For the glory of the little village

Gowna is a pretty, slight little crossroads village in Cavan with a few pubs and an impeccable whitewashed old schoolhouse. It is a place not readily found. Solid directions and lonely stretches from either Granard or Cavan town will get you there.

On this Tuesday not a sinner walks the streets - Gay Byrne is, after all, celebrating the new national obsession with fast cash on his new high-octane quiz show and outside, the weather is appalling. But beyond the town, a half mile after the hedgerows close in again, are the lights of the football pitch, dulled in the mist. This is Gowna's home.

The local team play the Ulster semi-final tomorrow and local expectation is strong. Cavan football has taken a bit of an image battering since that glory burst in 1997 but within the borders Gowna is a phenomenon. This year, they captured their fourth county title in five years and after pushing Crossmaglen all the way last year, are considered a good bet for Ulster honours.

"Every club has its golden period," says chairman Sean McGahern," and you just have to win all you can."

This is a club both remarkable and the same as any other. Although there is a perception that football ended with the recent All-Ireland, in reality, it is just beginning. It is at this frequently unsung level that the grassroots boys mix it with the stars who define the summer Sundays.

For every household name that puts in the mid-summer strain, there are 1,000 journeymen squelching through October laps. This scene in Gowna is being replicated in every county across the country. Cathaldus Hartin ("the name is Greek and it's a long story") is one of the emerging youngsters on this Gowna team. "I'm studying down in UCG so myself and another lad take a taxi up here once a week for training. No-one particularly likes going out in this rain and wind but I mean, in a place like Gowna, the whole town gets involved in this.

"It brings an atmosphere that I'm not sure would be here without the football. It's all people talk about and when you are winning everyone likes training."

Gowna has been winning longer than they have a right to. Hartin remembers the first ever senior success back in 1988, hamming it up in the club colours, just old enough to appreciate the thing. That win was the pinnacle of a rejuvenation programme that began back in the 1970s.

The town had tradition - Tony Morris, one of the great practitioners from the 1960s, was a Gowna man and Vincent and James White peer out from snapshots of the lordly Cavan teams that graced the land in the 1930s. When Sean McGahern was a youngster, though, that was just folklore.

"Gowna disbanded around 1969. Couldn't put a team out. I went over to Arva playing underage, other lads went to Mullahone. By 1979, men like the late Phelim Reilly, a school-teacher, and Des Coyle were putting a lot of work in here at underage level. So we came back and the thing got going again."

From then on, the club arose as unassailably as the phoenix, taking five under-16 county titles in a row, three minor championships, three under-21s, the Cavan junior championship in 1982, the intermediate three years later and then the historic senior win in 1988. It was meteoric and is in the ascendant yet.

"We were just lucky in that a lot of good players happened to come along," says McGahern, "and yet we lost a sight of fine players also when emigration was bad. The entire Kernan family, they all went to New York and never came back and John T Reilly was a very promising county minor that is gone now. Today, it's the opposite. Two boys are in college, Dermot McCabe works in Dublin, but the rest are all about locally."

Gowna is sequined with some of Cavan's football's biggest names. As well as McCabe, the redoubtable Bernard Morris lines out, along with Kieran Brady and some of the best underage talents to emerge in many years.

And for a manager, they have enlisted Derry's Eamonn Coleman. To see him standing on the parish pitch on this godforsaken night, with the twinkling eyes and weather-beaten countenance we associate with big-time games in Clones, is jolting. But this is where he has spent the last four winters.

"I certainly do not," he scolds when asked if he enjoys this. "Training a club team is much harder than coaching a county side. Why that is I can't fully explain - that you have lads of differing ability is one reason. But this is the easy part, training now in October. Any man that wouldn't be dying to be out here tonight, there is something wrong with their head. Because there are many teams, in Cavan and beyond, who would love to have this chance we have."

McGahern met Coleman in Edgeworthstown in the mid-1990s when the Derryman was in charge at Longford and the Cavan club were looking for a new thrust to take them beyond mere county domination.

"We met four times and I still didn't have a clue if he was going to take us on, he can be kind of evasive like that. But the third time he asked for a video of our games and I knew he was checking us out. Martin McHugh has just started managing Cavan at the time and Martin told him we were the best club in Cavan."

It is an unlikely partnership, the colourful northerner and this secluded, rural club but it has thrived.

"I think the main thing Eamon brings is respect; he is someone we all look up to and he knows what it takes at this level," says Hartin. "I mean, we were unlucky not to have beaten Crossmaglen last year and are in with a good shout this year also."

Gowna have their sights set on provincial silverware this time. They have talented youngsters coming through but are realistic enough to know that these storied days can't last forever. This is the season of the big push.

"After we won the championship this year, we had one session and that was it. Didn't mean anything to us. Years ago we'd have drank for a week. When you're winning, it's easy turn out on nights like this. People were saying Gowna is an old team now but we do have lads coming through. If it's enough to keep this going remains to be seen."

The other Cavan clubs might at times glare daggers at Gowna's prosperity but now that they are out representing the county in Ulster everyone will get behind them.

Standing between Gowna and the Ulster final is Bellaghy, old soldiers at this sort of fare. It will make for intrigue, Coleman marching the line past the Bellaghy dug-out and the Derry crowd to whom he is a folk hero.

"Look, it's not going to happen," the manager insists with his cherub's grin when the prospect of Gowna as Ulster champions is mentioned. "We don't have a chance.

Sure Bellaghy is goin' to give us a hammering on Sunday." With that he trots off across the field again, delighting in his own mischief, his instructions singing through the mournful cross-breeze.