Sean McGoldrick: “Cormac, you’re picking up Berryman.”
Cormac Trolan: “Ok… who’s that?”
Sean Leo McGoldrick: “Dad, it’s Bergman.”
Sean McGoldrick: “Whatever Sean Leo.”
IT takes a smart man to play the fool.
Sean McGoldrick is a smart man.
The Coleraine campus of the University of Ulster would not have employed him for over 40 years if he hadn’t been.
Quite what he did there, nobody is sure.
The Eoghan Rua players used to compare him to Friends character Chandler Bing.
Nobody knew exactly what Chandler’s job was.
Same with Sean McGoldrick.
Over the weekend, he and Sean McLaughlin stepped down as joint-managers of the Eoghan Rua footballers.
Hugh Mooney, by their side and responsible for refereeing in-house games in only pre-1995 rules, is gone too.
They took over in 2003.
That is 21 consecutive seasons in charge.
You have your Codys and Boylans and Hartes but such a prolonged spell is virtually unheard of in any era of club football. It has to be a record.
Sean McGoldrick is a lifelong teetotaller.
Sean McLaughlin runs the Springhill Bar.
Together, they were known as The Two Seans.
It was a perfect pairing.
When Eoghan Rua won the 2018 county title, McGoldrick was tidying up the gear questioning whether the players should be going drinking after the game with Ulster to come two weeks later.
McLaughlin was taking bottles of vodka out of his bag on the bus.
Ryan McGeough is the larger-than-life club chairman now, having been their goalkeeper in the good times.
He has been trying to warn the rest of the committee for years of the shock to the system that has been coming.
When people praise managers now for taking no money, they’ll usually add an appendage: ‘Just the basic expenses’.
It cost The Two Seans money to manage Eoghan Rua.
They did not take a single brass penny in 21 years. No phone bills, no mileage, no costs covered. Nothing.
Every year, Sean McLaughlin would arrive for pre-season armed with 15 new footballs that he’d bought himself.
He’d pay for training tops. When people tried to thank him, he’d deny any knowledge of having paid for anything.
In those 21 years, a club that had previously won one junior championship in its history would build a generation that won everything barring a junior championship.
Two Derry senior titles, an Ulster intermediate that led to an All-Ireland final, league trophies at senior, intermediate and junior, an All-Ireland Sevens, two Ulster Leagues, Dr Kerlin Cups, you name it.
Sean McGoldrick knew rightly who Bergman was. That was Enda Lynn’s nickname, their Greenlough nemesis from the intermediate days.
McGoldrick had played county football. He studied games, took tactical ideas from soccer as well as basketball, both of which he also played but didn’t like to admit to.
But in front of a group of players that had won nothing in ‘B’ football at underage, that didn’t produce Derry minors or go to school with these boys, the plan was not to elevate the opposition. They had two arms, two legs and a head just the same.
Eoghan Rua’s players were never asked to sign any contracts.
Everything was deliberately low-key. That rubbed off.
When they reached their first senior championship final in 2010, the team got caught up a bit in the trappings. They still beat Ballinderry because they were the best team in Derry that year.
But when they returned to finals in 2015 and 2018, the players insisted there were would be no bus, no tracksuits. They drove up to Celtic Park in their cars.
In 2018, there was an unseasonal heatwave that led the club to close their pitch.
The week of a senior county final, Eoghan Rua were training on a half-sized soccer pitch with one set of small soccer goals.
When the players were showering off having won the Sevens, Ciaran Lenehan laughed introspectively: "All-Ireland champion, never kicked a ball."
As a team they’d come to reflect Sean McGoldrick’s personality. Quietly-spoken, fiercely determined, no hint of ego.
When he and his wife Schira were planning their lives together in, it was supposed to be in Derry city.
Then politics got in the way. The university that was supposed to go there went to Coleraine instead.
The McGoldricks went with it.
A club was built around them.
Born in the red brick houses of North Green in west Belfast, he grew up to play football and hurling for St Teresa’s, Antrim and Ulster.
When they moved to Coleraine, he played football there and when Schira went to Derry to visit her family, Sean brought his hurl and played for Na Magha.
In the early ‘90s, Sean McGoldrick, Vinty McMahon and Brian Daly went to eternal club secretary Kevin Mullan’s house for a meeting with Terence McWilliams. They wanted to push Eoghan Rua’s underage.
A completely different club came into existence that night.
There are footballers that have gone from U12 to retirement and never known any manager other than Sean McGoldrick.
Their house was as warm to their childrens’ friends as it is to the grandchildren now. After nights out for their six sons and two daughters, the open-door policy became an open-floor policy. You’d have tripped over a Holly or a Mooney or a Leonard going to get your breakfast.
This season, Sean McGoldrick would invariably be 15 minutes late for training.
He was taking the U13s and the sessions overlapped. It was one of three teams he was involved with at the age of 72.
All that was ever asked for in return was that players turned up.
Training was an absolute non-negotiable.
At one stage, Sean McLaughlin was proud as punch to see his son Shay progress to the senior team.
It was going well until the night before St Patrick’s Day, when Shay phoned home with a flu.
His father delivered the news to a sceptical group. They would have remained so had they not gotten home that night and Shay McLaughlin on TV, interviewed on The Nolan Show while queueing to get into The Botanic Inn.
The Two Seans were loved for their different ways.
There were no grand speeches with McGoldrick. He delivered information before a game and at half-time.
Players were scared to listen half the time because they were busy looking over their shoulders for one of the kidney punches that Sean ‘Briney’– native of a big Foreglen GAA family but long time Port resident – would deliver when he got nervous.
Nobody will ever manage a senior club team for 21 years in a row again.
Sean McGoldrick insisted on an Irish goodbye, fought against the club announcing the news beyond a mention at the AGM.
For once he deserved to lose.
