Emerging from the shadows

Gaelic Games Focus on Longford football: In as much as the alarm bells rang Eugene McGee thinks it was the Fr Manning Cup in 1992. The under-16 football competition for northwest and midland counties is a respected event that spans three provinces. It wasn't just that Longford had been well beaten by Cavan, Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo and Westmeath but in a couple of the fixtures even mustering a full 15 was beyond the county.

McGee's considerable football management CV hasn't many entries at the desperation level but having won All-Ireland club and county championships with UCD and Offaly and managed International Rules success in Australia, he decided that something had to be done in his own county.

The project that began in 1992 and '93 was intended to make sure the county established structures to identify and maintain the interest of footballers from an early stage and to raise the profile of the county brand among young people.

"Unless we actually stimulated interest of kids aged 12 and up, the county would have been dying. So we started to tackle the problems. Unfortunately some eejit labelled it a five-year plan. It was never that. It was always going to take time."

Whether tomorrow's National Football League meeting with Tyrone proves too much of a challenge for Longford can't detract from the eye-catching start to the season made by the Division One newcomers. Full points from the opening two matches have left Longford tantalisingly close to the sort of total that might realise their primary target of remaining in the top flight.

A victory tomorrow could almost guarantee that ambition. In the hothouse atmosphere of the league's opening phase, with its first three rounds in successive weeks, Longford's flourishing wasn't foreseen.

Considered the more likely of the promoted teams to return whence they came in one seamless movement, Dennis Connerton's team has instead recorded a historic win over Kerry and a less epochal but just as satisfying defeat of neighbours Westmeath, who beat them mercilessly in last season's Division Two play-offs.

With their greater urgency going into the campaign such counties' appetites were always going to be sharper than that of established counties like Kerry whereas midland derbies are always evenly balanced in the mind's eye. Even if Westmeath have been having the better of the argument in recent years that was never going to inhibit Longford. Kerry manager Jack O'Connor felt the sting of defeat sufficiently to remonstrate with the amount of injury-time played but he also acknowledges the quality of the ambush.

"I was impressed by their teamwork. They've good forwards, a couple as good as any in the country when they run at you. They were very fit, committed and spirited. It remains to be seen if they can keep it up for the year. But I wouldn't pick holes in them; they'll give Tyrone a good game."

Such dramatics by unfancied teams aren't unprecedented, particularly in the league, but this isn't the story of an early-season flash that might burn itself out before the campaign is over, let alone before championship starts.

That Longford are in such a position at all - rather than the precariousness of the future - is the achievement made possible by the measures introduced by McGee and his committee over 11 years ago. Back then the situation of the county team was considered so terminal that prospects at senior level formed no part of the blueprint's remit, according to McGee.

"Longford was making little impact in Division Two and getting annihilated in the championship - there was no back door then. I think they lost to Offaly one year by 25 points. We had to restore the ethic of county football."

Despairing of the present, the committee looked to the future. It wasn't the easiest of routes. Quick-fix success at senior level is very gratifying and in its absence progress becomes harder to substantiate. To say there was hostility might be an exaggeration but indifference can be just as debilitating when resources are needed.

Longford reached for the coaching manual. There are now four full-time coaches in the county, a huge commitment for a population of 30,000. The upside of the tiny catchment is that it can be comprehensively serviced. So under the supervision of a Clareman John McMahon the schools of the 24 parishes were all relentlessly worked, structures devised and schools of excellence established. Leinster Council was impressed with the efforts being made and provided financial support.

An analysis of the 2002 birth rate shows the scale of the challenge. Two hundred boys were born in the county. The football structures have to winnow 25 players - one eighth of the total cohort - out of that and hope they can be competitive at underage and make a contribution at senior level.

So far the results have been heartening. The Fr Manning Cup, which triggered the original response, has been won twice. Two years ago the county famously won only its third Leinster minor championship and the first for 64 years. Last May the Vocational Schools team won the county's second football All-Ireland, the 1937 junior championship being the other.

"The system has worked well," says McGee, "but it's not a luxury in Longford; it's a necessity. If we lose 10 per cent of the available footballers there's no senior team."

On the horizon are opportunities and challenges. St Mel's, the famous football nursery, has ceased to be a boarding school and now draws nearly exclusively on local children rather than from a wider catchment. "The team that won Leinster colleges was nearly all from Longford," says county PRO Pat O'Toole.

The most obvious challenge is the relatively barren landscape in Longford town, which has only one senior club, Longford Slashers. It's a soccer town, home to the FAI Cup holders.

"The Slashers could be in a county final and 7,000 or 8,000 going to the match in Pearse Park," says McGee, "but you'd hardly see two flags in the town. But the time of the FAI Cup final there was a flag in every window.

"At a committee meeting in Pearse Park two years ago," he recalls, "someone pointed out that a third of the county's population were within three miles of us. There should be five or six from the Slashers on every county panel but instead there's just one or two."

But for the moment it's the big time. The reigning league and All-Ireland champions will be in town tomorrow and Longford will get to grips with them.

With five matches to go there are nearly enough points on the board to roll over the Division One tenancy and the summer is three months away with its optimistic prospects of at least a few championship matches.

McGee accepts there were other influences on the rising stock of Longford football but believes the plan of a decade ago was fundamental. "Without it Longford would be practically extinct."