Patience and hard work paying dividends for Brendan Harrison

That slow walk is just as you always imagined. You are towards the front of the parade and you turn the corner by the Canal End of Croke Park and face the length of the pitch down to the Hill end of the stadium. And it’s all breathtaking. The crowd noise is surround sound and it’s like being hit by a wave, so warm and thick you could feel like you could swim through it.

“You see the blue smoke rising,” you will recall months later, on a fresh January night on Linen Hall Street, in a restaurant where the early-evening crowd have gathered for supper and Stevie Nicks is on the sound system.

“And you get a serious buzz out of it. It feels like going into battle. I was nearly smiling as we marched around. Thinking back to when I was a kid and watching those guys walking in that parade and thinking how much you would love to be doing that. And to find yourself in that parade then.”

To find yourself there. Not many do it. You are Brendan Harrison and you have a Mayo shirt on your back with the imprint of a number two on it and you are about to play in an All-Ireland senior football final.

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Number two is a gilded number: John Forde (1951), Kenneth Mortimer ('96), Jim McGowan ('36), Jimmy Browne ('89). Why you? How would you explain your being there among the hundreds of other Mayo lads born in 1993?

If you had time – if you could freeze frame the moment and step out of yourself – you would advise that there was nothing inevitable about it. That there were a hundred days and nights when you could have become disheartened.

You could tell them about the day in the club in Aghamore at under-12. A huge game because, at that age, what game isn’t the beginning and end of the world? The parents are coming along to watch. And the manager names his team and he doesn’t call your name. You feel your cheeks burning. And you don’t know what to do.

“Hiding in the dug-out and not wanting to warm up in case people would see I wasn’t starting. And thinking: ‘how am I ever going to come back here again’?”

You can laugh about it now but at the time, it was terrible.

Big hit

Still, you kept showing up. You kept showing up so your cousin Willie McHugh, four years and a lifetime older, could hold the ball aloft in one hand for you to jump and try to catch.

You kept showing up because Richie Cunningham and Brian Murphy encouraged and encouraged you. You were skinny as a rake but you were quick so you had to improvise. You did some boxing as a kid and you discovered from that how to use your nimbleness and make it your weapon.

“Just getting a flick can work better than the big hit. I learned that over the years. You don’t need to be battering people.”

You could talk about that time in Aghamore when everyone left. You squint to remember the year, the way a centenarian struggles to recall some Civil War outrage. “Was it ’08? Around then?”

A word, out of the blue, suddenly everywhere. Recession. The Recession. The blight of the Tiger era.

“We had a really good team and then, yeah, the recession. And it seemed like overnight we lost nearly all of our team. Players who were meant to carry the younger lads through. A big gang went to Australia. A few to London. They all seemed to leave at the same time.”

So at the edge of 17 you are quickly promoted and playing football for a club stripped of proper adults, of actual men. And you are on the county minor panel.

You think about the many nights your mum drove you over to MacHale Park and then waited in the car park for the two hours while you trained. In all weather. Your mum, who was born and raised in Leeds – the city where you yourself were born. Your mum whose father was Dan Breen, raised in the shadow of Carrauntoohil until one of those periodic emigration tsunamis washed him up in Leeds.

Your mum who knew nothing of Gaelic football until she met your dad, a Mayo man, and they decided to move home. “It’s the Kerry blood in you,” she’d joke when it was clear you had the bug for this game.

And then you hit that age where your friends are diverging, when they are distracted by life.

Common dream

On Friday nights: the delights of Claremorris, the promise of Knock. When you were 15, the club had an A team and a B team because there were so many young lads playing football. But by the time you finish school only three of that group are still involved, still chasing this common dream that you all had of playing for Mayo. For the county.

“Brilliant footballers. Mates of mine. A lot better footballers than I was back then. When I was young I wouldn’t have been the most talented footballer at all. And it is nearly sad to say it but the pub took an awful lot of people away. Maybe one or two went off playing soccer but it was mostly pints. Then when we went to college, people just scattered. Boys would say: ‘I can’t be arsed coming down’. Because they would be drinking the heads off themselves for the week. I could never understand that. Because I got such enjoyment from the football. That was my social outlet. I am not saying there is anything wrong with a few pints. But so many fell away.”

You didn’t. You persevered. You did your best to bulk up even if you still looked like a runner, a miler. Your speed and your ball skills got you onto the under-21 panel. But you are still a million years from where you want to be. First year in minor, you don’t play. In your next year at minor, you make the championship team and lose an All-Ireland semi-final to Tyrone.

A bothersome shoulder – it has this habit of popping whenever you tackle – leads to your first operation and almost a year out. When you come back, you are on the Mayo Under-21 panel. You are 19 now.

“I came on . . . for very few games. Very few.”

You are under no illusions about how you are perceived then. A nice ball player – maybe a bit light. On the fringes of the county scene and nowhere nationally. Nobody would bat an eyelid if you decided to do other things with your life.

“That came into my mind many times. But sometimes your head will think like that and then the next day your motivation comes back. I was working hard in the gym trying to get a bit stronger. You want to be known for something 50 years down the line even if it’s ‘there’s your man. He played for Mayo’.”

Senior squad

You play championship in your final year at Under-21 and you are called into the senior squad. And this, now, is where everything quickens and you are living on your wits. It’s fabulous being there, with the heavy hitters of the Mayo scene, training with a tight group sharing this urgent ambition. It’s a joy. But you want to play.

You make the squad of 26 for the All-Ireland final in 2013 and watch as Mayo lose to Dublin by a point. The next autumn, James Horan gives you a few league starts. You do okay up in Newbridge against Kildare. Then you are in MacHale Park on a Sunday when Cork visit.

“I was marking Brian Hurley. He gave me a woeful hiding. He took three points off me. And I was fairly green. I was thinking about it for weeks. I was thinking about what the boys up in the stand would be saying. ‘Jesus, that Harrison. . .’”

You find yourself reading the forums and blogs, maybe for validation or maybe the opposite.

“Some comments were fair but once I would see something bad I would go in on myself. I was daft. And I learned the hard way. Not to go there. Absolutely not. If I hear people talking I just get out of the conversation with them. It doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t even bother reading the good things. Nothing.

“But I sat in the stands often enough and you’d hear the guy beside you shouting at some player: ‘What are ya at . . . ya effin eejit?’ And you know they’d be saying the same about you. Back then if I missed a tackle I would be thinking about it for 20 minutes.”

In 2014, you are sent on as a substitute in the championship game in New York. It’s not how you imagine it: a scruffy day in Woodlawn and the smell of barbecue. But you’ve made it that far. You have an operation on your other shoulder. In 2015, you stay on the bench all championship. It’s your third season; it is irrefutable proof that there is nothing inevitable. You have seen quite a few promising players come in for a while and then the panel is cut and they aren’t around anymore. That’s the constant background worry.

A cut

“You are always thinking, when you are on the fringe – ‘right championship is six weeks. There is going to be a cut. How many will go? Where will I be?’ It is always constantly on your mind. And you see new lads coming through, the under-21 boys who won the All-Ireland, the Castlebar boys who are constantly playing at a high level. You are looking at the full-back line coming into championship. Keith [Higgins]. Ger Caff’.

Tom Cunniffe

. Then the likes of Chris Barrett and Kev Keane. How am I going to get in here?

"And then the half-back line. You have Lee Keegan, Donal Vaughan and Colm Boyle. Where is the place? The likes of Paddy Durcan came on the scene in 2015 and started getting game time."

Weeks and months pass. You are in your car pulling out of MacHale Park at 11 at night , thinking – “Am I here just to fill numbers? On a wet night leaving training. These things go through your mind.”

You know how hard it is to get a chance. Players stake a claim on a shirt and a position and they take ownership for six, seven, eight years. That means someone else is sitting in the shadow, waiting, not knowing when or even if he will get a run. His entire career could pass . . .

“And he hasn’t had a shot. It is unbelievable, at championship time, the players on the sideline, who are just as good as the people who are playing. People don’t know it. They don’t see them. The guy out there is the regular. Like my improvement between 2015 and 2016, it wasn’t huge. It might have been marginal. And there are loads of players like that. There are players sitting on the sideline last year who will be the big heroes of 2017. I was lucky.”

You make your own luck. But Ger Caff' got injured. So did Chris Barrett. Tom Cunniffe called time. Suddenly the defensive squad was less crowded. Stephen Rochford picked you in the FBD League and kept picking you, right to the All-Ireland final. Everything happens in a rush. In 2016, even as you get your break, you and Natasha are expecting your first child. She is pregnant through league and championship. You are both thrilled, mildly terrified, really busy. And you are starting for Mayo.

Bernard Brogan

A week out and the manager tells you that you will be shadowing Bernard Brogan. And this was the moment when all that dreaming and ambition alchemised.

“When I was a kid I was watching Bernard Brogan playing. He will love that . . . but being up in the stands watching him and thinking ‘what a fantastic footballer.’ And he is. I had the ambition even on the bench of thinking that I would love to mark him.

“I was nervous. I was looking forward to it. And the first ball came in and I could have been playing up in Aghamore. The crowd become irrelevant once it starts. He is surprisingly strong. He is very physical. He is very tricky. A lot of other players just try and make a hard run and get out in front. He would be sneaking in around behind you and then obviously with the noise in Croke Park you can’t hear. In Castlebar, if you are in front of a man, you can nearly hear him make a run behind you. But in an All-Ireland you have to have your wits about you.”

Five minutes in and you make this instinctive, clean strip which sucks in a huge roar of appreciation from the crowd. The nerves fall away.

“I think he got the ball and I got a lucky slap on it. It was probably a good moment for me because it settled me into the game. He could just as easily have turned me, left me on my arse and stuck it over the bar. It could have been a very shaky start.”

The final goes on. You play.

Fionn is born eight days before the final. Natasha hasn’t missed a game all season. Both she and Fionn are at the banquet the night of the drawn All-Ireland. Both are there too on the night of the defeat. And Fionn sweeps you both quickly and far away from the attendant heartbreak and what-ifs of the final.

You finish the year with an All-Star. To be precise, you finish the year with a hip operation– your fourth visit to the surgical theatre thanks to Gaelic football – and a holiday in South Africa.

You are just back running these nights and you are thinking about the sessions missed, thinking about Eoin O’Donoghue and David Kenny, both corner backs, both All-Ireland Under-21 winners and aching for their chance. Both just like you. And that’s good. That’s as it should be. No guarantees, All-Star or not.

You know what’s ahead now. You have heard the decades-old question since you were a child. ‘Is this Mayo’s year?’ And that’s what you are trying to discover. You and the others. On nights when you arrive into MacHale Park exhausted and it will be vicious cold and you will push one another to the limits.

“Wrecked tired some nights. But once you get out on the field, it’s as if your tiredness goes. It is the weirdest feeling ever. My head would be bursting sometimes the whole way home from training. ‘What could I have done there? Or that went well.’ On a good night, you go down the road buzzing.”

It’s because you’ve spent over half your life trying to make it here. It’s been a crowded, lonely, brilliant road and it is just beginning to open out. Your eyes are set on it. You are not blinking.