Knockmore talents in tune at last

YOU CAN become blase About these All-Ireland clubs. Viewed as a continuum, they become blurred images of hard work, good form, triumph and/or disaster: "Communities finding most vibrant expression through their football/hurling. Blah, blah, blah."

This is not because of lack of variety. On the contrary. Only Carlow's Eire Og, finalists last year and in '93, have contested more than a single football final this decade. Every other club that has survived until St Patrick's Day and the club football final has been unable to repeat the trick.

This means that everyone's acquaintance with successful club teams is necessarily fleeting, which makes it hard to establish the individual identities of the teams involved. Hence, the blur of communities finding most vibrant . . . etc etc.

This afternoon at Croke Park, Mayo champions Knockmore take on Crossmaglen Rangers of Armagh in the football final. Neither county has had the pleasure of bringing home the Andy Merrigan trophy. In fact, not a single Connacht club has ever won it.

Even Eamonn Clarke, manager of Knockmore, struggles to articulate (an uncharacteristic difficulty) any reason why his club is special beyond the standard: a club, rural or urban, looks after the under-age sector, gets its act together and hurtles like a roller coaster towards an All-Ireland. And is statistically unlikely to be heard of again at this level.

Clarke tries. "It's a rural parish. You've been reared there. Maybe like me, you've gone away and come back. There's a special feeling for it. The football team is always central in a west of Ireland parish."

The truth, however, could as easily relate to your children. "Your own club is always special and we in Knockmore are no different."

The club, in defiance of the demographics governing relatively remote areas, is only 40 years old. Nonetheless, the pin-prick on the map can be misleading. The small village has a big hinterland. Bounded by Lough Conn and the River Moy, it stretches into Ballina and Foxford. Geographically, it's an impressive catchment area, but in population terms, at around 3,000, average enough.

Ballina, the nearest big town, is five miles away and many Knockmore people work there. Clarke owns Flair, a women's fashion shop in the main street.

Whatever about the general similarities of successful clubs, there are always individual splashes of colour. In the window of Eamonn Clarke's shop, nestling amidst the sartorial splendour, are two television sets relaying videotape of Knockmore's championship successes.

Above this bizarre installation and the shop itself, in a storeroom dominated by rails of polythene-wrapped couture, Eamonn Clarke sits at his desk by the window. This is his control room. A flourishing business is not right now the most impressive testament to that control.

Knockmore, formerly the leading textbook on unmanageable talent, have reached an All-Ireland final. Their semi-final demolition of Eire Og's perennial challenge was as close as many had seen to Knockmore turning on all their lights at once. The marshalling of these resources into a coherent force by Clarke and his selectors, Peter Hughes and Dr Michael Moffatt, is a fair achievement.

It is an achievement that owes a lot to the control room over the shop. Here there is order in the chaos of Clarke's ad hoc office. Among the order books and the training log which is regularly produced to detail attendance by players all the way back to January 26th 1996, are hints of a footballing theme.

The stack of filing trays alternating in yellow and blue are hardly a co-incidence. An otherwise unremarkable Cadbury's Flake tin box chimes in with its yellow and blue brand and most notably, a big television and video recorder gape out from behind the desk. "I watch it up here when I'm not busy," says Clarke. "And sometimes when I am busy."

He does not subscribe to the witless implausibilities of the "get on with our own game and let the opposition worry about us" school. He watches the opposition compulsively. Seven or eight times he has seen the Crossmaglen-Laune semi-final, marking down new revelations and passing them on to his team. Clarke says he can tell you at this stage the hair colour and height of the Crossmaglen players.

"Players like good organisation," he says. "If they ask you a question on Tuesday about Thursday, they expect an answer. We have very analytical team meetings on Sunday after games. It gives you great satisfaction to have picked out certain areas that proved vital in a match.

"You can pre-empt traps and make a player's game easier. It means on the field of play he will make the correct decision and that might be the difference between winning and losing. At team meetings you need that detail to bring the players with you."

ALL this analysis and detail isn't the first thing you'd normally associate with Knockmore. Was it a challenge harnessing the team's, ummm, wayward talents? Eamonn Clarke throws back his head and laughs uproariously, well recognising the uneasily coded question about the eccentricities of his team.

To be specific. Padraig Brogan is probably the greatest unfulfilled talent walking the playing fields of the country. Ray Dempsey was central to a tug-of-love between club and county in 1993, the last time Knockmore got out of Connacht. He has since been credited with firing the first shots in last September's All-Ireland replay war, for which he was suspended and missed the club's provincial campaign.

Kevin Staunton broke curfew the night before Mayo's 1993 All-Ireland semi-final mauling by Cork and has since struggled to convince successive county managements. Kevin O'Neill, an All Star at 20, unwittingly became a cause celebre before last year's All-Ireland replay when dropped from the list of substitutes and, together with Peter Butler, was at the centre of the most recent club-county conflict of loyalties.

Yet all of the above have made outstanding contributions to the campaign. Staunton received the AIB Footballer of the Championship award for Connacht and gave another riveting performance against Eire Og.

O'Neill has been outstanding in the full forward line, scoring 1-7 the last day, whereas Dempsey helped himself to two goals, the second of breathtaking quality. Butler has secured the defence at centre back and looks certain to return to the county team, all things being equal - a state of affairs that can never be taken entirely for granted.

Brogan's status is more indeterminate. Capable of astonishing feats and astonishing lapses in the space of the one match, he has nonetheless shown signs of maturing. Observing a voluntary media blackout may not seem that unusual in the lead-up to a big match, but for someone who in his day was capable of ringing up local radio to protest his talent and to take issue with the county for not picking him, it represents a change.

It is generally believed that he never quite recovered from the brilliant future forecast for him in his early days. As a youth he scored the 1985 goal of the season for Mayo against Dublin in an All-Ireland semi-final replay. The legend of The Goal - burning the very air as it whizzed past John O'Leary - has long since overwhelmed its inconveniently mundane context: a comfortable victory for Dublin.

Nowadays Brogan, to be married this year, appears more at ease within a team content to let him ply his mysterious ways rather than forming a queue so that he can lead them to the nearest mountain top.

"He's a quality player," says Clarke, "the first to really draw attention to Knockmore. He probably received too much attention. In '92, I coaxed him back from Donegal (one of Brogan's more exotic adventures, which led to him playing with Donegal for a year and winning a Railway Cup medal with Ulster). Brian McEniff (the Donegal manager) was a bit upset and I understand that.

"He's always been capable of missing simple chances, but only Padraig can put the impossible ball over the bar. Some days you go away thinking, `what was he doing?' and other days, `how does he do it?'.

"This year, he's been very good. He loves the big occasion. Padraig would have accepted that his inter-county career is probably over and now he finds himself totally focused on the club. He has been enjoying his year and appreciates the success greatly."

If Brogan's is the biggest individual file in the catalogue of controversy, the club's relationship with the county board and team is the most contentious single issue.

Four years ago, Ray Dempsey was requisitioned by the county team a week before the All-Ireland semi-final against Eire Og. He was unable to play for Knockmore because of a damaged hamstring which the club believe he picked up with Mayo.

Whatever the cause, there was going to be no possibility of anything happening this time. Although both Clarke and Mayo manager John Maughan protest their high opinions of each other, communication between them dried up in November.

"After the county final," says Clarke, "I started to look ahead to the Connacht championship and realised there would be a problem with county players. Decisions had to be taken in consultation with club chairman TJ Burke.

"I spoke to John Maughan and said it was vital we had a full panel available until the club's championship was complete. We also had to draw a line under the All-Ireland. There was still a fair bit of moaning in Mayo and I felt it was time to get on with it.

"Our progress was more important to us than Mayo's in the League. I couldn't afford to lose two or three players. The difference between winning and losing might be the three county players. John Maughan would always have been in a better position to look over the fence at other clubs if he had a shortage. With Knockmore, I had no fence to look over.

Maughan's perspective is different. The crux came with a League match in Portlaoise last November. Mayo had lost seven players to suspension in the wake of the All-Ireland. Free-taker Maurice Sheridan was injured. Kevin O'Neill and Peter Butler were asked to play, but sided with the club. Mayo lost narrowly.

"I didn't request Knockmore players for the League match against Monaghan," says Maughan. "In the circumstances going into the Laois game I had suspensions and two or three injured players. I requested the two players because I needed them, I needed at least one of them. Unfortunately they dug their heels in which didn't sit well with me at the time.

"I was disappointed. If we'd have had Kevin O'Neill in particular, we could have won the match. With due respect to St Mary's (Sligo champions, due to play Knockmore a week after the Laois match), I think they (Knockmore) could have spared the players."

There was subsequent talk of the Knockmore players never playing for the county again. This has led to the strange phenomenon of Knockmore's progress being treated as vindication of the players, despite the fact that it wasn't the county that dropped them in the first place.

Should they play for Mayo? Will they be picked?

"I don't know," says Clarke about the possible translation of their club form on to the county stage. "To get that type of football out of guys, it's up to each and every manager," he adds obliquely.

"I've no grievance with Knockmore," says Maughan. "I hope they win. It would be good for Mayo, good for the West. If those who are good enough are interested - and reading between the lines, a couple are - it would be in the best interests of Mayo football if they joined the panel."

The club appears to thrive on the friction. Them against the world or at least the rest of the county. Clarke himself doesn't dwell on the subject and prefers to look at more expansive motivations.

"At times I wonder," he says, "if Knockmore people fully understand the speed of movement with which the players have moved on. Other years, they'd have settled for getting to the county final and winning it. We've moved on from there and our thinking has moved on. We're capable of bigger things.

"The players have in the past been heavily criticised. They're not losers and want to prove that and a lot of them have to prove it to themselves."