we deserve to be successful? Probably at the back of your mind that is always there, but you have to break through that ceiling and say: ‘I do belong here. I’m as good as him and him and him...’
“That’s not an arrogant thing. In fact, one of my downfalls is that I’m not more out there. But, you know, there are so many good people involved in this, so many good people surrounding you, and Seamus and me just felt it was worth having a crack at this.”
A clever, very technical footballer, Lynch grew up in the New Lodge area of north Belfast. He played for Somerton in his youth. His family later moved to the Whitewell area of the city, just off the upper Antrim Road and he soon joined renowned youth football club Star of the Sea.
He enjoyed a couple of fruitful years at Newington under youth coach Marty Morgan and joined Cliftonville when he was 16.
“I played for the U18s and reserves and the year they won the league under Marty [Quinn, 1997/98], I actually went to Carrick Rangers on loan.”
He was offered a soccer scholarship in America, at Long Island University. He accrued all his coaching qualifications and was absolutely fascinated by the collegiate system in the States where sport and academia went hand in hand.
“Probably why I struggled with Irish League was that it was quite physical and very back to front,” Lynch explains.
“When I went to New York, I loved how you got coached. It was the first time I was introduced to ‘11 v zero’, unopposed, and coaches stopping you [during sessions]; whereas, back home, you ran around the Waterworks until you were sick, and if you weren’t sick, you weren’t putting it in.
“It just changed my whole mentality and my thought process.”
Upon his return home he gave his brother Seamus a hand with coaching Cliftonville’s U18s during Eddie Patterson’s time at the first team helm.
The couple of years in America made him realise that there was a gap in the market for blending education and football skills development.
“With our background, academia wasn’t really the mainstay. So Seamus and me thought there was an opportunity back home to give kids like us, with a working-class background and from both sides of the community, an opportunity to play full-time and get an education. One went hand in hand with the other.”
Belfast Metropolitan College embraced the idea and the new football academy, inspired by the Lynch brothers, soon grew wings, spawning the careers of players such as Jordan Stewart, Joel Cooper, Jay Donnelly and Gavin White.
On the Irish League front, no sooner had Eddie Patterson been sacked as Cliftonville’s first team manager that he was appointed manager of cash-strapped Glentoran.
Patterson’s best signings were undoubtedly the Lynch brothers.
“Eddie allowed us to coach at the Glens,” Lynch says. “In the main, I thought it was a very successful period. Glentoran went from having a couple of pound to a budget that was lower than the bottom six when Eddie took over.
“When you look back at the job Eddie did there: two Irish Cups, Europe three out of five seasons, he didn’t get the credit he deserved.
“He was great with myself and Seamus. It was easy for us as coaches because we weren’t the ones getting shot at. Eddie had that bravery and charisma. The football that those Glens teams played was superb at times.”
Two games stand out for Lynch during the six-and-a-half years he spent at the Oval: one was a Setanta Cup match against Sligo Rovers and the other a pre-season friendly game against Liverpool U21s.
“Ian Baraclough was Sligo manager at the time and they were awesome. They absolutely and utterly passed us off the park and I remember standing thinking: ‘Why can’t we do that?’”
The same lesson was absorbed against Liverpool’s U21s.
‘These f***ers only have 11 on the pitch,’ mused Lynch.
“I remember going away from those games thinking that we can actually do this because that wasn’t physicality, that was teams who wanted to play and were encouraged to play…
“When Eddie was let go by Glentoran, I was at that stage where, did I want to have a go at management myself? I’m not an overly confident or arrogant person, but I said to Seamus: ‘Surely, we can have a go at this. Maybe we could do this ourselves.’”
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AT the end of the 2016/17 season, the managerial vacancy in Larne came up. The Lynches threw their hat in the ring.
Tiernan remembers meeting Archie Smyth, the-then Larne chairman and now honorary president, in the Fortwilliam Golf Club about taking the role on.
“I said: ‘Archie, I’d like a crack at this but I’d want to do it a bit differently. I want to make it full-time and I want to take all these kids in.’
“I think Archie thought I’d a loose screw because the budget wasn’t even a week’s wage – £300 - and that was for the whole team.
“There was a huge amount of naivety on our part. We were playing in the Championship with a load of kids – we weren’t big enough or strong enough. We actually lost our first 15 games. Eight were pre-season and seven were in the league.”
It was in the early throes of that tumultuous 2017/18 season, Lynch’s first campaign at Inver Park, when Kenny Bruce’s name was first bandied around.
The hugely successful Larne businessman had been approached to save the club from extinction.
The team’s form was so dire in the Championship – local football's second tier – that Lynch was consumed with trying to land a first win rather than worry about boardroom takeovers.
“I’ll never forget this because Kenny was living in LA at the time. He flew home and had a board meeting. The board said: ‘He needs to go.’
“The first time Kenny rang me, we had a bit of a fall-out. Obviously all the talk was that Kenny Bruce was going to take over the club. When you hear about these things, the first thing you normally do is go on and Google them, but I didn’t. I’d no idea who he was. No idea about Purple Bricks. I didn’t really care either if I’m being honest as we were trying to win a game of football.”
Kenny wanted Larne’s rookie boss to be a bit more pragmatic, go back to being part-time, bring more experienced players in to stabilise the team.
“I remember saying to Kenny: ‘See for the last five months, I’ve walked up and down that High Street trying to get people to back us and support us’.
“I didn’t even think about me getting the boot; I’d nothing to lose. I was on peanuts. That was on the Friday night he rang. On Saturday morning at 10 o’clock, Kenny rang me back and said: ‘I’m just on my way to Heathrow. I’m going to live in LA and I’d like you to come and meet me. I’ll be in touch with you in a couple of days.’
“I thought: ‘Whatever’. The club was on its knees. The club had actually closed its doors. We played our first four games away from home. True to his word, Kenny reached out to me the following week.”
“Kenny says: ‘I’m going to fly you to New York to meet me.’
“And I’m thinking, Jeremy Beadle’s going to jump out somewhere here!”
A few days later, Tiernan Lynch and three Larne board members were sitting in a boardroom in the Hyatt Hotel, mid-town New York.
Recalling his first meeting with Larne’s new owner, Lynch says: “It was like a table like this (long and oval-shaped) and I had a print-out of all the things that I’d like to do. I passed it across the table.
“And, after a while, Kenny said: ‘Let’s go and do this’. Literally, from that moment… we changed our approach slightly, which made sense. Rather than get everybody full-time, we went hybrid: three mornings and two evenings.
“We brought in the likes of wee Jerry Thompson, God rest him, Darren Stuart, Conor Devlin, David Scullion, got a wee bit of experience in – but we just couldn’t get that first win.”
Lynch’s managerial reign at Larne hung by a thread. Lose to the PSNI at Inver Park and he was goosed. Scullion stepped up and scored a brace in a 2-0 win for Larne.
The anchor was finally lifted and Larne Football Club set sail.
New beginnings.
A seventh place finish in the Championship was followed by top spot in 2019, which included a 22-game unbeaten run, and a long-awaited return to senior football.
In the three seasons that followed, Larne finished sixth, fourth and fifth in the Premiership, securing European football for the last two years and they finished runners-up to Linfield in the Irish Cup in 2021.
The style of football has always mattered to a student of the game like Lynch – playing through the thirds, possession being 10-tenths of the law, but he was constantly evolving and appreciated that other tools were needed to keep Larne ahead of the chasing pack.
He doesn’t get too carried away with the highs but the lows used to kill him. But he’s coping better with losses, albeit they’ve been few and far between this season.
After Larne posted a meek display in their Irish Cup semi-final defeat to Ballymena United last Friday night, Lynch shook as many hands of the opposition as possible in the middle of the pitch, congratulating the Sky Blues on the win.
“The following day, I was so surprised by how upbeat Tiernan was,” says Curneen. “He actually lifted me after we spoke, which shows how much he’s evolving as a manager and leader.”
Four days after that devastating semi-final defeat, Larne eased to a 2-0 win over Glentoran to re-assert their championship credentials.
“I don’t switch off very well,” Lynch says. “The lows hurt me. That was one of the reflections I had at the end of last season. I was carrying that hurt in with me and the boys were feeling it.
“We were training on Tuesday and I still wasn’t over Saturday. But I’ve been better at it this year where if we lose, we move on and we go again.”
Wobbles going down the home straight in title races are an essential part of the terrain. But it’s how you react to those wobbles.
There may be a few more before the season finishes as Larne hope to land their first Irish Premiership title since the club was formed in 1889.
Throughout the season, Lynch has spoken about the need to “embrace” being out in front, just the way Linfield have done for generations.
“I talk to the boys every day: Why are we doing this? Why do I sacrifice things with my kids because they get no summer, no Easter, no Christmas or Halloween?
“I say to them: You work so hard to put yourself in this position, so are we going to get here and then shit ourselves? Or are we going to get here and say: ‘This is where we belong’. We might fall. We might not. Nobody knows. But at least we’ll have a go and we’ll enjoy what we’re doing.”
When Tiernan Lynch is out running or driving up and down the A8, he sometimes reflects on his football journey.
The coaching education he received in America. Working, mostly arguing, with his older brother Seamus – “a clever, clever football man” – and learning his trade at Glentoran.
Rolling the dice and backing himself, and telling Archie Smyth he wanted to do things differently.
All the while wondering how long he could work with a £300 per week budget before the club pulled the shutters down.
Sitting in the Hyatt Hotel and realising Kenny Bruce was the game-changer in the equation, that this local businessman would raise the esteem not just of a football club but of an entire town.
That vital win against the PSNI. Recruiting better for the big league.
Remembering the lessons of Sligo Rovers and knowing that it had nothing to do with physicality.
Always trying to play the right way. Evolving. Leading. Shaking each player’s hand every morning before they train and urging them to live in the moment.
Ignoring the noisy begrudgers of the club. Staying humble at all times. Work hard: ‘Arses up - heads down.’
The working-class in Tiernan Lynch dies hard.
On the cusp. But not there yet.
The journey continues...
