That one day: Eoghan Rua’s breakthrough story

Richard Carey reflects on Eoghan Rua’s maiden Derry Senior Championship triumph. He spoke with Shaun Casey

ON any given day, anything can happen. Form, history, it all goes out the window. Sometimes, your name is on the cup. When reflecting on Coleraine’s historic Derry Championship triumph in 2010, Richard Carey admits his side were the underdogs.

The Eoghan Rua club, competing in their first ever Senior final, were coming up against a powerhouse in Ballinderry. A team that had won four of the previous nine deciders and were hoping to make it three in five years.

After 2010, Ballinderry went on to win three championships on the bounce and collected an Ulster title in 2013. That was the force Coleraine faced. But on that one particular day, they made it happen.

“You can see why everybody fancied Ballinderry, but we were quietly confident going into it that if we played well, we’d enough players in our arsenal that we could give them a bit of bother and it’s just a one-off match,” said championship winning captain Carey.

“At that stage, if we played that Ballinderry team 10 times they would have won the majority of them but on that day, you need a few things just to go your way, which they did.

“Ballinderry missed a penalty in the second half, and if that went in, who knows how it would have panned out, but we managed to crawl over the line in the end by two points. There was serious pressure in that last ten minutes. That Ballinderry team was littered with inter-county players.

“The vast majority of their starting line-up were either current or past Derry players and the three years after that, they won three Derrys and an Ulster so that gives you an idea of the strength of that squad.”

The rise of the Coleraine-based club is a remarkable one. In 2006, they’d won their first ever Intermediate title, claimed the Ulster crown and went all the way to Croke Park where they lost the All-Ireland final to Ardfert of Kerry.

That brought them to unchartered waters in 2008. Senior football for the first time in their history and with a team now starting to hit its peak, they set their eyes on competing at the very top level.

Coleraine’s 2010 squad before the Derry final

“We only came into senior football in 2008 for the first time,” Carey explained. “We’d never competed at senior level before. We won a Junior Championship in 1997 and for many years after we yoyoed between Junior and Intermediate.

“Around ’03 or ’04, a lot of young players started to come in and we got to an Intermediate final in ’05, which we lost. Then we won the Intermediate in 2006 and went all the way to Croke Park, we lost the All-Ireland final in ’07 so we were promoted to senior.

“I was mid-20s for that All-Ireland final, but I was one of the older players in the team. When you get to senior, we’d have felt that if we could stay up then there’s a chance that we could build.

“We were never a big panel, we didn’t have much strength in depth, but there was a good team there. It just so happened that within a two or three year period, a squad of players came through and, in my opinion, we had some of the best club players in Derry for 10 years.

“With that team that got promoted, there wasn’t too much change-over in players. There was a team there that stuck together. Obviously players would come in and out but the core of it was there and as that team started to age and retire, we struggled to hold onto our senior status.”

Carey, now the Coleraine manager as they are back battling it out at Intermediate level, recalls taking it step by step and game by game when they reached the senior grade. Eventually they realised they were good enough to compete.

“In 2009, we had beaten Sleacht Néill and they had been in the county final in ’08, so that gave us an idea that we could compete, but at the start of the season we didn’t aim for the Senior Championship. Everything was around maintaining our senior status.

“Going into the championship, we were just taking it one game at a time. The way it panned out, we got heavily beaten by Dungiven in the ’09 quarter-final and we drew them in the first round in 2010. It was a backdoor system at that stage, and we beat Dungiven.

He continued: “Then we came across Sleacht Néill again and it went to a replay. They were two tight games and we got past them so all of a sudden, you’re thinking that we can definitely compete and we’re capable of beating anyone in Derry.

“That builds belief as the season goes on. Every time you beat what would be perceived as one of the bigger teams, it fueled that belief that there was a championship there for us, but it was that old cliché of one game at a time.”

The final itself was a nerve-jangling experience but the foreshadowing words of Peter Doherty left Coleraine ready for what Ballinderry were going to bring. No championship is easy won.

When Coleraine rattled off two second half goals, through Carey and Colm McGoldrick, they looked home and hosed. Ballinderry had other ideas. A missed Conleith Gilligan penalty could have changed everything, but it was Coleraine’s day.

“We had a fella Peter Doherty, he’s originally a Kilrea man now living in Omagh. He’s a very experienced manager and then there’s Sean McGoldrick,” Carey continued. “He chatted to us and the only thing I remember him saying was that we’d have to beat Ballinderry twice.

“He told us they’d come back at us and we scored the two goals in quick succession and it put us six or seven points up. The temptation is to think that it’s job done but as we knew they would, they came back at us but we just managed to hold out.”

Good teams win one and great teams win two. Coleraine backed up their golden years in 2018 when they recaptured the John McLaughlin Cup. They’d reached the final again in 2015 but lost out, so making up for it in 2018 was essential.

“2015 was difficult. We lost to that Sleacht Néill team by a point and then they went on to dominate Derry and Ulster. Then in 2018, we needed a replay to get past them and the majority of the team that started in ’18 were there in 2010.

“It was so good to get the second one to show that 2010 wasn’t a one off. To show that it was a serious senior team that we had because in between that, Ballinderry and Sleacht Néill were the only teams to win Derry championships.

“It’s always difficult to win the Derry Championship, it just seems to be that there are certain teams that dominate for a while and it’s very difficult to break that cycle and from our point of view, we beat Sleacht Néill and Ballinderry in 2010.

“We beat Sleacht Néill, who were back-to-back Ulster champions at that stage (2018) and had won three out of the last four Ulster clubs so there’s no easy way to win the Derry Championship, but we did it the hard way and we beat the best.”