Football

Jamie Clarke reflects on the past, present and future

Jamie Clarke has never taken the conventional path and his latest stop is with Dankse Bank Premiership side Newry City. The Crossmaglen man spoke to Brendan Crossan...

Jamie Clarke is hoping to add a different dimension to the Newry City attack after signing for the Premiership club last week  Picture: Brendan Monaghan
Jamie Clarke is hoping to add a different dimension to the Newry City attack after signing for the Premiership club last week Picture: Brendan Monaghan Jamie Clarke is hoping to add a different dimension to the Newry City attack after signing for the Premiership club last week Picture: Brendan Monaghan

TAYLOR’S Avenue, Carrickfergus on a baking hot Saturday afternoon is the last place you thought you’d find the nomadic Jamie Clarke.

It’s an hour before Newry City’s first match in the Irish Premiership since they won promotion back to the big time at the end of last season.

The night before their trip to Taylor's Avenue to face Carrick Rangers, the club’s social media platforms went a bit haywire when they announced manager Darren Mullen had signed the former Armagh Gaelic football star for the season ahead.

Clarke has always led that now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t existence; swaggering around the Athletic Grounds one minute, jetting off to New York the next to pursue his dreams in the fashion industry.

Now 33, the Crossmaglen native has never resembled anything close to your Gaelic footballer stereotype.

His twenties revolved around football, fashion, the love of travel and self-discovery – but his interests never made him any less competitive on the football field.

“I decided to come back home and play sport again,” he says.

“It’s part of who I am. I like the competition, the arena, the fans and that pressure at elite level, it’s something I’ve always wanted to be part of.”

The last time we met for interview was in a Newry coffee shop some years back. At that time, he was looking forward to another campaign with Armagh, but you could almost touch the restlessness within him.

A year or so later, he was gone again. The lure of the Big Apple could always hold his attention.

Given that he’s only joined his local Irish Premiership club in the last week to 10 days, it was no surprise Clarke was merely an interested spectator at Taylor’s Avenue last Saturday as his new team-mates went down 2-1.

Before the game starts, we take refuge in the shade.

So where has Armagh’s ‘prodigal son’ been for the past couple of years? How many more passport stamps has he accrued since we last met?

We know his last game for Armagh turned out to be in an empty Breffni Park, deep in the throes of lockdown when elite sport was given a pass, and where Donegal ran over the top of them in an Ulster Championship semi-final in 2020.

“I didn’t want to hang around home and I decided to go to Paris. I knew lockdown wouldn’t be a good idea to hang around. I was in Paris for a year which was a great experience. I had the [fashion] business and I was in a café as well which was a nice experience too.

“I picked up a bit of French. I really enjoyed it. I always wanted to do the Paris thing, and I played a lot of five-a-side out there. I played in the Zidane Fives that he’d set up so that was kind of cool, a lot semi-pro teams would have come and played there.

“I came back home and said I’d give the club a go; I was conscious ’Cross hadn’t won in a couple of years so that was a goal of mine; the soccer came about and that’s kind of where I’m at the moment.”

Those who don’t know or have never encountered Jamie Clarke might get the wrong impression of him.

Aloof?

It’s the last thing he is.

Quiet and reserved?

Most definitely.

Softly spoken with impeccable manners, he has always been an open book as an interviewee. At different times he's ran a million miles from his home place only to come back.

“I think I had a really good relationship with ’Cross when we were winning All-Irelands… I’d be quite private. I didn’t really get involved in a lot of activities around the town. I always kept myself to myself and there was maybe a perception out there that I didn’t want to be part of the town.

“Maybe it was because I’d stepped away from the Gaelic but, you know, there are a lot of people looking out for you as well and you meet the likes of Margaret McConville and Jim McConville, everyone is friendly and nice, it’s great, and people are wishing you well...

“I suppose I’m a lot more comfortable now in who I am. It’s almost you’re not allowed to make a mistake and people jump on it. But over the last few years I accept them and I appreciate that these things have to happen and if you don’t go for anything, then what’s it all about? You don’t want to go through your life sitting on the fence because you’re not living.”

He adds: “There have been a lot of ups and downs, it hasn’t always been easy. Even in those initial stages of thinking about going away and people saying the nastiest things online, that ‘he shouldn’t be leaving’, I’m actually trying to make the right decisions for me - I’m not trying to hurt anybody.

“I think it was those comments back in the day maybe hurt a bit more. But now it’s just a pinch of salt. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s when people meet you it’s then they get an actual feel for who you are.

“I always try to be nice, well mannered, do the right thing for me and for those who I’m close to. That’s purely where decision making comes from and nothing else.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a deep thinker, maybe an over thinker and being totally aware of everything and analysing things too much in depth: what’s the right thing to do, where’s it all going, what path do I want to go down and knowing one decision can change everything. It’s the awareness of it all…

“Every single person on this planet has a different way of thinking; the way they’ve been brought up and what they’re thinking. What do I have to improve? What am I good at? What am I shit at? What are my characteristics, and how do I make them better? Everyone is going to have an opinion. I can’t do anything about that.

For the best part of the last decade Jamie Clarke carried the hopes of the Orchard County on his shoulders.

The problem was Armagh were in the doldrums for most of Clarke’s inter-county career, yo-yoing between Division Two and Three, not making much headway in Ulster before revealing glimpses of their indefatigable spirit on numerous nights in the All-Ireland Qualifiers.

Clarke has always been a player of bewildering talent.

He’d some great and not-so-great days in the orange jersey - but when Kieran McGeeney’s side put a run together in the summer of 2017, Clarke excelled.

He was sublime in important back door wins over Tipperary and Kildare that year before Armagh fell at the All-Ireland quarter-final stages to Tyrone.

Because he was different to your regular inter-county player, when Clarke made a decision of some consequence, it always seemed to make headline news.

Newry City is not the first time he’s dabbled in soccer either. In his youth he played for local soccer club Cartwheel United and in 2016 he left for New York and signed for semi-professional outfit New York Shamrocks.

“I was with Dundalk U18s but then I went with the Gaelic full-time. I would’ve had to sign an U21 contract which meant no Gaelic.

“So, later I was playing out in New York in the Cosmopolitan League [in 2016]. I left there when I was top scorer and we were top of the league.

“It was a really good standard, ex-MLS players and I remember our central midfielder went to New York Cosmos, so it was a really good standard.

“I would love to have stayed and given it a really good go because I loved the culture of it, the different backgrounds and ethnicities and how things were done out there.”

Clarke had already declared he wouldn’t be playing for Armagh that year [2016]; he came back and starred for his county the following year 2017 before opting out again in 2019.

“John McEntee said a thing in the Crossmaglen BBC documentary a few years back that when I first went over to New York, it hadn’t really been done before.

“It was a precedent. But when you think of all the boys going over to Chicago this summer there hasn’t really been any negative press.”

He’s probably had one of the best pre-seasons for a long time with Crossmaglen Rangers and is flying fit.

When asked would he take another nibble at Armagh next season or has that boat sailed?

“Who knows what’ll happen,” Clarke replies.

“Like, I love it when it comes around and I know the amount of work that goes into it but it’s the return of investment - you want to play games.

“My gripe with the GAA has always been the ratio of training sessions to games. You’re trained to play and you’re training in November when it doesn’t real kick off for a while after that. But I’m really enjoying this challenge…”

He attended Armagh’s Championship games against Tyrone, Donegal (second game) and Galway and enjoyed the experience of being among the crowd and cheering his former team-mates on.

Newry's next outing is against champions Linfield at the Showgrounds this Sunday. Clarke's hoping to force his way into the manager's thinking.

“I think with soccer and the way modern Gaelic football has gone, there’s a lot more skill and thinking involved in soccer. If you’re not sharp or you’re not on it, you’ll be stripped of the ball in every possession.

“I think you can transfer from soccer to Gaelic but not necessarily Gaelic to soccer. There’s a lot more athleticism in Gaelic. You can put an athlete on a Gaelic field, purely because of the rules and the hand pass and stuff.

“I just like the expressiveness of soccer, I’ve always loved watching it and it was probably the number one thing growing up.”

He doesn’t envisage a problem in balancing both his Gaelic and soccer commitments between Crossmaglen Rangers and Newry City over the coming weeks and months.

“Stephen [Kernan, ’Cross manager] was very good when I was looking at this especially with ’Cross and the championship coming up. For now, that’s the priority.

“With Newry, it’s a long Premiership season. Soccer is something I’ve always wanted to do and to give it a proper rattle.

“I’m feeling fit and sharp and I think it’s about balancing both codes and living an elite athlete’s lifestyle, watching what I’m eating, training well, recovering well.”

Right now, he’s in “a good head space”.

He still carries that easy demeanour of his 20s. Still curious about everything with always options on the table.

Taylor’s Avenue in Carrickfergus seemed an unlikely place to find Jamie Clarke last Saturday afternoon.

Then again, should we be surprised about when and where this mercurial, engaging character turns up next?