GERARD O’Kane doesn’t know when he’ll see his fiancée again and is bracing himself for a postponement of his wedding – but it didn’t stop the former Derry footballer revisiting his youth by breathing new life into the ‘field of dreams’, otherwise known as his back garden.
After posting photographs of the family’s fantastic small-sized GAA pitch - while at the same time announcing to his nieces and nephews that its official re-opening had been put back because of the coronavirus – his tweet went viral in GAA circles.
O’Kane tweeted: “Hi folks. It’s like Kevin Costner in the film ‘Field of Dreams’. Me and my bros and sister had many a battle down here for 25 years - now it’s the grandchildren’s time. Welcome to ‘Pairc Fal’. Official opening has been put back but we hope to be up and running soon."
Having been confined to their home in Glenullin in the last week, the two Gerards (father and son) got busy with giving the pitch a tight cut, a lick of paint and some club flags.
“We moved down here about 25 years ago and we got that pitch done straight away,” Gerard jr explained.
“It was our back garden but it was also our football pitch. We played out there all day every day in the summer. People would have come and congregated and played four or five-a-side on it.
“One of my brothers organised a tournament on it every summer. He gathered up teams, charged an entry fee, boys paid into it and it was run off.
“We got hours and hours of fun out of it. I’d say there wouldn’t have been too many people of my generation around Glenullin that didn’t play down there. As we got older we didn’t use it as much. So there was a generation gap there before the grandchildren came along.”
Gerard O’Kane snr and former Derry chairman has been manicuring the pitch to the nth degree since the lock-down.
“We lined the pitch out, got the flags out and it’s there for the wee’ans. My father even cut the grass either side of the white lines so the lines stood out a bit more.
“The nets were dismantled for years. We’d cut the grass and we didn’t put the nets back up. Even the fact there’s a net on the back of the net, the ball pings back out.”
O’Kane (25) added: “My young boy Ethan is playing out on the pitch on his own. If you look out the kitchen window he looks lonely. We have seven grandchildren and they are football in the brain. And they’ve seen this picture and they want to come down now. But they simply can’t.”
O’Kane, who retired from the inter-county scene in 2016, says his wedding day in six months’ time could possibly be postponed as the coronavirus begins to bite hard across Ireland.
He’s been apart from his fiancée, a Cavan native, for three weeks and doesn’t know when they’ll be able to meet up again.
In the meantime, O’Kane says the community of Glenullin is pulling together with no-one in the surrounding area feeling isolated.
“We’d always be proactive as a community. As soon as the restrictions were put in place the club became a community hub more than a GAA club. Even if you’re not in football circles it is there for everybody.
“Everybody got a flyer through the door recently where a list of people who can help and the services we can provide. We’ve our own shop with restrictions but they do deliveries and go to bigger towns if you need a pharmacy and there are government helplines on the back of it.”
On the football front, he was hoping to return to senior action this season after keeping goal in his first game.
“I took the winter off as I was managing Queen’s Freshers. So I came back and did nets for Glenullin and enjoyed it. Nets isn’t a long-term thing as it was only to get back out on a field.
“I would still train five or six times a week, an hour each evening. So I should be fit after this coronavirus!”
