Curious gets curiouser for Derry

In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland the White Rabbit asks the King where he should start his story

In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland the White Rabbit asks the King where he should start his story. The King tells him: "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." So it is in the soap opera that surrounds Brian Mullins's now terminated involvement with the Derry gaelic football team, the latest episode of which was played out last week.

Begin at the beginning. Mullins strode into Derry three years ago and found a team licking some very sore wounds having been beaten by a Tyrone team which played the entire second half of their Ulster championship game with 13 men. Even before that the county had been riven by the fall-out from Eamon Coleman's departure from the top job despite his having delivered the county's first All-Ireland title in 1993. More of Mr Coleman later.

The fact that the Carondonagh-based Mullins was an outsider was seen as a positive bonus in a county whose GAA community seems to have a healthy appetite for some pretty bitter in-fighting. Mullins was wielding the new broom.

Derry cruised through the National League - a competition that has become their favoured habitat - and Mullins finished his first winter in charge with a national title. Spring rolled into summer but Derry's frailties both on the pitch and on the sideline were again exposed by a Tyrone side on its way to back to back Ulster titles.

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No-one at any stage ever pretended that Mullins's relationship with his players was either as close or as deep as that which Eamon Coleman had enjoyed. After all, Coleman was one of their own. And he had delivered. But Mullins and his playing achievements with Dublin inspired respect and it was that awe and regard that kept the Derry ship on a reasonably steady course.

Derry reached the 1997 Ulster final and Mullins's settling-in period seemed over. The scene was set for the completion of the county's rehabilitation from the wreckage of the end of the Coleman era but Martin McHugh's Cavan had other ideas. Mullins was comprehensively outthought by McHugh and with direction lacking from the sideline, Derry floundered. One cameo which saw Mullins and Joe Brolly involved in animated discussion about the paucity of ball coming the corner forward's way as the teams walked off at half-time was a precursor of some of the problems that were to follow.

So two years in and Derry were no closer to Ulster championship success than they had been when Brian Mullins arrived. Back to back failures had upped the ante among the more senior players and there were rumblings of discontent about Mullins's aloofness and about his training methods. This was a group of gaelic footballers that, for the most part, had been playing top-level football for a decade and the biggest challenge facing any manager was to counter the boredom and restlessness that the inter-county treadmill can produce. Mullins, it would appear, conspicuously failed to do this.

1998 brought the by-now obligatory National League run, but that was brought to a shuddering halt by Offaly. Many of the problems that were to manifest themselves with a vengeance later in the summer - Anthony Tohill's ineffectual presence at midfield, the lack of options if Brolly was contained - surfaced in the course of that Offaly defeat. But they were papered over as Derry and Mullins at last won their Ulster title in a final of stupefying mediocrity against Donegal.

This was now Mullins's big opportunity - freed of the claustrophobia and shackles of the Ulster championship he now had the chance to push out his chest and strut on the national stage. Fat chance. From the second John Bannon threw in the ball on August 23rd for their All-Ireland semi-final against Galway, that never seemed even remotely likely.

Derry were bereft of ideas and devoid of direction. Even to the casual observer it wasn't clear whether Mullins and Derry were playing their trademark short-game or had opted for a more direct style thus bringing their corner forwards into the game much more quickly. The result was a confusing mish-mash of both and Galway's robust and direct response destroyed Derry.

The scene in the dugout as Mullins and his fellow mentors watched their team disintegrate in front of them was, according to one senior player, "pandemonium". They needed a scapegoat and Joe Brolly's out-of-sorts performance served up the perfect victim. He was given an ultimatum during the half-time team talk and when a good goal chance went begging at a key point near the start of the second half, he was called ashore.

Proven match-winners are a rare fixture in a modern football manager's armoury and Brolly had already proved his worth with the injury-time goal in July's Ulster final. And yet he spent the last half-hour of the game against Galway sitting on the Croke Park grass in front of the Derry subs. Curiouser and curiouser.

Mullins's position at the Derry helm was no longer tenable and he parted company with the County Board earlier this month. Now comes his first public pronouncement on his departure in The Derry Journal and it makes for some interesting reading.

His opening salvo, with expressions of regret at not having "the courage of my convictions on important issues", sets the tone. Then he really gets going. "I had difficulty with a senior player in the panel being very disruptive and having his own ideas about what was required."

But having gone this far in making public a private team matter that should have stayed that way, Mullins pulls back. "I do not wish to go into personal details about this and I do not wish to name him as the press is not the correct forum. . . the players know who he is and he knows himself. Subject closed."

So Brian Mullins rides off into the sunset with the subject anything but closed, leaving a smoking gun of accusation aimed at an unnamed player. If, as he observes, the press is not "the correct forum" to name the player then it does not take a huge ideological leap to suggest that nor is it "the correct forum" for public criticism that borders on ritual humiliation.

The name of Joe Brolly is, inevitably, the one that is coming up as the search begins for Brian Mullins's "mystery man" begins in both Derry and Ulster GAA circles. Brolly has publicly conceded that there was "friction" between him and Mullins. He, at least, did not hide behind any ambiguity or innuendo and was prepared to admit that there were problems. Mullins, though, has taken a different tack.

His era in Derry has ended with more questions than answers, more problems than solutions. Eamon Coleman is, by all accounts, in the box seat to return to the role he performed with such distinction earlier in the decade. His first job will be to restore some of the trust that has been lost. And to do that he will have to begin at the beginning.