THE 2013 Ulster Club final was barely 10 minutes old when the call came in from the line.
"Gareth, switch to Murphy!”
Gareth McKinless had been given the big jobs throughout the campaign, from clamping down Benny Heron in the county final to then taking Connor McAliskey against Clonoe and Conor Laverty in the semi-final win over Kilcoo.
Ballinderry had decided to go a different direction for the final against Glenswilly but Michael Murphy quickly had 1-1 to his name and was threatening to take a wrecking ball to the Ballinderry dream.
The then-19-year-old’s father, Martin, made the call from the line. The youngest of his three sons went on to put the clampers on Ulster’s premier forward with a performance that has gone down in club legend.
“I did thrive off it. A quote I use is that it’s not about the size of the dog in the fight, it’s about the size of the fight in the dog,” McKinless said in the glowy aftermath of the club’s third provincial title.
There’s a famous photo of him from that Ulster final, Murphy on the ball, tongue out, eye over the shoulder, the hairline 10 years ahead of itself.
Right there on him is the spindly, boy-faced figure of McKinless, not a fleck of gel in the hair, the arms long and stringy. Just a cub.
Locally they’d always been well aware of what he was about. Tenacious, fast, fearless, with a constant readiness for war. But small. Maybe too small, they feared.
Yet he was good enough to conquer that and jump ahead to play on successful underage teams that were two years ahead of him.
Brian McIver, manager for Ballinderry’s 2002 All-Ireland club success, called him into the Derry setup after the 2012/13 bid failed at the hands of St Vincent’s.
He’d played county minor and would play U21s too but having been exposed to just 35 minutes of senior inter-county football, taken off after keeping Paddy Brophy scoreless but complaining of double-vision at half-time in his debut against Kildare, few expected him to be launched straight into championship action.
Not only did he play against Donegal that summer, but he was Derry’s best player. He took Patrick McBrearty to task and carried serious ball with a fearlessness that marked him out. This was someone to build a team around for the next decade.
Eight years on, his outstanding display in Healy Park eight weeks ago was just his second Ulster Championship game since. He's up to four now. This summer’s run included, the 28-year-old has played just nine championship games.
Speaking on Colm Parkinson’s Smaller Fish podcast the morning after the Ulster final, McKinless opened the window publically as to why.
He told of sitting in a meeting before a qualifier with Galway in 2015, looking over at the Slaughtneil contingent thinking “I can’t look at these boys”.
McKinless had been suspended for a year following the fallout from their 2014 county final, which Slaughtneil won with a disputed last-minute goal and went on to reach an All-Ireland club decider.
His ban was later reduced to just over six months after appeal and although he accepted a call to rejoin the county panel from McIver, that meeting turned his head again.
“The bus was leaving the next day and I didn’t get on it, I went on the rip,” he told Parkinson.
He did play the following year under Damian Barton and was a big loss when they were beaten by Tipperary on a day when he took a bang in the warm-up and had to be replaced.
Then the lure of America took over. He spent two summers in the States.
All the while he had continued to mark himself in club football out as someone easily capable of translating to the county game very quickly.
But like so much of Derry’s success, his place in the current team owes a lot to Covid.
Rory Gallagher had convinced him to join up when he took over in late 2019 but the week the National League started, McKinless upped sticks again. He wanted to go to America for the summer again and didn’t show for the league opener against Leitrim.
Covid put that at an end and he contacted Ciaran Meenagh after watching Derry lose to Armagh in the winter championship, returning to the fold.
It still wasn’t plain sailing, with Rory Gallagher travelling to Belfast to meet him after St Patrick’s Day last year. McKinless had been dropped and Gallagher had met him in Starbucks to deliver the message that he was on his last life.
“It was a very short conversation, so it was. There had just been a couple of wee things,” says the Derry boss.
Why give him so many chances?
“Number one, he’s fundamentally a very good lad. I wouldn’t have realised then what a good player he was, there’s no point me saying otherwise,” Gallagher adds.
“You have to give everybody chances. Everybody gets an opportunity now in sport and in life. There’s no one-size-fits-all, it’s not a situation where you come down on everybody with a sledgehammer, far from it.
“Gareth turned a massive corner with regards his commitment to Derry and he’s never turned back. He’s an extremely popular and valued member of the squad, long may that continue.”
From not being able to look at the Slaughtneil men across the room in that Limavady meeting, he now travels to games with Shane McGuigan and Padraig Cassidy.
McKinless lays the foundations of those friendships at Gallagher’s door.
The mental corner he turned over lockdown was matched by a physical transformation.
Stuck at home on the Drumenny Road in the heart of Derrychrin townland - on the Tyrone side of the border in Ballinderry – McKinless put on some bulk, adding serious power to the pace he naturally possessed.
Rather than fixate on the lost years, Derry fans are basking in the missing piece of the puzzle that had long been sitting off to the side finally allowing himself to be placed at the heart of the operation.
Well they might be glad too, given that he spent the early part of the campaign struggling and is headed for an operation to clean out his knee once the season ends.
He's played through it and the longer the year's gone on, the better he's been. Outstanding against Tyrone and Monaghan, his role was different against Donegal, sitting more than going.
In the league game down in Ennis earlier in the year, Derry were struggling to shake Clare off. It was 0-6 to 0-5 with almost half an hour gone. McKinless was brought off the bench and the whole game turned with him.
“He’s a massive player, he really is,” said Clare boss Colm Collins.
“He gave us awful trouble on the day, dominated. The [first] goal came off him, he was immense.”
It’s maybe taken him longer to realise it than it took others, but he heads to Croke Park a huge part of the reason why Derry are there.
Gareth McKinless was made for this stage.
