The old general rides west this weekend, despite heavy losses and whispers of mutiny in the ranks. On the horizon, the enemy in green and red, whooping and hollering their war cries, eyeing scalps.
The All-Ireland group stage has had a tranquilising effect on the once-volatile personality of the football championship season. The lack of jeopardy has blunted the edges of every narrative twist, adding a get-out for every bum performance, a caveat to every good one. It has been like throwing a nice snuggly blanket over a basket of poisonous vipers.
But beneath the calm seas, the currents have been shifting. Some teams are drifting along nicely, some pulled hopelessly under, others riding the crest of a wave. Derry have been gasping for air since day one.
It is hard to think of a sporting collapse as precipitous as the six-week spell which took Derry from genuine All-Ireland contenders to the point where three consecutive championship losses sparked rumours of a player revolt against their manager.
It was so recent that you don’t even need to go back and read the previews to this All-Ireland championship to remember how talked up Derry were. Michael Murphy declared them as genuine contenders from his various media pulpits, seeing in their Allianz League final victory over Dublin the hard evidence to go with his hunch of where they were at.
Éamonn Fitzmaurice, one of the sharpest around, liked what he saw as well. “The new League Division 1 champions have all the answers at the moment,” he wrote in these pages in early April. “Since Mickey Harte and Gavin Devlin have come in they have further improved an already excellent team. Any of the slight question marks that were there from last season have been addressed.”
Regurgitating their words is not meant to undermine either man’s credibility, rather to underline how widely admired this Derry team were a few short weeks ago. Fitzmaurice was writing in a piece focusing on the championship’s Big Three: Dublin (31 titles), Kerry (38 titles) and Derry (1 title). In the around the same time, Dean Rock said it was hard to see anyone emerging from the pack behind those three.
Within days, Derry had not just returned to the pack, but had been trampled under its feet.
The defeats to Donegal, Galway and Armagh were shocking and telling in their own ways. In the same way as a matador kills the bull in stages, the format of the championship seemed to be tormenting Derry with a slow death.
First Jim McGuinness, scalpel in hand, took apart their high press and exposed wandering goalkeeper Odhran Lynch. Then indiscipline – often a sign of underlying problems – did for them against Galway, when Gareth McKinless saw red for a stupid, pointless stamp on Damien Comer. Armagh capitalised on turnovers caused by loose kicks and flaccid handpasses, rattling in three goals while Derry had their men stationed upfield in a sad facsimile of their formerly innovative tactical set-up.
Everything about Derry in those games seemed antithetical to the wit and vigour of their rise under Rory Gallagher and their performances in the early part of this year. Where once they had been the sharpest, the smartest and the hungriest, now they were the opposite of all those things.
The bull is not dead, yet, and against Westmeath last weekend they did just enough, extricating themselves from Group 1. Dazed, shirt torn, blood dripping from their brow, but still standing. There were signs of life – two goals scored, their first in this season’s championship, one of them thanks to a typically lacerating Conor McCluskey run from deep. And no goals conceded: no Lynch pegging it backwards with the ball flying over his head, nothing like the outtakes and bloopers that haunted their championship highlights reel to date.
“Sometimes you have to go the road you are sent, as fate would have it,” Harte said after the Galway defeat, “I’ve been down a few of those roads before and we managed it rightly.”
The road takes him to MacHale Park against a Mayo team with the sort of spring in their step Derry once had, the one you get from being able to put it up to Dublin.
Its suddenness makes it a story in and of itself but there are Gothic sub-plots to the Derry decline. The mid-season departure of Rory Gallagher last year felt, at the time, like the bottling up of something potentially combustible. Gallagher stepped aside on the eve of the 2023 Ulster final, after allegations of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, Nicola.
The show-must-go-on necessities of the inter-county game and the dark subject matter involved have meant that Gallagher’s name is rarely mentioned when discussing this Derry team. And yet the team’s success was such an expression of his jagged, intense personality as to make that reductive when analysing their recent failures.
But it is the presence of Harte, the lion in winter, the stubbornest of old goats, that summons the storm clouds of fate over Castlebar. For a pious man with a long-standing career of staggering achievement, and who has had terrible tragedy visited upon him, Harte inspires surprisingly bitter feelings in many.
His decision to leave Louth and take over his native county’s closest rivals managed the incredible feat of pissing off everyone involved. As his former Tyrone player Owen Mulligan said, he “may as well have joined Rangers.” Joe Brolly led the discontent from within Derry, accusing Harte of being a mercenary trashing the GAA’s core values.
Why did he do it? It was a chance to take over an All-Ireland contender and maybe to stick it to those in his home county who denied him the final crack at it with Tyrone that he had wanted. Maybe he likes being the dissenter, the one having his faith tested, flying into the prevailing winds. He has long revelled in taking singular, cussed positions, in sport and otherwise. Maybe you need to be like that to turn a county team from outside the elite into a dynasty.
He knows these roads and has been down them before with Tyrone and in his own life. If his team summon some of the dogged contrariness that has him still trudging down them after all these years, they might just live to fight another day.
