Wee County fully engaged by unfinished business

INTERVIEW PETER FITZPATRICK: MALACHY CLERKINtalks to the Louth TD and senior football manager who says of tonight's key qualifier against Meath: "This is the biggest game Louth have played in a long, long time. No doubt about it."

THE FITTEST deputy in the Dáil has an office about as far from the front door as it is possible to be. On his first day as a TD, Peter Fitzpatrick was asked if he had a preference as to which office he might get and since he knew nothing of the time-honoured pas de deux involved in such delicate affairs, he said he didn’t care. Give him any one at all, it didn’t matter.

So they put him up on the fifth floor while the clever boys and girls who’d been there before hedged and inched and had quiet words in the right ears.

It was no skin off his nose. A year short of his 50th birthday and lean as a teacher’s pointer, he will make a serious addition to the Oireachtas football team if and when there’s time for childish things. Just because he has a longer walk than most when it comes to collecting guests or going to vote is hardly cause to grumble.

“It meant I was able to get going straight away,” he says. “You could be waiting a week if you made a big deal of it.”

It’s a whole new world. He’d waited 15 years to become manager of the Louth footballers but when it came to running for the Dáil, barely a week passed between the idea being put to him and his decision to say yes. Fine Gael came to him around the turn of the year, he got nominated at the local convention in Louth about a fortnight later and he was out canvassing from the first day of February. He knows the date because two days earlier, he’d stood on the sideline and watched his team throw away an O’Byrne Cup final to Kildare by coughing up two goals in injury-time. “Typical Louth,” he smiles.

But we’re not here to talk politics. Not parliamentary politics, at any rate. He knows it, we know it, you know it. If Louth had pulled anyone else in the qualifiers, Peter Fitzpatrick TD would be sitting behind his desk this Thursday afternoon with a phone hooked to his ear, a scatter of reports spilled out in front of him and ne’er a newspaper man to be seen. But they didn’t, they pulled Meath. And it’s all anyone wants to talk about.

“That game is 12 months ago and I’ll be honest with you – I can go absolutely nowhere in the country without people bringing it up. The amount of people around here wishing me luck on the weekend. And it’s all out of a sympathy vote for what happened last year.”

Look. He wants to move on. He wants everybody to move on. He wants the ball to be thrown in at Breffni Park this evening and let the chips fall where they will. He wants Louth people and Meath people to stand next to each other on the terraces and have a laugh and a barney and to shake hands when it’s done. He’s managed teams in Meath, has plenty of friends there and if tonight’s game can draw some of the poison out and send everyone back to their corner with noses in joint, it’ll be best for all concerned.

And yet, and yet. He can’t let it go, not completely. He thinks people don’t really understand. This was about more than Joe Sheridan’s goal. In his mind, it was about respect and honesty and the little guy getting shaken down in front of the whole country in a way the big guy would never have to endure. It’s lived on because the two counties are neighbours and there are bragging rights in the mix. He says repeatedly that the book is closed but you only have to talk to him for 10 minutes before you realise that the spine is cracked and worn and the pages will flop open readily enough to the touch.

“As far as I was concerned, we were robbed of a Leinster title. That’s the bottom line. It was an injustice, what was done, right? It really, really hit us hard. I have to hand it to the players and the county board – I think they took it with dignity. But when you have something in your grasp like that and it’s taken away from you, it’s just a hard, hard pill to swallow.”

Little things annoy him still. He says nobody from Croke Park or the Leinster Council has been in touch. Not so much as a text message. The biggest controversy of the summer – of any summer arguably since Loughnane, Clare and all that in 1998 – and to him, nobody from official ranks has ever wanted to know.

He never wanted special treatment, he never wanted rules to be bent just for them. All he wanted was for somebody to come and explain to him how this was fair.

“I’m just the manager of the Louth football team and nobody has been on to me about it. As far as they’re concerned in Croke Park, it’s over and done with. They washed their hands of it.”

That’s the crux of it. Whatever about the referee’s decision, whatever about the goal, whatever about the people on the pitch at the end, he feels Louth were left hanging. Rightly or wrongly, he doubts the same thing would have happened to a bigger county. Something would have been done, some clarification would have come. Not inertia.

“Croke Park should have made a decision that evening whether the game was going to be replayed or not. But it dragged on and it dragged on and to be honest with you, the players got so unsettled by it all. I was unsettled too. I hope it didn’t show it but I was. I still maintain that Croke Park should have sorted the problem out there and then. They should have said, ‘Lads, the game’s over. Move on.’ But they said nothing and the thing dragged on for three or four days. The book should have been closed straight away.”

As for the incident itself, his desire not to drag the whole thing up again is a constant. More to the point, he hates the idea that by talking about it at all, he and his team are ducking responsibility for losing the game.

“We hold our hands up, we should never have let the game get to that point anyway. We had six or seven incidents before that goal that cost us badly. We kicked the ball away to slow the game down. We had a man sent off who I was getting ready to bring off anyway, only I probably delayed it too long.

“We lost concentration. There was a comedy of errors there and we could have done a lot to stop it. We could have stopped the ball coming in, we could have caught it when it got there, we could have done anything. The goal shouldn’t have stood but it shouldn’t have been scored either. On the Tuesday night, we all said that we threw the game away. The management team, the players, everybody in the squad knew afterwards that we could have done something to change that game. Fair enough, the referee could have done something as well but we’re not blameless.”

He’s seen Martin Sludden only once since. Back in January, he stood in a long queue at Michaela Harte’s wake and looked up to see the local referee coming walking in the opposite direction. They didn’t catch each other’s eye and the moment had passed before he even had time to realise it was a moment. There has been no communication in either direction since. It’s all still a little too raw.

“Martin Sludden didn’t consult his umpires. If he’d done that at least, then you could say something. If you look at the disallowed Graham Geraghty goal (against Kildare), that referee went in and spoke to his umpires and then he overruled them. Now to me, that was definitely a legitimate goal and it should have stood. But I have no problem with what the referee did because at the end of the day it’s his decision.

“Martin Sludden didn’t do that at all. He didn’t consult the umpires at all. He just went in and told them to put up the flag, end of story. To me, that’s a massive error. But what has happened? Nothing. The GAA still have him down as one of the top 18 referees in the country and he’s still refereeing championship matches. I don’t think it’s good enough.”

Sludden will be refereeing in Casement Park today, far from the madding crowd. Joe Sheridan will feel the full blare of the music though. Sheridan’s post-match interview with RTÉ – done in the heat of the moment with the sweat hardly dry on him – has nearly been the focus of more Louth ire than the actual goal itself. He smiled through the interview and said he felt a push in the back anyway so it should have been a penalty. And the walls came tumbling down.

Never mind that it’s hopelessly unfair on Sheridan. Never mind that he was smiling because he had just won a Leinster title with the last kick, ahem, throw of the game. Or that he genuinely made an attempt to kick the ball. Or that he couldn’t have seen a replay by the time he’d done the interview.

Or even that he’s since admitted it shouldn’t have stood.

Louth people, even one as fair-minded as Fitzpatrick, are still sore. “The only person who can answer the question about the interview is Joe Sheridan himself,” he says. “I can only say what I saw and he can only say what he did. He said the goal was legitimate and if he thinks the goal is legitimate and he wants to stick to that statement, then fair play to him. I think a couple of hundred thousand people who saw the game or saw the goal that night know that it wasn’t.”

But enough. Endless grinding will leave only dust. Fitzpatrick shook Sheridan’s hand after the Leinster final and will do the same tonight. He doesn’t want this all to come across like he’s bitter. He isn’t.

Losing the Leinster final hurt, losing it the way they did hurt even more. But he’ll remember last year for more as well. The wins over Kildare and Westmeath. The electricity before the final. The lap of honour after Dublin knocked them out. And Pat Gilroy. He’ll never forget Pat Gilroy.

“When that game was over, I went into the Dublin dressing room to thank them and wish them all the best. When I got in there, the dressing room was half-empty. I walked in the door and went to talk and Pat said, ‘Hold on.’ And he went out to the team bus and got every one of the players and staff off it and brought them back inside.

“He got them all in a circle and told them to listen. He said, ‘These men here are the real Leinster champions.’ The respect they showed me and that they showed Louth was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s what the GAA is. It’s the family, it’s the feeling. What they did that day will stick with me forever.”

So he gets up and he gets on. A million things to do. He has another year left as Louth manager no matter what happens tonight but if the county board want him to punch the clock after two, he’ll thank them and move on.

Spinning two such gargantuan plates consumes every inch of his life but he wouldn’t have it any other way. Louth have Division Two football ahead of them next year and he’d love a crack at it. Good teams, decent crowds, serious buzz. A man lives for such things. But first, Breffni Park.

“This is the biggest game Louth have played in a long, long time. No doubt about it. People say, ‘What about the Leinster final last year?’ But this is bigger. Let nobody tell you any different. The Leinster final is gone and they have a new manager and all that but there is this wee thing about Meath in the back of the mind of every Louth supporter.”

Just a wee thing about Meath, that’s all. Like Abel had a wee thing about Cain. Abel never got another go in the qualifiers, though. You can be sure he’d have been up for it if he had.