Antrim's rebirth a cause for optimism

This shifting of the sands in Ulster football is taking more than a little getting used to. Monday mornings used to have their own, unfaltering rhythm as the championship events of the day before were mulled over, cogitated and digested with the minimum of fuss. There was an established order and all nine Ulster counties had a reasonable idea of their place within it. But as one championship 2000 Sunday runs into another, the complacency of that hierarchy is under sustained attack. Mondays have now become a time for reassessment and readjustment and the casting off of some old prejudices.

Yesterday was no different. Antrim's footballers were all over the newspapers and the radio spreading the new gospel. "It's a game we know we should have won," chirped one. "We've learnt enough to come back the next day and finish the job," opined another. Time for a reality check. This, after all, was Antrim, wasn't it?

But last Sunday provided yet more evidence that there is a renaissance going on. Modest it may be - the Down side Antrim accounted for first time out was ravaged by injuries and ageing limbs and there is still the small matter of the semi-final replay against Derry - but in the barren context of what went before, this is a rebirth of genuine significance.

Antrim's emergence has provided an injection of new life and optimism into an Ulster championship that had become moribund. Before this summer the last championship to catch the public imagination was in 1994 as Down took the first step towards a second All-Ireland of the 1990s. That journey began with an epic game against Derry which stands head and shoulders above all-comers as the most satisfying all-round football feast of the last decade.

Since then, however, Ulster has been a province treading water. There have been occasional bright spots - Tyrone's 13-man win in 1995, Cavan's breakthrough three years later - but those have represented only sporadic flickers of entertainment illuminating what were otherwise years of drab, negative football.

The omens for this year were scarcely much better. Armagh's power-play football of last summer was devastatingly effective but its inadequacies were dramatically exposed in an All-Ireland semi-final against Meath when they came up against a side with the same physical attributes but significantly more footballing know-how. The message had been sent out - big teams with big men will take you a long distance and it is worth sacrificing a few of your footballers along the way to get there.

Any prospect of change to that status quo seemed unlikely in the extreme but with five teams down and four still standing this year it is clear that the tide is turning. Fermanagh face into a semi-final next Sunday with back-to-back championship wins and brimming with new found conviction and confidence. But it is Antrim who have been the driving force. In the space of a game and a half (Sunday's first-half display is excluded) Antrim have played far and away the best football in this year's competition to date.

Against Down they moved the ball at a pace and with a directness which will surely have hastened the retirement of more than one All-Ireland winning defender. And on Sunday at Casement Park they toyed with the brittleness of a Derry side that up until that point had been touted as potential All-Ireland champions. To have performed to that level against Down might have been dismissed as fortunate. To have repeated the trick a few weeks later presages the arrival of a genuine footballing force.

There have been some fascinating common denominators to both of Antrim's showings to date. One has been their unshakeable faith in the virtues of playing football. If that sounds a little trite, then it's only because Ulster's recent history has made that characteristic more of a liability than a worthwhile aspiration. Antrim's approach recognises the value of pace and movement and their second-half dismantling of a Derry fullback line that included Kieran McKeever and Sean Marty Lockhart indicates that it can have its own rich rewards.

Their performances have also been stamped with a tremendous depth of character. The extent of their self-belief is all the more remarkable given the depths that had been plumbed over 18 years. It has been graphically demonstrated during the same phase of both of their games so far. In the first half against Down the fallibility of their medal-laden opponents was there for all to see but the question was whether Antrim would be capable of making the most of that weakness and go on to win. Four unanswered points at the start of the second half provided the answer.

If anything, the situation at the break last Sunday was even more acute. Derry had ambled into a seven-point lead in an atmosphere which could best be described as that of a half-heartedly contested challenge match. A point minutes into the second half extended that lead to eight. What followed was genuinely thrilling as Antrim edged their way back into the game, tentatively at first but then with burgeoning confidence as they picked away at both Derry's lead and their belief in themselves.

As their momentum ebbed steadily away, Derry looked rudderless and leaderless. With the vast array of talent at their disposal one of the traditional imponderables of Ulster football has been why this Derry side has won only one All-Ireland. The answer may lie in an inherent brittleness when the most searching questions are asked of this team's character and there were definite echoes of the bad days of 1995 against Tyrone and 1998 against Cavan in their second-half display last Sunday. The incomparable Anthony Tohill was the only man to stem the flow and but for him Derry would be contemplating another year of chronic underachievement.

As it is, battle will have to be joined again. The value of the interest that will generate among the wider footballing community to the Ulster Championship cannot be overestimated. With Down and Tyrone already gone and Derry and Armagh looking increasingly vulnerable, there is now a palpable sense of flux. And it is a wind of change that has nothing at all to do with the GPA, or players' agents or product endorsements. These past few weeks have been a pertinent reminder that the GAA is never stronger than when it rediscovers its own roots.