Looking to deliver on the big stage

INTERVIEW - DAMIAN CASSIDY: Tom Humphriestalks to the Derry manager as he prepares to face rivals Tyrone in the opening round of the National Football League

SPRINGTIME COMES around each year and Derry vibrates with its giddy expectations for the summer ahead. It’s possible right here to bump into a man who has seen something akin to the light shining inspirationally in a McGrath Cup stalemate. This modest glimmering has led him to believe that this year Ulster will be ruled once again by the Oak Leaf county.

Similarly you can walk on until you come upon another member of the faithful who in one stroke has freed himself from the burden of grief. Derry’ll not win anything with the presence of a certain idiot within their fold. Nothing.

It’s almost always this sense of feast or famine in Derry, where the investment of belief in the county team is as volatile as the stock market itself.

Damian Cassidy, born into and appreciative of the local excitability, leads his Derry side out this evening in a league opener which has the potential to set the general mood in Derry for another month or too. There was a time, and a happy time it was too, when the flavour of the win in the 1993 All-Ireland could only be completely enjoyed Foyleside by taking Tyrone’s view into account. Tyrone’s view was black. The more Derry succeeded, the more distance they put between themselves and their neighbours.

That was then of course, this is now. Tyrone have shown the template for permanent revolution, demonstrated how a small, keen and committed county can stay at or near the top table, the challenge has been rewritten.

It is no longer enough for any man’s summer that an Ulster title be claimed in Clones in July. It is to win an All-Ireland and to look like having the unity and maturity and ambition to kick on and win another one.

Tyrone are the brand leaders. Derry are in another of their periods of transition. Underage success is being built for and prepared for but as yet is too sporadic to generate a reliable supply of footballers. Cassidy is happy at what is developing at grass roots however.

“I know that at underage in Derry there is a massive amount of work gone in at club level. Grass roots coaching level. That is starting to feed through into schools under-15 and under-16. We are strong at those grades now. Kilreagh won the under-16 vocational schools last year. Maghera had success all the way down to the go games and the blitzes.

“We have a highly developed set-up. We lost our way, put a gap in there, winning an underage title and then having to wait five years or so before we got another. There is a huge amount of work going into addressing that. So that is a start.”

Cassidy is all too aware of the bubbling nature of Derry expectation and promising success five years down the line doesn’t draw standing ovations everywhere.

“That’s how we are. When it goes well we all feel everything is rosy. A minor final in 2007? We will be sorted. The problem for Derry is we need to have teams consecutively coming through. One team won’t give you enough.

“We had one team and, after another five years, another team. We didn’t back it up in any way. We aren’t like Kerry, everybody tries football down down there, that’s part of the culture of the people . We don’t have it that way for obvious reasons. We make the best of what we have.”

It took a while in Derry, he thinks, before there was a full realisation of what exactly was going on next door in Tyrone.

“The new standard was being set right beside us. There were significant developments around strength and conditioning, big change. I got involved with Derry in 1984 and was there till about 1996 and we would have sporadic runs at doing weight but nothing like the individualised exercise regimes that the lads do now. From a player’s perspective that is a massive difference and it’s one you can see in the dresssingroom when players take their shirts off. The physique of the Gaelic footballer has changed.”

As everybody waits for the next great evolutionary leap forward, All-Ireland’s are won and lost in a smaller space than a gym.

“It boils down to the players’ mindset. Looking at people who will get up at six in the morning to do 45 minutes before work, or go at lunchtime and do the same. I met a 17-year-old swimming at the pool a while ago. He is serious about his swimming. He goes to school but he is up at 5:50 every morning to do an hour in the pool before he goes in. And then back for another hour in the evening. Every day.

“Things change. The Morris Minor was a great car in the 1950s and 1960s. Now it is quaint. You have to move on.”

Ask him to name where his courage and inspiration for embracing change comes from there is only one answer. Eamonn Coleman, the father of the modern GAA in Derry.

“No qualms. It would be Eamonn who had that biggest influence. Predominantly he changed us in the area of realising what it takes to win. Until then Derry had no idea how to win. We were very happy to win the odd Ulster title. We would have liked to have won more but had no idea how to go about it.

“I’d be doing Eamonn’s memory a disservice by trying to sum him up in a few stories. He had the personality and the passion essential to selling you a big idea. A big idea that would involve a lot of sacrifice. There was that sharpness to his voice that made you listen. He had those oratorical skills you don’t meet often in life. Personality, delivery and a bucket full of passion. All that and a real understanding of Derry. He was a Derry man through and through. He knew everyone. There is a confrontation thing among Derry people that Eamonn knew and was well able for.”

Damian Cassidy sighs.

“And that doesn’t go close to capturing him. I worked with him from when I was 16 or 17. It was a little like how Mickey Harte had a significant number of Tyrone players from that level. When you have built up that relationship with Eamonn you would always go that extra mile for him. That was football, but for many of us, I think too in terms of a real close friendship. Again it is hard to articulate the feeling that I would have or that of many of us.

“I would have looked to have chats with him at many different times. There was just an attachment there that is fairly hard to accurately describe. It influences your thinking over your life and football. It was such a serious bond. Would I include Eamonn as part of my extended family in terms of those relationships? I certainly would.”

The earnestness about football brings its own trouble, of course. When things have to be changed he can’t just walk on by. This year it was the structure of the club league in Derry, a competition which was a source of constant battle. When his predecessor Paddy Crozier sat down to pick a team for Derry the night prior to Derry playing Fermanagh in the Ulster Championship semi-final he noted one player had played 29 matches. Tough hard games every one of them.

“Where can the freshness be for that fella? Those are the things we are working on. People will criticise, but if they give us a chance we will see a difference in players and ordinary club players will get to play more games. The way we were doing it! Dog eat dog. Fierce. My point was that our players were being expected to play for so long at a particular level. There are only so many times they can get themselves up.”

This spring the targets throw a damp cloth on any hysteria. “Basically if they can get a run at end of the league coming into the championship, developing, we have a panel settled. Then they will move on. “We want to retain the divisional status and we have to find another two or three players from our under-21s coming through.”

Three just now. They are, he feels, the quality of players to make the difference in the absence of Sean Marty Lockharte, who has retired.

James Kielt, who was involved very promisingly last year and who retains his student and under-21 status, is back and should get to do some sparring. They have Declan Mullen and Cillian O’Boyle who has been midfield for Jordanstown in McKenna Cup.

Big and strong he says, and breathes in slowly. Big and Strong.