Gerard O’Kane: Success breeds success

THREE weeks on from the All-Ireland Final and the business of club championship has ramped up in nearly all counties.

Even with the club championship in Armagh just around the corner, the topic of discussion on most Armagh people’s lips is still their recent All-Ireland victory. It will probably garner more interest in their club games as people will flock to the games where county stars are lining out and especially where they are pitted against each other, so expect to see bumper crowds at Armagh club games this year.

Children will be begging their parents to take them to games where Rian O’Neill, ‘Soupy’, Blaine Hughes et al are lining out and this is just one of the knock on effects of wining Sam. It genuinely does give the whole county a boost from grassroots right up and there’s no better county to take full advantage of this than Armagh as can be seen from their fanatical support in the weeks leading up to and the week after their victory over Galway.

Even locally in around Derry, I have spotted more Armagh jerseys and training tops than we would normally see and given these are McKeever manufactured and not O’Neill’s, I can only assume one has to actively go to look to purchase one of these items.

Listening to Niall Grimley on a podcast post the All-Ireland, he talked about how Kieran McGeeney told the players in previous years to actively seek each other out in club championship, pit yourself against each other but have that level of respect too. This is a great way for the best players to test each other and given what they have experienced over the last few weeks, the dynamic might be slightly different but it will be interesting to see the best players match up against each other considering the bond they have developed.

There was always a sort of myth in Derry club football from the outside that the club rivalries were so competitive that it hampered the county team and held them back during the noughties and early teens.

I have to say, being at the coalface of it for 12 years I never once found this to be the case. Yes, guys were unbelievably committed to their clubs, no doubt about that. But from my experience it was never a case that this was brought into the county changing room. Certainly it was never outwardly portrayed anyway.

This was a lazy observation to make just because lads who might have played county football together were cutting lumps out of each other at club level. When it came back around to playing for Derry I never saw a case of lads not getting on, lads not passing or lads not pulling for each other. It would have been obvious inside the camp if this was the case.

Not everyone had to be best friends but this didn’t mean we didn’t strive for Derry to win. The club scene might have been a factor, but not in the way mentioned above about the rivalries. Generally in my time playing for Derry, there was always this ‘two-week window’, a rule from Croke Park where club players could not play club football in the 13 days ahead of an inter-county championship game, so essentially it meant missing one weekend and a club game the week before a county game. Outside of that, most county players in Derry played for their clubs in the league but that was a want of playing football and a love of club football, not a hatred of any other county player, etc. So for Glenullin, I might have played 10 out of a total of 15 league games in a 16-team league.

The difference was our counterparts in Tyrone and Armagh played next to no club football until their county was eliminated. Its not that a Derry club league medal was so valuable, but more so that lads wanted to play football, especially those who were maybe not getting regular football at county level. At the time we probably didn’t realise it was hampering the county scene as we saw it as lads just playing football and that was a good thing. However, when we fast-forward 15 years and look at Derry club football now, it is similar with Armagh in that players on the county panel do not participate in any club league games if the county has a run of any sort.

I think over the last three years, the county players have missed all 12/14/16 of their club league games and basically only come back for the championship. This seems to be the model moving forward for success at any county level, where the players are totally and fully invested in the county scene until it is over for that respective year.

This is what makes the Armagh story all the more remarkable. Not only the first 15, or the regular 20 used on game day, but getting 42 players to buy into that and the clubs to be okay with it is a success story for Kieran McGeeney in itself.

In Derry and Tyrone over the last few years there has always been defections around Easter time when the club leagues kick in. However, in Armagh, some lad might not have played five minutes for his county yet is prepared to forsake club league games for the bigger picture with absolutely no guarantee of success.

Had Armagh not have beaten Galway, would some players have looked around and said, ‘What’s, it all about, I have not kicked a ball in anger in six months for this?’. The balancing act is very difficult and it’s often noted the price for success at county level is to the detriment of the club game in a county. So it will be interesting to see the dynamic in Armagh over the coming weeks as the group stages kick off but no doubt the fanatical fans will make sure the turnstiles keep ticking over and as it’s often noted success brings success.