The men who have seen it all

Nobody told them it would be easy. Ask Peter Brady how many times he's played championship football for Offaly and he laughs and offers some simple arithmetic. "I've been on for 13 seasons now. Must be about 13 times."

It's closer to 30 games, of course, but 13 seasons have brought 13 defeats. Peter Brady can recall each loss as easily as he can run his fingers along the line of a scar.

Ask Vinny Claffey when he first played with Brady and he can't quite remember. Twelve years ago maybe. "He'd always have been there." For Claffey, pulling on an Offaly jersey has always meant being in earshot of Brady's easy chatter.

"We don't live near each other, but the understanding we have on the pitch, it's like we grew up together sometimes. We know the way we move."

That knowledge of each other wasn't easy to come by. If defeat wasn't a fully blown addiction in Offaly it was certainly a habit. In the years immediately after 1982 and all that, they would lose narrowly despite great expectations. Then the defeats grew greater and the expectations narrowed. To devote the best years of a life to playing football for Offaly was a gesture of stoic martyrdom or, as unkinder people put it, "just plain stupid".

Offaly became a dowdy football outpost. In August and September to be an Offaly footballer was to have a slight headstart in getting tickets to see the Offaly hurlers. Until this year, that is, when the county rediscovered that late summer is the sweetest time for football and the tricoloured jersey came back into football fashion.

August. While the weather held fair for a few days early this week Peter Brady went out to the bog and lifted a bit of turf. Later, back in the shop in the middle of Edenderry with an All-Ireland semi-final beginning to crowd his thoughts the significance began to dawn on him.

People shuffling quietly to the counter with arms outstretched. People who had waited till all the Leinster final fuss had died away to offer their congratulations and best wishes to the town's most luminous talent. They've waited a long time for days like these.

"The lean years?" says Peter Brady when you inquire. "There was a lot of them anyway."

Trying to describe the ineptitude of Offaly football in the years after Eugene Magee left is like trying to describe the air. Ineptitude was just there, all around. Thinking about it too much was frightening. Peter Brady thought about it too much.

"Yeah. Came close to quitting a few times," he says. "Just felt like packing it in. After defeats you just put down your head. Then, after a couple of weeks, you say `ah well I'll go again'. You knew there was a better team in Offaly than was being shown out on the pitch. The work just didn't go into it and you never knew why."

For Brady the glass was always half empty. For his partner, riding shotgun in the Offaly forward line for a decade now, there was always room for argument.

"Peter would always be more pessimistic than me," says Claffey.

Claffey was on Hill 16 when the last great team won an All-Ireland in 1982. Can't be 15 years ago, can it?

"I'd be optimistic by nature. I'd always be saying that it would be coming along the next year. Peter would be wondering would we ever get into a Leinster final. I know he came close to packing it in. I never felt like quitting, though. I always enjoyed playing football. Playing for the county was a great honour.

"Some games that we lost stick out. We played Donegal in the league quarter-final in 1992 and they beat us in extra time. We were winning by three points with half a minute to go. They went on to win an All-Ireland. They went on to win something and that was a real low. We felt we were close to them."

Dublin beat Offaly by 11 points that summer.

Claffey and Brady have grown old together on afternoons like that. Brady made his debut as an 18-yearold in Croke Park in 1984, himself and his brother Mick coming on together as subs. Peter Brady was on Mick Holden and "got a few kicks of it but scored nothing". Dublin won that day as well.

Claffey and Peter Brady played together in 1985 and 1986 for the Offaly under-21s. They reached an All-Ireland final in 1986 and five of the panel, including Claffey, made the senior squad that year. Claffey came on for his senior debut in Tullamore the following summer. Played Kildare. Kildare won.

The mid 1980s was too soon to get depressed, though.

"We had a good under-21 team in '86 and then we won it out in 1988 with another team," says Claffey. "Some of the 1982 lads were still around. We thought it was just a transition. You'd think it was only a matter of time, but the longer it went on the worse it got."

"Winning and losing aren't that far apart in terms of habits," says Brady. "Me and Vinny we are getting at the wrong end of the years. I thought when I came on the panel at 18 I was going to win a good few Leinsters. Vinny thought the same when he came on. Little did we know."

The longer it went on . . . The team which Peter Brady crashed on to in 1984 was spangled with All-Ireland medallists. There were flesh and blood heroes there: Matt Connor, Johnny Mooney, Gerry Carroll, Mick Lowry, Brendan Lowry, John Guinan and Paudge Dunne. And that's just Brady's off-the-top-of-his-head list.

"You'd be thinking what an honour it was to just be playing with these fellas, but one by one they all went. Gerry Carroll went to America, Johnny Mooney went to America, Tom Connor went to Dublin and gave it up, Matt got injured and had to give it up. Suddenly you have no team at all.

"Brendan Lowry and Paudge Dunne were about the last left. Myself, Vinny and Brendan were the full-forward line for a good while. I came in and I was training with all them lads and suddenly I looked around and there was no team at all. It was great when they were there, but by the time it got to about 1989 or 1990 and they were almost all gone it was a real struggle for us then."

If Claffey the optimist remembers the league quarter-final of 1992 as the low point, Brady the pessimist can offer up a banquet of bad days.

"People wonder did we take much abuse in the bad days. No. Not that much abuse. Sure they wouldn't bother to come to the games to give you the abuse. I played in Tullamore with less than 50 people there. You'd hear fellas in pubs or even in the shop here and they'd be rolling their eyes and saying `sure Offaly's gone to the dogs altogether'. They were right. We were."

The litany begins. Brady is a nice storyteller, relating everything with an air of slightly detached disbelief. Jody Gunning asked him recently how many managers he had served under while playing for Offaly. Brady made out a list and it came to 11 names. Well-intentioned souls, mostly. Brady will tell the stories, but he'll grant the authors of Offaly's misfortunes their anonymity.

"I wouldn't like to tell you who was the manager at this time, but Vinny would remember it. The year Laois beat us in Portlaoise. That was bad. There was only five or six of us training in the run-up to it and we'd run around a bit and then we'd play a bit of soccer. It was all a farce, a bit of a joke around the county. I remember nights, lots of them, and there would be maybe eight or nine of us out training in Tullamore and the Tullamore club team would be training across the road. They'd have 40 lads out and another 50 people watching them and we'd be there playing mini soccer. The county team!"

People used to come to Brady and advise him to give up the football and not be making a fool of himself. Play golf. Enjoy life.

He played a little soccer for a while, following his friend Ray Treacy from Home Farm to Shamrock Rovers, but the travelling up and down to Dublin bugged him. The football was in his genes anyway, his father, Mick, having played in the 1961 All-Ireland final and his brother having played at full-back for seven or eight years.

"I'd talk about giving it up, but I couldn't. There's a great old club here in town, they stood by me. Men like Paddy McCormack. I was down a few times and Paddy said to me `don't give up, there'll be a time when you won't be able to play and you'll wish you could'. So I stuck with it, hoping I'd win something."

Claffey, in Doon, a good stretch of the midlands away from Edenderry, never entertained the doubts which plagued Brady.

"I'd always look for the positive things out of games. You never really knew how other players felt about the bad games. After you lose you go back to your own place and you are on your own. When we'd be out of the championship I could always see some bit of progress." For Brady, the sorrowful mysteries of Offaly football are still being worked through the system. Fresh horrors still churning through his brain. You wonder if he wakes up at night sweating and 10 points down.

"Against Meath two years ago in Navan. We were 1-4 to a point up. We got to half time leading by 1-5 to 0-4. Then they just ran through us. Brendan Reilly scored a couple, which got them back into the game. We didn't score in the second half. Not at all. They brought on Colm O'Rourke then and he scored a goal and the whole place went mad. I was so demoralised I stayed away from the club here for a couple of weeks. I couldn't see any way back."

That was bad. Maybe not as bad as 1991, though.

"There was a bit of a buzz about us in 1991 alright," concedes Claffey. "We'd come out of the fourth division, playing well. People fancied us a little bit."

In the week before they played Meath, Offaly had a challenge with Donegal and ran in 3-5 before Donegal registered a score. Buzz.

Meath were reckoned to be tired after an epic series of drawn games against Dublin and then Wicklow.

"They murdered us," says Brady. "They ran through us like we weren't there. We had no organisation. I was full-forward on Mick Lyons that day and I'd go out ahead of him and the ball would go over my head into his arms. I'd get in behind him and they'd kick it straight to him. It was so bad that it was just every man for himself. We just kept working and working so as we wouldn't look too bad. We were running into spaces and the ball was going into other spaces." Meath 2-13, Offaly 0-7. Spirits lower than a snake's belly in Edenderry.

That was a low time, but now that Peter Brady thinks of it, perhaps the lowest circle of hell was losing to Wexford in 1994.

"I thought the Wexford one in Tullamore was really bad. We drew with Wicklow and beat them in Tullamore in the replay and next thing Wexford beat us. It was a disaster. I got my nose broken early. Vinny missed a penalty. It was a really fine summer Sunday. Big crowd out because no matter how bad we were we'd surely beat Wexford. That one set us back another couple of years. I came home and said `forget about it'."

Indeed Offaly are unique in terms of the sheer number of teams who have beaten them in the championship in recent years. Since 1990 they have been turned over by Laois, Meath, Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Wexford. Not so much soft touches as defining the concept of the soft touch.

The pressure of that knowledge asserted itself on two different temperaments in their forward line.

Claffey was always aware of the latent support within the county and was constantly surprised at the interest the team attracted.

"You'd know there was a passion for football here somewhere. Take last year, we failed to get out of Division Four after being beaten by Longford, then we lost in the championship to Louth. A lot of people would have said that was the last straw. People came out and supported us this year, though. When we got to the Leinster final you could see what it meant to people.

"The thing which always puzzled me was the way good players would come and go. We'd have fellas who were really good for a year or two and then they'd just be let drift away. We got players out of the under-21 teams, but they didn't last the distance, a lot of them. All it needed at any time was for somebody to come along and organise us properly." For Brady, playing in a fully-functioning, properly-organised team is a merciful release from the bad days.

"I used to get a few good games for the club every year where I'd run in big scores and then in the league, whatever division we'd be in you could run up big scores handy enough. Come the championship you'd be well marked and maybe have a couple of fellas looking out for you and I'd just know that in Offaly people were picking up the paper on a Monday morning and saying: `What did Brady score? Nothing. Let us down again. Never does it on the big day.' You'd just want to go around telling people that none of us were good enough."

This sunny August has delivered Brady and Claffey to a blessed utopia. Claffey remembers arriving in Doon with the Cup on the Sunday night of the Leinster final, the friends, the family, the tears and the hooting.

Brady remembers leaving Edenderry that morning with Finbarr Cullen, the whole town emptied out on to the street waiting to wish them well.

"I was so embarrassed. It was like we'd won already. I got on the bus and just realised what a boost it was. I look out the window here now and all I can see is Offaly flags. Never thought I'd see the day. Whatever happens on Sunday I hope we come back through the town."

Years of failure have been a reproach to Offaly's proud history. Claffey and Brady cut a swathe into the big leagues tomorrow, the sharpened cutting blades in a remarkable full forward line. They have arrived together at the place they were born for.

"Imagine if Peter Brady had never won a Leinster medal," says Claffey quietly.

Imagine if either of them had faded away without that honour. Nobody told them it would be easy. Nobody told them it would be this hard or take this long, though.