Learning to love Antrim football

Let he who is without sin when it comes to denigrating Antrim football cast the first stone. The county with the worst record in Ulster by some considerable distance enters the Championship fray on Sunday against Down but the time has come for all the ridicule and the cheap shots to end.

Forget all the snide comparisons with the noble footballers of Kilkenny. Leave behind all the so-called "helpful" references to the fact that they now take decimal coinage at the gates in Clones on Ulster final day. Out of the North is going to be the first to stand up for Antrim and to say it loud and proud.

First off, a full and frank confession. In the past this column may have been the forum for many of the aforementioned tasteless jibes. It was lazy and it was easy. But let it be known now that none of it was meant to be taken to heart. Honest.

The problem is that the statistics and the history of the county's football decline provide such rich pickings. As a simple experiment, digest a few of these facts and figures, sit back for 30 seconds and see if you can resist thinking of at least one smart, sneering or otherwise uncomplimentary comment.

Antrim have not won an Ulster football title since 1951. Antrim have not contested an Ulster final since 1970. Antrim have not won a single match in the Ulster football championship since they beat Cavan in 1982. Antrim have lost so much ground in Ulster that even the football people of Fermanagh and Monaghan look down their noses at them. OK, time's up. See? Not very easy, is it?

But all need not be lost. With a little help you too can learn to love Antrim in the same way that we now do. In the space of one short week you too can cast aside forever all your old, lazy preconceptions. It all started last week with the public debut of the new, all-singing, all-dancing, revamped Casement Park.

Now, for years Casement had been the poorest of poor relations when it came to facilities within Ulster. Nobody ever had any gripe with either the pitch or the setting. The playing surface is acknowledged as one of the best in the province, while the bowl-shaped arena provides ideal viewing from almost anywhere in the ground.

The problem was the facilities. To call them "Dickensian" would have been unkind and as the rest of the sporting world moved on in the post-Hillsborough era, Casement remained a monument to the disdainful way that sport used to treat its most avid consumers.

The old grassy banks were just fine and dandy on that balmy summer day which sidles into Belfast once and only once every summer. But the rest of the time, the merest jolt or movement could result in an ignominious slide down the hill. The repeated refrain that the park was a "natural amphitheatre" was all very well.

But now all has changed, changed utterly. A visionary £2.1 million u2.1 million pound rebuilding scheme has transformed the decaying facilities into a modern 30,000 capacity sporting venue. It is clean, it is comfortable, there are seats, there are terraces (Hill 16 diehards, take note) and most of all, it is safe.

All this was undertaken, don't forget, in a city and county where conventional wisdom would hold that the GAA in general and gaelic football in particular are moribund and irrelevant. That the redevelopment of Casement Park has been effected in the space of a year and has managed to attract substantial public funding is testimony to the dedication of everyone involved. It shows that there is more to the Association than preparing Championship teams for months on end, fostering elite groups of footballers and hurlers at the expense of the ordinary decent club players, planning elaborate winter holidays and allocating tickets for All Ireland Final banquets.

The 24 or 25 footballers who will trot out on to the Marshes in Newry next Sunday afternoon will probably never experience any of those things in their inter-county football careers. For men like Locky McCurdy, Paul McErlean, Aidan Donnelly and Terry McCrudden the past decade of struggle has been about the more mundane tasks of fielding all the flak and getting on with the small matter of ending that horrendous 17 year losing streak.

Management teams have come and gone with alarming frequency and while the county regularly sends sides which more than hold their own into the Ulster club championship, there have been fundamental problems translating that into achievements at inter-county level. Part of the problem is the same city-country divide that Dublin, Cork and Galway have had to contend with. The crucial difference is that while football in Belfast has struggled on, the game has become largely eclipsed by hurling as you travel further north.

Even more fundamentally the Troubles have had a devastating effect on GAA within the city. Some clubs lost a whole generation of players during the 1970s either through death, imprisonment or emigration. The security situation had a catastrophic effect on the most basic GAA activities like the organising of club games. The administrative structures struggled on admirably but in the circumstances it was perhaps understandable during the darkest days that full priority and concentration may not have been given to beating Tyrone, Derry or whoever in the first round of the Ulster Championship of that particular year.

But there are signs that the GAA is now coming out the other side. The new Casement Park is proof in bricks and mortar of that regeneration at the highest level and below that youth coaching programmes are now in place to ensure that this generation of footballing and hurling talent does not haemorrhage away in the same fashion as the last. How long it takes for that to filter through to the more public arenas of the Championship remains to be seen but there are just small hints and suggestions in the young players emerging on to the senior team that a change is going to come.

This Sunday, even against a Down side riven by the disintegration of a double All-Ireland winning side, may have come to soon. But if it's not this year, then it might next year or the one after that. Last Thursday night Antrim played Derry club side Bellaghy in a warm-up game at Moneyglass. As the more senior players mingled about beforehand, one talked freely about all the mockery and all the jibing laughter levelled against them. He said he didn't mind at all. "The thing is," he said, "I just enjoy playing for Antrim so much." Enjoyment. What an old-fashioned concept. When was the last time you heard an inter-county footballer talking like that? Go Antrim go.