THE Wee Man has been getting a raw deal lately.
Whether you’re six foot two and fifteen stone of outhouse or you’re vertically challenged and the width of a fiver, we’re all The Wee Man in some way.
Fighting the establishment. The big dog. The ones that aren’t worrying from month to month about whether they can justify keeping Netflix.
I met a postman recently who told me about their strikes. Waste of time. The company was almost delighted to see them doing it.
It wasn’t affecting Royal Mail’s trade at all, but the posties themselves were losing a day’s pay every time they went out, and have to catch up by doing two days’ work in one the next day.
They’re fighting over the couple of grand a year that could be the difference for many of them between being able to pay a mortgage and not being able to, but no, that money doesn’t exist, we only have millions for Michelle Mone and the like of that gang.
Wee Man syndrome has become an affliction that is no longer bound by the physical statutes of the person it inherits.
Kilcoo played The Wee Man card to perfection last year.
This tiny collection of houses, where all there is to do is pray, lamb ewes, have baby boys and play football, up against the establishment - a giant monstrosity of a club in Kilmacud that by the fiscal laws of most modern sports they shouldn’t even be in the same competition as.
It was one of the most remarkable All-Ireland titles ever won.
Like a Russian doll, open up Kilcoo and inside you find Conor Laverty.
Sunday could be the last we’ll see of him as a footballer. It would be hard to imagine him going on, getting into scrapes in the thick of next year’s Down championship when he’s managing the county team.
That he played this year felt as though it would have been because he’d committed to Kilcoo before he committed to Down, and he wasn’t going to break a promise to his own for no man.
If he goes, he goes with 11 county medals having played in every one of the 11 finals. Nobody in the history of Down club football can match that.
As Neil Loughran slipped nicely into his Irish News player ratings yesterday, since making his debut Laverty has missed just one single championship match, some 16 years ago.
He’s always embodied the spirit of The Wee Man. It was most notable when he was playing for Down.
Up against these big-shouldered corner-backs, Laverty’s mind enabled him to survive.
He’d roll out of half the tackles but halfway through the tumble he’d still have seen the run going past him. Up he would with his eyes turned goalwards and the ball still at the behest of his right foot.
At one stage early on Sunday he got emptied popping the ball off. He half thought about staying down but you could almost see the gears turning in his head. He didn’t want to give Glen the satisfaction, the psychological lift, so he bounced up and found his wind as he walked.
If Glen go on to emulate Kilcoo, theirs will be a different story. You could tell from the words of Connor Carville, holding Seamus McFerran up to his people on Mount Sinai, that so much of the last two years has been about shedding the Townie tag.
They’ll never get to play The Wee Man card in Derry. Maghera would be considered a decent-sized parish in most parts of Ireland (around 3,000 nationalists) but in the Oak Leaf county where most parishes of that size have two, maybe even three clubs, they’re positively huge.
But just as with the vanquished champions, the spirit of The Wee Man lives within Ulster’s new kings.
Conleth McGuckian was outstanding on Sunday. It was as if Malachy O’Rourke had wrapped him in rubber bands before the game. He just bounced off everything and fell back into the path he’d been running.
Five turnovers, two kickouts won, a point of his own, direct assists for 1-2.
The Wee Man doesn’t survive in Gaelic football unless his survival instincts are that bit sharper.
McGuckian’s assist for Ethan Doherty’s score that put daylight back between them and Kilcoo was genius wrapped up in survival.
He’s, what, five foot nine and twelve stone at best? Coming along the stand side, the black bodies converge.
There’s no way he can take the ball into the tackle and keep both it and his head. The sideline is another enemy he doesn’t need right now.
A big hit, a turnover right in front of the crowd, turfing The Wee Man into the fence for good measure – you could almost see the Kilcoo defenders salivating at the thought.
Not today.
McGuckian pops it out over the top of the defender, glides around him and uses his pace to regather the ball as it hops back up on the other side. Sets up Doherty, and Glen are on their way.
His fellow Wee Man, Tiarnán Flanagan, works as a welder a hundred yards from my front door.
When I met him in the shop a few days after they beat Cargin, and asked him how he was, he just replied ‘sore!’
It was the week before their 2021 county final I’d met him on the same spot and he told me about the heart condition that he spoke about after the game at the weekend. He was either on his way to or just home from hospital for a scan.
‘Will you even be able to play?’
‘I’ll be playing. Nothing would stop me.’
Just over a week ago, he had a procedure to widen an artery. He was barely able to get out of bed when Glen were training the following night.
But there he was on Sunday, bombing up and down the wing, breaking even with arguably Kilcoo’s best player this year, Shealan Johnston.
If Conor Glass and Emmett Bradley and the Doherty boys are the engine, Flanagan and McGuckian are Glen’s gearbox. None of the rest of it would go far without them.
A bit like The Slow Forward, club football has become safe shelter for The Wee Man. There’s no real place for either of them in county football any more.
But where the game is stripped of that bit of extra physicality, the brainy player that just lacks for that the brawn to match can still hold his own.
Even there’s he’s an endangered species, and we must protect him.
Because even if it doesn’t feel like it, we’re all The Wee Man somewhere.
