Bam and ball: Brian Neeson looks back on his footballing career

From a young age, Bam was one of these guys that was always accompanied by a football.

Whether at his feet or in his hands, where he went, the ball followed.

The hurl was no use, so he didn’t last too long around the hurling end of the St John’s club, but when it came to the big ball, Bam had everything.

His intercounty journey was short and sweet, but Bam left a mark.

He only played four years of championship football before the demands proved too much.

Despite not making it at hurling, Neeson was still balancing the dual life, trying to give his all to the soccer side of his identity as well.

His early soccer career included spells with Knockbreda and Larne, before joining Carrick Rangers in 2014, the same year he made
his championship bow with Antrim.

He moved to Cliftonville in the summer of 2017 and helped the Reds qualify for Europe while recording 17 clean sheets in his first season.

Then, in 2019, he joined Ards, before later playing for Ballymacash Rangers.

To put it simply, all Bam ever wanted to do was play football.

“When I was younger, I tried to play everything and then as I got a wee bit older, I realised I was useless at hurling, so I stopped hurling and concentrated on Gaelic and soccer,” Neeson laughed.

“For as long as I remember I always tried to do both. I tried to be open with coaches about my schedule and that’s the way I
tried to operate for as long as I could.”

On the soccer pitch, he was a goalkeeper. On the Gaelic Football field, he was a goal-getter. His motto wasn’t so much take the points and the goals will come, quite the opposite actually.

“The older boys in the street would have put me in nets because I was the youngest, so I was stuck there. But when I started playing Gaelic for St John’s, I didn’t want to do nets.“I wanted to be out the field and getting involved, I just enjoyed playing out the field in Gaelic.”

The two positions bounced off each other. When he was between the sticks, he knew exactly what was going through the striker’s head.

The same applied when he was bearing down on goal – he knew the thought process of the opposition goalkeeper.

“It was good for reading body positions and stuff like that,” he said of the contrasting positions.

“If a forward is coming through and then opens up their body a certain way, I had an idea what they were doing so I had a bit of a read on it.

“I always thought it was a wee bit harder doing nets in Gaelic because there’s more to a Gaelic goalkeeper, it’s a wee bit tougher.

“And the kickouts are so important in Gaelic, especially with the new rules, if it’s not a pinpoint pass then you’re going to get punished.”

SPECIAL TEAM…A lot of the 2006 minor team went on to represent Antrim at senior level

Bam was part of the Antrim Minor team in 2006 that reached a first Ulster final since 1998. They faced a Donegal team laced with would-be household names like Michael Murphy, Leo McLoone and Martin McElhinney.

The Tir Chonaill men stuffed Antrim in the end at Croke Park (a curtain-raiser to the Armagh v Donegal senior showpiece), but that Saffron side was backboned by plenty of quality players who would also go on to enjoy great days at senior level.

The likes of Justin Crozier and Sean Burke went straight into the senior set-up and helped Liam Bradley’s side contest the 2009 Ulster final, where they came up short in the end by the then All-Ireland champions Tyrone.

That summer, in the qualifiers, they pushed Kerry all the way. That was a Kerry side that would go on to recapture the Sam Maguire Cup that September.

“I always remember the management from the get-go said we were going to be successful,” Neeson reflects 20 years on from that minor final.

“We were going to do stuff that no Antrim team has done in a long time.

“That team had a real togetherness, and I still talk to all the boys now. We just believed even though Antrim at the time, they were doing nothing.

“They’d play the first round of the championship and get knocked out but Seamie O’Prey, the manager, told us we could achieve something and we had a great team to be fair.

“We had CJ McGourty, Sean Burke, Aaron Thompson, Justin Crozier –so many good players that went on to play senior football for Antrim and won club All-Irelands, so we definitely had a good team.”

While the big dream day out at Croker didn’t land any silverware, playing on the hollowed turf at such a young age still meant a
lot.

“I’d say that gave a lot of those boys a bit more hunger that if we committed to it, you could get days out at Croke Park. I remember near the end of the game, all the senior supporters were starting to come into the stadium.

“There was a good buzz even though we got well-beaten in the end, but it was a great experience, and it helped push a lot of boys on.”

It didn’t happen as quickly for Neeson, however. He was first called into the panel in 2010 but had to wait until 2014 to taste the white heat of battle in the Ulster Championship.

His performance that day was worth the wait.

The St John’s attacker rattled off 1-6 in a man of the match display as the Saffrons soared to victory over Fermanagh.

“I was sort of knocking on the door and I always felt like I should have been playing. The likes of Paddy Cunningham was playing in my position and at the time, he was probably the best free taker in Ireland and a great player as well,” Neeson added.

“Something happened to one of the players the night before we played Tipperary (in the 2014 league), and Baker (Liam Bradley) started me and told me to go out and show what I could do.

“I scored 2-8 that day and basically that was it, he couldn’t drop me then.”

Scoring goals was something Neeson was renowned for. He followed that Tipperary performance (the highest individual scoring tally in one game from a player across all divisions) up with a haul of 1-6 versus London.

“I always just tried to get to the net as quickly as I could,” he explained of his goalscoring habit. “I wasn’t really a placing kind of guy, if I got close to the net, I just hit it as hard as I could.

“If it went under the bar then brilliant and if it didn’t, well you still got a point, so my thing was always to be direct, I didn’t try to go around the houses to get a score.”

During those years, Neeson was on the books at several different soccer clubs where he was fit to balance the dual lifestyle with the help of his managers.

“Gary Haveron was the Carrick Rangers manager, and he is one of the best people you could
ever meet,” the 37-year-old reflected.

“If you’re straight with him, he’s straight with you and he completely understood it.

“His thing was that as long as I was doing my job for him on a Saturday, he didn’t care what else I was doing and that was it basically.

“There were days that I was playing for Carrick and Antrim were down in Division Four, and we were away to Leitrim, Wicklow and Carlow. When I was driving on the Saturday after the Carrick game, the Antrim boys were already away down the road.

“I’d drive myself to meet the team and got a massage, went to the pool, and then get up the next day and go and play a Gaelic match and then drive home myself again. It was a bit silly, but I could do it at that time. My body was willing, so I was happy to do it, I wanted to do it.”

But it eventually became too much to deal with. “What I always found with Gaelic was the training to game ratio is mental.

“The intensity of it, you heard Jim McGuinness talking about it and I’m no one to argue with him but when you’re playing soccer, you’re playing 50 games a season.

“In Gaelic, especially with Antrim, you’re lucky to get 10 or 12 games but you’re probably doing 200 training sessions between gym, recovery and pitch sessions and it just didn’t feel right.

“Every player wants to play matches and then it’s hard on boys who aren’t playing and then aren’t allowed to play for their clubs either. How are you meant to get better? It’s a very hard balance and it’s going so professional now, it is hard for people.

“I didn’t have kids at the time but you’re training four nights a week with Antrim and then at the weekend you might have been away to Sligo or Wicklow, and you had no life.

“At that time with Antrim, we were training all over the county and you never knew where you were going to be, so it was hard and I felt like I had no life.

“You were never seeing your family or my wife, it was just so hard.”

MAKING THE STEP UP…Neeson had to wait until 2014 to make his championship debut.

There were some success stories, like finishing at the top of the pile in Division Four in 2016, although Antrim did lose the league final to Louth on Jones’ Road.

That was just one of the highlights of his Saffron journey.

“If I remember I had a stinker that day!” he laughed. “I always loved playing for the county, and the training was brilliant, the coaches were brilliant, the boys were brilliant.

“Beating Fermanagh (in 2014) – that’s the last time Antrim won an Ulster Championship game so it was a big high that day, especially as I played well personally.”

He didn’t leave the Gaelic Football behind, however. Right up to this year, he was still plying his trade between the sticks with St John’s and enjoying the new rules, but signed off before the championship began.

“As I got older, I started doing nets with St John’s. I went back this year, but I couldn’t balance everything with kids now and work, playing football and Gaelic. I played three or four games and then stepped away before the championship because I didn’t think it was fair.

“I was coming up and hitting the two-point frees and the 45s but it was strange that the ‘keeper wasn’t allowed to take the ball back, so we had to work around that. If the game was slowed down around the middle of the pitch, I’d creep forward and one of the boys would drop in and I would push up and loop round to get a two-pointer and then back into nets but I’m just too old for it now.”

Time waits for now man and life eventually catches up, but Bam did it his way and whether the ball was at his feet or in his hands, that child-like love for football never wavered.