The two balanced sides to the Derry story

An end to fallow days and the journalists are back like migratory birds, hopping from foot to foot in the late evening sunshine over Owenbeg. Back the road is Dungiven, the Glenshane Pass the gentle ridge of the Sperrins, ahead is Derry city and an evening of talk and sweat.

Scattered around are the little towns whose names sound out like tribunes for the game here, the villages Bellaghy and Castledawson and Swatragh and Loup and Ballinderry, the townlands of Gulladuff and Mayogall and on. and on. Country places. Somnolent Derry city has no part in it.

Taking in the unique taste of Derry football again, you realise how badly they have been missed, how little enjoyment we got out of Eamonn Coleman and his team and their brief sunburst eight years ago. And surveying the landscape, the little dotted villages, the place-names redolent of heroes or rivalries it's hard to imagine how they've gotten back so quickly. It's a small wee football community they have here, but hardy.

Inside a dressing-room big enough for an army to get changed in everything is ready. It's like prison visiting hour. Tables are arranged around the white-walled dressing-room with a chair on either side of them. Players will come in and be pointed in the direction of their visitor for the night. Not many players mind. The best line of the night states that GAA PROs are as relevant as provincial titles these days.

Derry football in its desperate years never lacked for distraction or fascination but here they are again with another team virtually. And back in Croke Park with a middling chance of making the All-Ireland final. And the same pint-sized messiah leading them. Eamonn Coleman is in the room and the place is alight with his mischief before he has settled into his seat, with his hands wrapped around his cup of tea.

"Ya enjoying the summer Eamonn."

Eyes roll.

"Well are ye surprised to be in an All-Ireland semi-final?"

Pause.

"Ach, don't be asking such stupid questions."

And he's grinning to himself, the same old caffler who walked out of the dressing-room in the The Marshes, Newry eight years back and gathered the press around and announced "see youse boys, youse know nothin".

A Down team just beaten by 11 points mourned themselves in the background. Eamonn Coleman had arrived in the big time and we concluded that like ole man river he must know something.

Not that he was ever destined for anywhere else. If he ever keels over it will be at a football match surely and we'll know straight away that the oak leaf in his blood has clotted his good heart and that the lively brain which worked only on the narrow Derry wavelength is stilled at last. Then there'll be yarns to tell.

Is Eamon Coleman the only man in the GAA to have been banned twice for 12 months? Once for playing for three different clubs in a year? Is he the only one to have been sacked almost immediately after bringing his county its first senior All-Ireland? There's a great GAA book in that head of his.

He began managing teams when he was 28 years of age and had an All-Ireland minor and under-21 medal jingling in his pocket. He was working with a fella from Tyrone, a fella by the name of Mickey Gallagher and one day out of the blue Mickey asked would Coleman be interested in managing their club team in Kildress. Tony Scullion is managing them right now but you won't have heard of them.

"I'd never thought about management," he says now. "I went to Kildress in 1977. They'd never been over the first round of the county championship. We got beaten in a replay in the county semi-final and they've not been back since.

His CV filled out quickly after that. He had the Derry minors in 1983 and brought them to an All-Ireland. He took the under-21s in 1985 when nobody wanted them.

"Cork beat us in the under-21 final. Then I went to England. Derry couldn't get a manager in 1991 and the county board flew me home to talk to me. Flew me home. Imagine. Then we won 43 matches out of 47, the National League and the All-Ireland and then they sacked me." He creases into laughter at the county board's punchline.

"Ach we can laugh about it now," he says, "but it wasn't funny at the time."

No. It wasn't.

The story of Derry football and all its successes of recent times is intertwined in the most complicated way with the story of Eamonn Coleman. Some people disliked that as much as Coleman dislikes red tape and blazers. He was pushed out the door.

No reckoning of Derry today can begin without an account of those bloody years. Player morale left and players went after it. For a while virtually the whole senior team was on unofficial strike. As Joe Brolly told Breaking Ball a few weeks ago: "we'd ring each other on Mondays and say did ye see how the scabs got on?" Good men lost sleep trying to figure Derry football out. Coleman, peripatetic at the best of times, wandered with his work and lost interest. The good of 1993 was sucked out quickly. He carried the husk but only for a while.

"It took me a long time to get over that sacking of 1993. I just lost the appetite for the game. I lost the heart. I went to Derry matches alright - I was always a Derryman - but it didn't bother me or excite me. Well, it bothered me that good players like Johnny McGurk and Henry Downey and Anthony Tohill were getting beaten by 13 Tyrone men that weren't fit to be on the same pitch. The team was wrecked. If it hadn't happened against Tyrone it was going to happen against somebody else.

"It was going to happen though. That annoyed me. A great team that should have won two All-Irelands, maybe three, only got one. Those players - McGilligan, Downey, Barton, McGurk, Gormley, Brolly, all of them - they don't come along often. It took so long to build them. They are a special breed and to have it all thrown away by county board ach. . . ."

Thirteen Tyrone men. That one-point defeat in Clones with SΘamus McCallan and Pascal Canavan gone for early showers, that was the thud of a team hitting bottom. Tyrone. The worst humiliations always happen with the neighbours somehow.

Yet, now they are back. They have a right to be. Teams break out every second generation or so from places like Derry, from counties who must necklace together a few parishes and pitches just to make a team. Derry shouldn't be due another crack at the big time until about 2035.

Coleman hasn't told them this, though.

Anthony Tohill has arrived. He is box office, so box office that you imagine flashbulbs popping as he strides through the Owenbeg complex. He remembers that evening in 1995 as being the low point in terms of his own disenchantment.

"There were times, yes, when walking away seemed like an idea. After the saga involving Eamonn and then the 1995 defeat by Tyrone, that was a low ebb in Derry football. In terms of my own feelings, that's when I had the flirtation with soccer. If things had moved along nicely in terms of the Derry side, I'd have been there all the way."

When he speaks about playing soccer there are hints of the adulterer explaining his wandering ways. He had his fun but, well, how to explain it. . . His words could be borrowed from a marriage counselling session.

"I'd had a gutful of football and wanted something else to occupy my mind. This is what I enjoy though, what I was brought up doing. Ultimately, it comes from yourself. I suppose I realised that Gaelic football is what I do best, born and bred doing it, playing for the county was what I wanted to do, realised I had to concentrate solely on football."

It is hard to know if the people who run football in Derry deserve the fortune they've enjoyed in the past decade. And what fortune. The Melbourne Demons decline to pay for Anthony Tohill's university education and he returns to Derry and goes training on his first night back in 1991. Manchester United sample him in a try-out against Sunderland but place him gently back into the pond.

And Coleman? He'd have happily wandered back to England and stewed in it, but other things kept him here so he worked the sites and bided his time and when the chance came to get involved again he took it.

Without Coleman and without Tohill there would have been no Derry All-Ireland eight years ago, and there would be another Ulster team coming to Croke Park tomorrow. When Derry football achieves, it does so by dint of Coleman's brain and his genius with people and Tohill's brain and his genius with a football. Each knows the value of the other.

"Tohill is an exceptional fella," says Coleman, "a great man, a great friend and the best Gaelic footballer I ever saw, and I'm talking about them all. He has everything. You've had the men who could catch ball and the men who could kick a free and the men who could carry it. Well, Tohill can do everything. And what does he do for me?

"He's like Henry Downey. When he speaks, everyone stops and looks and listens. He's held in the highest respect."

Tohill reciprocates: "Eamon has always been there in Derry football. For as long as I can remember. He lives for Derry football. He has a way about him, you couldn't not like him. You're in the dresssing-room at half-time and your head is down and he's giving you a bollicking, criticising your game but he has that way with him that you can't dislike him. He has that way of getting around you. It's the Derry blood running through his veins. He cares."

With Tohill as the heart and with Coleman as the brains they have built a new team. On the playing staff only Tohill, Dermot Heaney, Gary Coleman and Johnny McBride survive. The style is different, less laboured some would say, less thoughtful others would suggest. The team plays the ball quickly out of defence and works it from there.

"I couldn't compare the teams," says Coleman. "This is a new team, a young team, this Derry team is probably the youngest county team in Ireland. The team in 1993 was mainly well-established players, who had the experience and knew what was needed."

Does the lack of experience worry him going into a semi-final against Galway?

"Ach, sure it's early in the week to worry about that. Anyway, experience is like tradition, it's a myth if you just go out and play well." This season has been a condensed lesson in experience anyway. If they knew that 1993 was finally and mirthlessly over when 13 Tyrone men beat them in 1995, well they knew they were in trouble this year when Tyrone beat them again.

"If someone had said after the Tyrone game that we'd have got to an All-Ireland semi-final we'd have been a bit taken aback," says Tohill. "Some things have worked in our favour. The extra games, the chance for a young team to gel. This team is having its first real year together. The team has progressed and improved steadily as the competition has gone on."

So they tightened, got meaner and tried their new face out on a number of victims. If there is a kink now it is in the forwards who score only sporadically.

Coleman is nonplussed. "They said that about us in 1993. We got to Croke Park and scored 15 points against Dublin and 1-14 against Cork. That's enough to be scoring."

For Tohill, this year's adventure is to be savoured. He turned 30 earlier in the month and was made captain of the Irish team which will travel to Australia later this year. For the guy who came back from Melbourne 10 years ago there is a satisfying symmetry to his career. For Ireland, his return to Australia will mean meeting up again with Gary Lyon who was with Melbourne when Tohill was there and who is managing the Aussie team this autumn.

"There'll be Garry and Jim Stynes will be around and I imagine a few others who played when I was there. It will be nice to go back as captain of Ireland. Ten years ago I came home and going back that way having won an All-Ireland in between, it makes me realise it wasn't a mistake."

And for Derry, his development in the team has been classical almost. He began as the bright understudy to the monumental Brian McGilligan, then made the adjustment to the defensive, holding part of his game when McGilligan went. For a few years he played as an equal with Dermot Heaney in the middle of the park, both men roughly the same age, both All-Ireland medallists, both compulsive workers. And now at the end he's playing with another red head, Fergal Doherty from Bellaghy, except Doherty is the kid and Tohill is the protector.

"I like that extra responsibility," he says. "This is my third year as captain, I feel that I have something now to offer the younger lads. . . . It's a good blend to have, that mix of young and old, a few older fellas passing on what they know."

And what they know is considerable. When Eamonn Coleman turns his mind to the business of experience he has a statistic to offer: "Some of the boys, Anthony and Gary and Dermot, I reckon they've played in Croke Park 15 times since minor and only lost twice. That's experience to be bringing down." Tohill rises to leave. He is the box-office star of the evening and the scribblers, snappers and television heads have all formed a queue for him. What's left is his quiet thoughtfulness and the illuminations provided by his old friend Coleman.

All night, of course, Coleman has been shooting off little fireworks which rise and burn into the memory..

"I must say the Derry county chairmen are slowly improving down the years," he grins.

Is this Derry team hard to manage?

"No Derry team is hard to manage," he says emphatically, then laughs.

Well, maybe not for you.

"That's because the county board pays me more than any other manager!" he says and bangs the table with delight.

C'mon Eamonn, with the way the summer started off aren't you a bit surprised to be having a press night in August?

"There's only one thing in Gaelic," he says, "no matter how bad you play, no matter what bad period you had, be ahead at the finish. Not how you start, it's how you finish. Football is like boxing."

Well Ulster football, Eamonn.

"It's like boxing because you want to be ahead at the finish. We danced a bit and we took a bit of punishment but we're still standing."

And for how long?

"Listen," says Eamonn Coleman with a final parting wink. "Before the Tyrone game it was a matter of keeping the temperature in the dressing-room down. No hyping up was needed. We were ready. Keeping things level is my job now. Everyone else knows their job and they know how good they are.

"There'll be two good football teams goin' out there on Sunday no matter what the press says or Pat Spillane or Colm O'Rourke. Two good teams, mind."

Look out youse boys. Ole man river just keeps rollin' along and his oak-limbed midfielder is nurturing an acorn.