IN FOCUS – Fermanagh’s Shane McDermott

GO on and hazard a guess – who do you think captained Fermanagh on their epic voyage to the All-Ireland semi-final in 2004?

Could it be….Barry Owens? Martin McGrath? How about Ryan McCluskey? Nope, nope and nope again (and apologies if we underestimate the intelligence of our readers).

Their skipper that year is someone whose name doesn’t resonate quite as much to the wider GAA family, even though it really should.

Shane McDermott gave ten years of solid service to Fermanagh, captained the side in the mid-noughties, and was quite simply one of the best defenders in Ireland for much of his playing career, yet he isn’t as well-known as many of his contemporaries.

We can only surmise that the reason he’s relatively underrated is that he preferred to do his talking on the pitch, and the man himself had to be gently coaxed into doing this interview by his wife Ciara.

He said: “It’s funny, Ciara turned round to me earlier and I said there’s some lad from Gaelic Life looking an interview, and I wasn’t sure. She said ‘why do you always do that, what do you have to hide?’

“I wasn’t really big into doing interviews as a player – it wasn’t as if I was anti-media, but I never purposely tried to put myself out there.

“We were a team and that was very much the focus – I didn’t want anyone thinking ‘why is so and so away doing interviews?’

“Obviously when I was made captain I had to show my face and that was fair enough. It came alright to me, it didn’t daunt me, but I didn’t go looking for it either. I did it to get it out of the way, basically, as it didn’t add anything to us as a team.”

It’s hard to believe given he barely missed a match in his Fermanagh senior career, but McDermott didn’t play any underage football with the county until u-21 level – despite captaining his club St Pat’s Donagh to a minor championship title.

But once he got a firm grip of the green and white jersey, he never let go, even if there was a little positional reshuffling after he made his senior intercounty debut in 1999.

“I played for the U-21s for two years under Ciaran Carey and Pat King. I was centre-half forward one year and half-back the next.

“At U-21 level for my club I was playing in the forward line, and in my first year at senior level with Fermanagh I was a wing-half forward. I would’ve been pretty light.

“Then John Maughan came in and I started off at corner-forward and I kept going back as far as it went.

“I remember our goalkeeper getting sent off in a game in Enniskillen and I looked for the goalkeeper’s jersey and John quickly went ‘Jesus, don’t let him in goals.

“Eventually I ended up at centre-half back and that’s where I mostly stayed for the remainder of my career.”

McDermott was delighted beyond measure to find himself playing with some of his idols, and he saw potential in the team as well.

“In my first year I remember getting lifted at the door to go to training by Collie Curren and Cormac McAdam. They’d won the All-Ireland ‘B’ title and all that craic, they were heroes of mine.

“I was thinking I’ve really made it, these guys are lifting me on my own doorstep!

“I remember it’d been a long time since Fermanagh had won an Ulster Championship match. We lost to Monaghan in 1999 and I was saying to the lads afterwards, it’d be great if we could just get that one win in Clones, but the team was progressing. I came in at the same time as Colm Bradley and there were the lads who won the All-Ireland ‘B’, so I felt optimistic about things.”

However new manager John Maughan, who was appointed in late 2000, stepped down as Fermanagh manager after less than a year in charge.

In his short and mostly unsuccessful reign, they got a great win over Donegal in the first round of the Ulster championship, lost to Monaghan in the quarter-final and bowed out of the All-Ireland race with a qualifier defeat against Donegal – but what McDermott remembers most vividly is that they were flogged to death in training.

His old school methods weren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but our interviewee was willing to go along with it as he desperately wanted to make it with Fermanagh.

“I was pretty light but it took me a couple of years to thicken out. We had a bit of strength and conditioning under Pat King and then it became more important obviously as the years went on.

“I was mad to make an impression and I was willing to do whatever it took, but the training was absolutely brutal when John was in charge.

“We were doing heavy circuits in a gym and then heading outside to do hill runs, it was cruel and it didn’t suit us either. We needed more and more football.

“What he was doing was trying to get us as physically fit as possible. The ball was secondary, we were strong and fit but we weren’t gelling as a team.

“It was still a set-up, and what John brought was an element of professionalism which helped us in the long-run. Football was changing very quickly, and still is, so at least we were trying to adapt.”

But in saying that, it was pretty agricultural stuff. McDermott recalls an example of one of the players sticking it as such to Maughan, and it wasn’t a major surprise that the Mayo man left in a bit of a huff after their All-Ireland qualifier exit.

“I remember one particular time we were doing circuits in the gym, and a lot of the lad were getting sick.

“The next thing John said ‘no more going outside, if you have to get sick do so in a plastic bag.’

“And this mate of mine did all the circuits without getting sick, and he turned round and told John ‘you can shove your plastic bag.’

“To be honest John would really have loved that, but he started talking to the rest of the players and two seconds later that lad was behind me and he was puking. It was ridiculous really.”

They were managed by one of the legends of Fermanagh football, Dominic Corrigan, in 2002 and 2003 but in that time period they were taught some pretty chastening lessons period by the best teams in the land

In the 2002 Ulster Championship they were overpowered by Armagh on a scoreline of 0-16 to 1-5, but worse was to follow when they were pulverised by the Kingdom in a qualifier at Portlaoise (the scoreline, 2-15 to 0-4).

Some progress was made in 2003 when they reached the Division Two final against Tyrone, but they were well-beaten and when the two sides met later in the year in an All-Ireland quarter-final, it was a similar story against the champions-in-wait. McDermott winces when he recalls marking Brian Dooher in one of those matches.

“We were progressing as a team but Kerry and Tyrone were light-years ahead of us. I remember I was supposed to be marking Brian Dooher and we were in the middle of the pitch trying to get the breaking ball from a kick-out. Dooher was standing right beside me. Sean Cavanagh got the ball, drove the ball 40 yards and two seconds later Brian Dooher had it and was heading in on goal, and I was thinking ‘holy ****’. He never stopped, he was relentless.”

So there was still little indication of what was to come in 2004, especially when the county failed to find an immediate replacement for Dom Corrigan, who stepped down in the wake of the quarter-final capitulation to Tyrone.

Corrigan’s exit was only the start; many of their main men retired or headed for Australia, so the future looked bleak for Fermanagh football at the turn of 2004.

“There was a mass exodus when Dom left,” said McDermott. Eight or nine of the starting team either retired or left, and they were the players whom we had built a team around.

“Tom Brewster, Colm Bradley and Ronan McCabe all went to Australia, and there was hardly anyone at training.

“Sean Reilly from Teemore had to come in to help out, we’d have a bit of a kickabout for 20 minutes and then play a bit of a match.”

Donegal native Charlie Mulgrew was appointed in late January, and it seemed he had a tough task on his hands, but there was another way of looking at it: everyone who wanted to play for Fermanagh at that point in time was playing for Fermanagh.

“They went on a bit of a trawl through the county, and anybody who wanted to be there came along. Playing for Fermanagh wasn’t very fashionable, it wasn’t going to be cool, so it probably wasn’t difficult to get called up.

“Charlie came in late and I don’t think we won in a game in the league because the organisation wasn’t there yet.

“We’d done well the previous year in the league so we were in Division One and we were way off the pace, but we got ourselves sorted and were a tight enough unit against Tyrone in the first round of the championship.”

The Erne County were indeed massively competitive against the reigning All-Ireland Champions, and actually lead 0-9 to 1-4 with 20 minutes remaining.

Tyrone’s class told as Owen Mulligan and Sean Cavanagh took the game by the scruff of the neck, but the final scoreline of 1-13 to 0-12 showed that Fermanagh were by no means out of their depth.

Something was brewing in the Erne County, and maybe luck was on their side as well as they were handed a walkover into a second-round qualifier after Tipperary withdrew from the competition following the resignation of their manager.

For the second year running, they overcame Meath in the backdoor, and they did so in dramatic circumstances with a magnificent point Colm Bradley (described in the Fermanagh Herald’s match report at the time as “the equal” of Maurice Fitzgerald’s famous point against Dublin) sending the game into extra-time where they held strong to eke out a 0-19 to 2-12 victory.

That set up a Croke Park date with Cork with a place in the All-Ireland quarter-final at stake. They were underdogs, but from early on it was apparent that Fermanagh more than had the measure of their opponents, and although it was 0-6 apiece at the interval, they pushed on to record a 0-16 to 0-10 victory.

With newcomers like Mark Little playing with abandon and fearlessness, Fermanagh were riding the crest of a wave, and McDermott believes that the shake-up from the previous season had almost accidentally created a unified camp.

“A lot of new lads had been brought in and it was a very open thing. Sometimes when new lads come in, they feel they have to fit in with the older establishment, but the old establishment wasn’t there any more. Everybody was welcomed with open arms and it served us really well, it was like an adventure.”

One man who hadn’t got the hint, however, was Sunday Game pundit Kevin McStay.

Although Fermanagh weren’t expected to continue their winning streak in the All-Ireland final against Armagh, McStay was particularly disparaging of their chances.

But as we’ve established, McDermott wasn’t especially interested in media chatter, and he saw no reason why Fermanagh couldn’t tear up the script against the Orchard County.

What transpired was one of the greatest shocks in GAA history; Armagh raced into an early lead but unlike so many of their opponents at the time, Fermanagh didn’t wilt and it was nip and tuck for the entirety of the second-half before Tom Brewster struck that famous late point that sent his team into the All-Ireland semi-finals.

“During the lockdown I saw the match, Kevin McStay didn’t give us a bloody chance in his speech before the game – we really were no-hopers.

“But the thing as, as a player you’re out of the bubble and don’t get caught in the hype.

“I was in Donegal when the draw came through. When it came through what we got Armagh everyone was going ‘jeez’ but I was thinking “there’s no better time to get them!”

“We were almost automatically getting ourselves in the right frame of mind for those big matches. You have to believe in yourselves and we did. It wasn’t as big a shock to us as it was to the spectators.

“It was a great day, it obviously went well – we left it a bit late. I remember the Tyrone and Mayo ones streaming in for the second game at Croke Park that day, and I got a ball near the end and the hair was standing on the back of my neck from the noise of the crowd.

“I’d played in Croke Park a good few times already but the noise from the crowd was just unreal, the whole thing was immense.”

Fermanagh brought the All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo to a replay, but they lost on the second day out by 0-13 to 1-8.

They should have won the first day out, but they squandered numerous scoreable chances against a Mayo team which had a man sent off early in the second-half.

Memories of those games are hazy – both were low-scoring, dogged affairs – but it’s worth reminding ourselves that Fermanagh were a point ahead in the replay heading into the final five minutes.

Mayo found a second wind to rattle off the final three points of the game, but McDermott says he tried not to dwell on the disappointment too much.

“I suppose you just try to learn from defeats. Everyone has their own way of doing things but I try not to look back too much.

“Over the lockdown I’d a look at a couple of those games from back then and I thought “maybe I should have analysed them more at the time” to see what I could’ve been doing better.

“We were just riding the crest of a wave that year and we thought anything could happen. When you look back on it, we were so close but we just didn’t get over the line the first day.

“Momentum was massive to us that year – we never thought we couldn’t do this or we couldn’t do that, there were no limits and for a lot of the time it was working for us.”

Yet for whatever reason, Fermanagh didn’t come close to hitting the same heights for the rest of Mulgrew’s tenure, even though he stayed on board until their qualifier defeat to Meath in 2007. McDermott finds it hard to put his finger on why that was.

“Maybe we believed the hype to some degree, so the mental focus mightn’t have been the same. It wasn’t as if we put in any less effort, so I don’t know what the right answer to that is.”

Mulgrew stepped down somewhat reluctantly (he’s quoted as saying “To be honest, I’ve been dreading the prospect of this because I bonded so well with this group of lads”) but they found a good man to replace him – Malachy O’Rourke.

McDermott said: “Malachy’s a good man, very organised and very focused. He knew the ins and outs of the game and knew the players very well.

“He brought it again to a different level, and it was good to have a clean slate as well. It wasn’t as if Charlie was doing anything wrong – it was just a matter of hitting the reset button and going again. We had good players, it was just a matter of getting the right tactics and Malachy was definitely good at what he did.”

They ambushed Monaghan in the first-round of the Ulster Championship and pipped Derry in the semis to qualify for their first provincial final appearance since 1982.

Not for the first time, Fermanagh only their own profligately to blame as they failed to get over the line the first day despite dominating the final quarter of the game, and in the replay their challenge wilted after the concession of a Stevie McDonnell goal.

Again, they were left to rue nine first-half wides (you can hardly blame McDermott for that particular statistic), and it’s a major regret of his that he failed to win the Ulster title.

“It would’ve been huge to have won that elusive Ulster title, so of course there are regrets. It didn’t happen but if I’d the choice I’d do it all over again.

“I put in a lot of time and effort, and I don’t have many medals to show for it, but I had good times and made great friends. It was enjoyable but hard work too.”

After exactly ten years on the senior intercounty panel, McDermott decided to call it a day in 2009. From the outside looking in, it looked like a hasty decision, but he explains that work commitments meant he no longer had the appetite for spending hours on the road to get to training.

“We got beat by Wicklow in 2009, and that was it, I didn’t play the following year.

“It was my decision to be honest with you. I’m an engineer and I was working all over Ireland – there were times when I was working in places like Galway, Kildare and Dublin.

“I had a young family as well – I had two kids and a third was on the way something had to give.”

He still goes to the matches, and while some of the football hasn’t been the prettiest in the past few years, particularly during the Rory Gallagher tenure, he’s had some great days as a spectator as well.

“There were times in the last couple of years when it wasn’t the easiest thing to watch, but I was at the game where they beat Monaghan in the Ulster semi-final, and as a spectator I thought it was immense – the way they out-worked and out-fought them.

“It’s great when you’re winning but I don’t think they seem to have as much fun. I’m not a big advocate of going on the beer but after a championship we’d go out that night and have a bit of craic.

“When I first started in ’99 the Monday club was a regular thing and that was phased out. Now they don’t even go out the same night sometimes, so I don’t think things are really the same.”

McDermott was still a relatively young man, and he was asked back a few times, but he said there was no going back.

“Malachy tried to convince me a few times. John O’Neill came in and did the same but I’d made my mind up.

“Once you’re out you’re out, it would’ve been too difficult to get back that fitness needed for intercounty football, and it would’ve meant giving that crazy commitment as well.”

While McDermott won a couple of minor championship titles with St Pat’s Donagh, and a few Division Two titles with his club as well, most of his career was a trophy-free zone.

But he has one particularly special medal in his possession – he was a key part of the St Pat’s team that won their one and only senior club championship title in their history, defeating Derrygonnelly by a point in the 2008 decider.

“It was nice to finish with one medal anyway! That was huge. The club had been looking for that one for a long time, and I myself had played in championship finals where we didn’t get over the line.

“Finally making the breakthrough was huge for everyone and all the hard-working people in the club deserved having something to shout about.

“We’d been knocking on the door but had been beaten by the likes of the great Enniskillen Gaels team, so to finally win a senior championship was great.”