Dooher driven to succeed

Keith Duggan talks to Tyrone's all-action, hard-running captain about the team's date with destiny and a crucial week in his sporting life.

Kelly's Inn is like one of those cinematic American diners which was somehow transported from Route 66 to the heart of Tyrone football country, on the rural dipping road that runs from Omagh to the signature landmark of the Ballygawley Roundabout.

It is a culinary institution around south Tyrone, with a menu crammed with universal favourites and prices that are shockingly low, particularly for visitors from down South.

Mickey Harte has been coming here since boyhood and now that he is manager, the county's elite footballers have become such regular faces that when Brian Dooher walks in, a waitress calls out, "Hiya, Brian, pet." It is disconcerting to hear the all-action, hard-hitting, fast-running, sleeves-up Tyrone captain addressed in such casual terms of affection.

When Dooher is closing in on the tackle or bounding fearlessly into opposition territory, it is hard to imagine him as anyone's pet. But now, wearing jeans and a fleece, he throws a friendly wave and looks practically bashful when the diners look up from roast dinners and chicken curry specials in recognition of the footballer.

"I'll not eat," he says after a moment's consideration. "I'll get something down below later. Good grub here, though. They put on a good spread."

And so he takes us up to an empty bench to discuss the crucial importance of this week in his life. Brian Dooher is Tyrone captain and, when you strip the thing down, the team's most elemental force and spirit.

Dooher has never been lauded in the same way as Peter Canavan nor are his attacking skills as extravagant as those of (Stephen) O'Neill or (Brian) McGuigan but it is impossible to imagine this Tyrone team without him. He is its constant.

He has played for his county for nine years, balancing the lonesome and often nocturnal hours of veterinary work with the well-documented demands of top class football. He rose early on this morning to clear his schedule so he could meet some RTÉ people for an interview at Kelly's, belting down the road to Derry in a jeep that is like his second home.

"It is not so bad now because I changed jobs, I'm with the Department of Agriculture and the hours are more regulated," he explains.

"But for a lot of years there I would be working up to 80 hours a week. And that would be accepted - everyone in the practice was at the same. I'd be up around Derry and Donegal and a wee bit of Fermanagh. A fair bit of that would be night calls. I suppose the thing about it was that at least when you were out in a field at three in the morning, you could get a bit of peace and quiet. Though I'd rather be in my bed at that time.

"But it would happen a lot, even during the championship. I wouldn't do it on the Saturday night before a game but during the week, sure you'd be out in the middle of nowhere. That's gone now but I suppose even at the best of times, playing football now can be a bit crazy."

As it to illustrate the point, Seán Cavanagh bursts through the rear door of the restaurant, late for his date with the cameras and Michael Lyster.

"Don't be panicking," Dooher counsels. "Sure aren't ye getting' well paid for it." A broad grin breaks across Cavanagh's face at the preposterousness of this notion.

"Go on, up the stairs and the wee room on the right."

Cavanagh bolts up the stairs, giving Dooher a quick punch as he passes and the captain grins. He has reason to smile.

After an exhausting and at times highly risky season, Tyrone are once more on the threshold of greatness. The main theme of this year's All-Ireland championship was that Kerry would meet one of Ulster's pre-eminent forces in the definitive final of the era. Tyrone, after a majestic series of games against their great rivals from Armagh, have made it to that point.

Dooher's adolescence was spent on farming land way north, flush on the border with Derry and so the orange shirts of Armagh never animated him as they did footballers from east Tyrone. But he admits that the series of games the teams played this year were crucial to the long-term perception of this team.

"If we hadn't beaten them, we would never live it down. Three times in one year, if you can't beat Armagh, then we could never have said anything about it. That semi-final was our last chance and we had to give it everything. I mean, the All-Ireland was the prize but to lose those three chances would have been tough. And now, we have won one each and drawn one. And ultimately, we are still here," he points out, smiling at this concluding rider.

Armagh deepened them, as athletes and people. After relinquishing a handsome lead in the closing minutes of the drawn Ulster final, Tyrone were poised for victory in the replay before coming out worst in a manic, unforgettable closing 20 minutes.

"Like, I never had a nice defeat and that was no different," Dooher says ruefully.

"We went out that night. Hit Dublin and went out as a team. Shouldn't probably say that but we did. It was our first drink since January. But I didn't want to be there. I was out there, I was drinking, I didn't enjoy the drink, I didn't get drunk. I could have been drinking all night and I wouldn't have got drunk. And not because I would hold a lot of drink but just because of the form I was in. I was in no form at all. A lot of other boys were like that too. I ended up going home a bit earlier.

"Like, it was an Ulster final. I went out to be with the boys. The first match, we threw it away. We just stopped or something, it is hard to know. You can just imagine how we felt. But Mickey prepares a team well for replays. He gets you back home and gets the head down and we were thinking about it and looking forward to it. But losing the Ulster final. You can say we lost the two men but we should still have been able to hold on to that game, we had five points of a lead. The game was opening up and it should have suited us. We didn't do it. And after that, we could either be turned away from it or pushed on."

Maybe a few years ago, Tyrone would have turned away from it. Brian Dooher is old school when it comes to Tyrone football and clearly remembers the days before the enlightenment. He came from true football stock: the Kerlin family produced two of the most dynamic players on the contemporary team: "Stephen O'Neill's granny and my granda would have been brother and sister." Like his cousin, Dooher talks in low bursts and prefers wry, common sense to the grand statement. He was always small and always highly regarded.

"I must have been the wee-est minor midfielder in Ulster," he jokes. "Never bothered me. Never was big. Still amn't big." He managed to miss out on Tyrone's string of All-Ireland under-21 victories and absconded to Dublin to study veterinary medicine in UCD, where he won a Sigerson Cup along with Trevor Giles and Derek Savage.

"Good lads. We didn't keep in touch. No point in saying we did. It was a nice thing to win but it didn't make or break anyone."

His recollection of his first visit to Croke Park is hazy: it may have been an All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo in 1989 or a league final in 1994. But by 1996, he was out there on the field, a young lad on the Tyrone team who were supposed to be making up for a galling All-Ireland loss to Dublin the previous September. Instead, they were pulverised by a young Meath team, their day symbolised by the sight of Ciarán "Dinky" McBride returning with a white, bloody bandage wrapped around his head.

"I was thinking, this is great, we'll be in Croke Park every year. Meath beat us fairly that day; we had no gripes about it. Then maybe it was a transition thing or boys not putting in an effort. We had Art (McRory), the nicest man you could meet and a really respected football man. Then Danny Ball came in and he had no luck at all for three years. You start to wonder when the f*** this is going to happen. Then the young boys came through and won a league with Art. It was a stepping stone. And of course, typical Tyrone, we probably thought we were the bee's knees now, we are going places. And sure enough, Armagh beat us in the first round of the championship."

It was disappointment that nourished Dooher as he became a senior man, quiet and durable and obstinate as guys like Adrian Cush, the Devlin brothers and Mattie McGleenan called it quits. Tyrone were the portrait masters of false dawns.

It is easily forgotten now that it was only three years ago when Sligo - when Eamon O'Hara - caused them to blow an eight-point half-time lead in a mortifying championship experience at Croke Park.

"I was shocked at us," Dooher mumbles. "Shocked. That was our first time back in Croke Park since 1996. You'd think we could have given a better account of ourselves."

And so they would return to the arcane passions of Tyrone club football, with rivalries that had occasionally spilled into naked violence. And as a county, Tyrone saw more than its share of sadness. Gaelic football was the chief source for optimism for many decades but the frustrating thing was the depth of their feeling for the game never saw full expression in the bloom of summer. Tyrone always got tripped up. Dooher learned what football meant in Tyrone through his job rather than anything else. Talk was learned, constant and urgent.

"Take away Omagh, Dungannon and to a lesser extent Strabane and what have you? Tyrone is very country oriented and you are born and bred into the habit of people watching and playing football. I was. People just care about it. And when things finally clicked for us, you wouldn't have believed it afterwards.

"I suppose winning an All-Ireland has given Tyrone people a wee bit of confidence in the county that mightn't have been there before. Like, it's a quiet enough county but that week after the All-Ireland, it was madness. It was Tuesday before I got home. It was late February of the next year when I got the cup into our house. We had a few neighbours around, a few drinks and it is something to look back on. You are sitting looking at this cup and you think of everywhere it has been.

"Like, that cup has been to some parties! Doesn't go to many places there is no party at." Even during that winning season, Dooher had to endure some criticism. From television pundits questioning his ability to the slight of being dropped from the Australian Rules tour - "I took a flu and then they wouldn't bring me" - he was slow to receive the recognition he deserved. But his unorthodox style - he has the elongated stride and poised carriage of a Kenyan distance runner - the ferocious work ethic and the stoical nature had long been appreciated by Mickey Harte, who knew Dooher as a minor.

He was the obvious man to replace Cormac McAnallen as captain after the tragic passing of the Eglish man and perhaps alone on the team, he had the temperament to accept such a role. A year on, Dooher refuses to allow that McAnallen's death was the chief reason Tyrone looked so deflated last summer, arguing that maybe in some way it was an excuse.

"Of course we were going to miss Cormac because he was a great lad, a brilliant footballer and a leader. We miss him this year. But there were plenty of other good players out there, we are a team and we came up short. It was a cause, yes. But there were others. Maybe we thought we were putting it in. See, you can fool yourself very easy at this level. There are teams that believe they are putting it in and teams that are really putting it in. Armagh.

"And from what I hear, Kerry aren't a kick in the arse away from Armagh. I saw a lot of people write us off before the Down game this summer, saying we were dead and buried after Wexford beat us in the league semi-final. And it was true, we did have a wee chat with ourselves after that. You couldn't say we were that impressive all season really. We have played in 20-minute patches here and there."

And he can't promise that it will be any different against Kerry. Nor does he care so long as Tyrone can win.

"People said what they said the last time we played Kerry. Water off a duck's back to me. They forget that Tyrone played a wee bit of football that day as well. But the thing about that game, it feels like ages ago. It is done and dusted. It could be donkey's years ago for all the bearing it is going to have on the Tyrone and Kerry of this year."

Outside Kelly's, Cavanagh and Enda McGinley are waiting for him. Dooher knows a short-cut down to training in Carrickmore and invites his colleagues and a few pressmen to join him in cavalcade. A pressman greets him and makes an admiring comment about the countryside. Dooher casts an amused look around the modest drumlins and the clean, pale September sky and the long, excellent North of Ireland roadway, pleasant with evening car light.

"Ye mightn't be saying that if ye were seeing it everyday," he laughs.

Disappearing into his grey jeep, Dooher speeds across the motorway and guides the pursuing cars through the dense and pretty Tyrone interior, along Shantavny Lane, shooting through Sixmilecross and a series of sharp lefts and rights that take us all directly to the pitch in Carrickmore. Along the way, a farmer's kid, riding shotgun on the trailer, does a double take at the sight of the Tyrone captain bombing past his field, hotly pursued by the county midfield pairing. They are burning rubber.

Approached from this secluded route, the Carrickmore club house and the lighted field seems like a splendid city. There are many hundreds of fans and stewards to arrange parking, there is hot food and everyone seems to know everyone and people are in good mood. It is a scene that makes the relationship between Tyrone football and Tyrone life click. Dooher laughs as his colleagues shake their heads at the roads they had just taken which did constitute a short cut, though not one you would try alone.

"Sure I got youse there, didn't I?" he calls out and the words hang hopefully in the evening as more and more car lights appear on the horizon around Carrickmore, like vigil candles.