IF ever a manager was reflected by his team, it was Paul Bradley and Slaughtneil at the weekend.
A deadly inside forward in his younger days, he migrated out to centre-forward later in his career was the pivotal in the club’s early success under Mickey Moran as a player.
The way he could find and deliver a kick pass was one of the hallmarks of his own game, and in the men that he once called team-mates you can see a distinct difference since he took over.
Moran’s methodical approach can still be called upon but when Glen left Slaughtneil space, they used it brilliantly. The quality of their kick-passing and the movement of Shane McGuigan, Brian Cassidy and Christopher Bradley up front were of the very highest order.
Cormac O’Doherty, playing at 11 and dropping out around midfield to gather and deliver ball, looked the ditto of his manager.
Bradley stepped out of playing and straight into the backroom team, and has this year taken over as head man, with Tyrone assistant Gavin Devlin by his side.
“I always loved kicking the ball when I was playing, it called football at the end of the day,” smiled Bradley.
“That's the thing about Gavin, we seem to look at the game fairly similarly and we always encourage the kick pass.
“If it is not on, it is a totally different story, then you have to start recycling. It was on today and with the quality of the ball winners we have inside, it would be a sin not to kick it to them.”
They say it is a difficult transition to go into management over the men you played alongside, but while he admits he has had to alter his relationship with the team, Bradley is enjoying it.
“It is alright, we are in the semi-final. I suppose it won't be as sweet whenever the day comes when we get beat. At the minute, it is going alright.
“They are easy men to work with. I played with a lot of them. They are so down to earth and they don't make life very difficult for you.
“You have to distance yourself, you can't be in the craics and the jokes all the time in the huddle. You have to distance yourself from that side of it. We were aware when took the job, it would have to be like that.
“We knew there would be calls made some days, with boys not starting, that wouldn't be the popular one or the easy one, I said to them from the word go, it is not about individuals or names, it was just about Slaughtneil and the best for this team.”
In Shane McGuigan, he has a blossoming inside forward at the very top of his game.
He kicked nine points on Sunday, seven of them from play, in a remarkable individual performance that was ultimately the difference between Slaughtneil and their parish rivals Glen.
“He’s brilliant. He’s brilliant, he’s brilliant!” enthused Bradley.
“But the thing I like most about him is that he’s very Michael Murphy-like in that it’s always the team first.
“He kicked nine points but how many turnovers did he get, how many men was he harassing and tackling and beating?
“The amount of ground he covers for a full-forward is just unreal, then he comes the other end of the field and he’s lethal.”
The next assignment is a semi-final against another old rival, Ballinderry.
In recent years the shoe has switched feet, ever since Slaughtneil’s dramatic and still-hotly-disputed county final win in 2014.
Up until then, it had been the Shamrocks who held the upper hand in big games, but the Emmet’s have three knocked their next opponents out of the championship since that final six years ago.
While the likes of Kevin McGuckin, Raymond Wilkinson and Raymond Wilson remain, it is a very different Ballinderry team now under brothers Niall and James Conway.
It’s pretty much a brand new attack, with fledglings Conor O’Neill and former soccer starlet Sean Graham grabbing their goals in a gritty quarter-final win over Ballinascreen.
“It probably is, they seem to have brought in a lot of youth, but Ballinderry’s Ballinderry,” said Bradley.
“They have that know-how about them, they have a swagger and rightly so. They’re an awesome team, we’ve had some amount of battles with them going back to 2008, they beat us here in a final, and 2012.
“There’s been a bit overlap in players since that but whatever, there’ll be nothing in it next weekend, it’ll not be simple.”
