By Niall Gartland

THE greatest Tyrone goalie of them all? Well, he’s certainly in the conversation.

Aidan Skelton plied his trade for Tyrone during the eighties – a time when catch and kick ruled, a time when positions actually meant something, and a time when a goalkeeper’s primary remit was to give the ball an almighty welly from kick-outs as well as throwing the odd save into the bargain.

Skelton, it could be argued, was the exception that proves the rule.

Standing a relatively diminutive 5’9”, his size alone wasn’t going to cut the mustard (and he played his club football with Junior outfit Drumquin, so the cards weren’t exactly stacked in his favour – more on that later), yet he was so ahead of his time that Tyrone didn’t even bother with a substitute goalie for much of the eighties.

Not only was Skelton a superlative shot-stopper (his performance par excellence was the 1989 Ulster final replay victory over Donegal when he made a string of tremendous saves despite playing with a hairline fracture in his knee), but he favoured precision over power from restarts and regularly bounded from his goalmouth area to snuff out any sign of danger. As a prototype for the modern goalkeeper, you couldn’t get much better.

The Sam Maguire managed to elude his grasp – something had to – and three All-Star nominations without reward is just damn unfortunate, but Skelton reveals that only for a twist of fate his Tyrone career could’ve been over before it even really began.

“Art McRory was a great man for the greyhounds and he was down in Lifford with Tony McKenna, who was teaching me at the Tech.

“Tony said ‘you’ve got a good vocationals team the year’ and Art said ‘aye but the goalie is terrible, he couldn’t cap a cow.’ Tony said ‘what about your boy Skelton’ and Art said ‘you must be the tenth man who told me about this Skelton lad, I can’t remember him at the trials.’

“Art told him to bring me up to Cavan for their next game. I never really looked back and I was brought straight onto the minor team as well. It was pure luck as he didn’t even remember me at the trials.”

While there may have been snobbery in some quarters towards players from ‘small’ clubs like Drumquin, Art McRory soon realised he’d stumbled upon a goalkeeper of almost limitless potential.

Skelton excelled in the 1975 All-Ireland finals with the Tyrone minor team against a Jack O’Shea inspired Kerry and the Tyrone Vocationals Schools team, and within three years he was making his senior intercounty debut in a National League game against Roscommon.

“Even when I was competing for Ulster finals and All-Irelands, I was still playing Division Six football. I remember after the 1986 All-Ireland final, the following Friday I was playing in a relegation play-off against Glenelly down in the ‘Plum’ with 10 sheep at it. Some difference.

“These days any talented young player is spotted at summer camps. There were lads on the Drumquin team who were very good footballers, but if they went to trials, they never looked at you.

“I remember when I was overage for minor football, Art said that if he was appointed senior manager I’d be the first man he’d look for, and he was good to his word when he took over the seniors in 1978.

“I remember the first year I was on the senior panel, I was doing a bit of goalkeeping work late in the evening, and after I had a shower afterwards, someone was chatting to Art about the new players who were brought in. The lad said “do you not think it’s a bit stupid looking for footballers in Division Six’ and he was obviously talking about me. Art said “I don’t care, he’s here to stay’ and that’s why we’d such a good team – we’d lads from all over the place like Ciaran McGarvey from Aghyaran and John Lynch from Castlederg, we weren’t just a clique of players from the likes of Ardboe and Clonoe and that’s where Tyrone had gone wrong in the past.”

It was around that time that Skelton decided to cultivate what became his trademark; an unmistakable handlebar moustache. He explains that he didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to go for what was a fairly bold look even in those days.

“I remember Armagh fans shouting, ‘you’re in the wrong country you Mexican, where’s your guitar?’ Later on they called me the Grobbelaar after the Liverpool goalie (Bruce Grobbelaar).

“You know where it started – I was playing my first ever Tyrone game against Roscommon in the National League, and I could hear people in the stands saying ‘who’s the young cub in goals? That’s a wile wee boy in goals’, so I started to grow a beard to make me look older.

“They stopped saying those things after that, but I remember my dad saying to me ‘Jesus you need to do something about that beard, Aidan, because you’re scaring everybody, you’re wile looking’. My mother thought I looked like a murderer so I had to do something, so I shaved off the beard, left the moustache and thought ‘that doesn’t look so bad!’

“It was a trademark I suppose, jet black hair with a big Mexican moustache so I stood out.”

Skelton pocketed his first Ulster Championship medal with Tyrone in 1984 when they overcame Armagh in the decider – AKA the Frank McGuigan final.

The Ardboe maestro stole the show with 11 points from play, but Skelton says McGuigan didn’t let his footballing genius go to his head.

“Frank was the best footballer on the planet, if you trained with him you’d know what I’m talking about. It’s just a pity he got hurt when he did because there’s no doubt we’d have won the All-Ireland if he was available in 1986.

“I know people say we missed him when he was younger but he was a bit crazy in those days, he’d matured a bit by the mid-eighties.

“I remember in team talks, Art would say to Plunkett Donaghy ‘what kind of kick-out do you want’ and he’d say he’d want it on his right-hand side or something. He’d ask Harry McClure, and he’d say he’d want it up in the air.

“Then he’d come to Frank and Frank would say ‘just give it to me five or ten yards either side of me and I’ll get it, and anyone who’s coming in to support me, getting there in good time because otherwise I’ll trample over the top of you and score anyway!’”

He continued: “But he was a real gent. I remember the first time I met him, back in 1983, we were told he was coming back and hopefully he’d be there for a challenge match in Newry.

“So that was all fine, we were in the changing rooms and in came Frank with a big bag of work stuff with him, he was a plasterer like myself. He sat beside me and said ‘how’s it going now Aidan, how’s the Tones doing’, as if he knew me for 20 years. He’s the nicest man, you’ll get no better.”

Skelton also recalls being pelted with shots – half of which was friendly fire – during the infamous pre-game incident with Dublin in the 1984 All-Ireland semi-final.

The Tyrone players were aggrieved by the antagonistic attitude of a Dubs official in the changing rooms of Croke Park, so they defiantly marched on Hill 16 to warm up and all hell broke loose…

“When we were getting togged out, this Dublin fella wearing a blazer came in and said ‘right boys, quiet down, we’re going out at 3:15 and we’re going to our Hill 16, you’re going out at 3:20 and you bog off down to the Canal End.’

“As he was going out the door, he noticed Ciaran McGarvey had his feet up as he was getting a rub down, and he said ‘get those feet down, where do ye think ye are?’ As soon as he shut the door, McRory said ‘right, we’re going out first.’ I remember the Guard in the tunnel saying the wrong team was coming out, but we went up to Hill 16 and Dublin joined us. I remember John O’Leary and myself standing in goals while the players were belting the balls at us like ****. It just shows you Dublin think they own the bloody place, but they don’t.”

Skelton also detected a general anti-northern attitude from people south of the border. A Munster referee was appointed as the referee for the All-Ireland final in 1986, even though Tyrone threatened to pull out if the decision wasn’t reversed, and he also has vivid recollections of a xenophobic comment made by an umpire while he was still only a minor footballer.

“We played Kildare in the All-Ireland minor semi-final in 1975, Dublin were playing Derry in the senior game. Dublin fans were drinking out of bottles, then breaking the necks off and throwing them through the squares in the nets into the goals where I was standing.

“I remember saying to the umpire, ‘look at the state of this’, and he said ‘would you shut your mouth, all yous do up there is kill policemen’, and me only a cub!

“Kevin Heffernan had to come on with a loud speaker and tell the supporters to stop or else the game would be postponed. I don’t care what anyone says, they still don’t like the six counties down there. They don’t want you winning anything.”

Tyrone actually enlisted Heffernan to the cause in 1986, and the Dublin legend helped engineer their All-Ireland semi-final victory over Galway with an amusing piece of strategical chicanery.

“Heffernan was great pals with Art McRory and was in with us for a while. Galway had a cracking footballer called Val Daly, and Heff said to Art ‘you need to start building up your midfield in every paper in the south.’

“’Really pump it up, tell everyone how good Plunkett Donaghy and Harry McClure are, as Galway will switch Val Daly from centre-half forward to the middle of the field and he’ll get smothered. Otherwise you’re in big bother.’

“Lo and behold, he was number 11 but as soon as the ball was thrown in, he went to the middle of the field. Heffernan wasn’t one bit slow, he knew his stuff. It spoiled things for Galway and we won the game.”

We all know what happened in the final; Tyrone went seven points up at one stage but ended up losing by eight to the mighty Kerry. Kevin McCabe’s missed penalty was possibly the turning point in the game, and Skelton didn’t stand much of a chance as Pat Spillane and Mikey Sheehy found the net amid their unrelenting comeback.

“I think they were gone only for the penalty. If Kevin have scored it I think we’d have beaten them by a total cricket score.

“I think they were gone, I heard them in the full-forward line crying at each other and calling each other names and you didn’t associate Kerry with that craic. A couple of bad decisions went against us as well against us, the ref was dicey and he shouldn’t have been referring in the first place as he was from Cork.

“Spillane was very fly with his first goal, nobody expected him to palm the ball and he told me himself that they’d watched videos of us and knew I was good in a one-on-one situation, so that’s why he palmed it first-time.

“The second goal was from Mikey Sheehy, it was a cracking goal right into the bottom corner. I swear to this day that he winked at me just before he hit is as he knew it was heading straight into the net. I asked him about that though and he said ‘not a chance.’ He was some player. The Kerry boys were lovely lads. Spillane was a bit different, he wasn’t even pally with his own team, but then you had the likes of Jack O’Shea and Bomber Liston, he was a brilliant big fella.”

Skelton produced his best ever performance in a Tyrone jersey in the Ulster Championship final replay against Donegal in 1989, winning the official man of the match award. Remarkably, he played most of the game with a hairline fracture which ruled him out of their ill-fated All-Ireland semi-final clash against Mayo.

“I broke my kneecap about 10 minutes into the first half, it got to the point I couldn’t stand on it and had to prop myself against the post. Donegal got through on goal three or four times and I blocked the whole lot of them..

“The pain was tarra. I’d the plaster on for 12 weeks, I was hoping to get back for the All-Ireland final but as it turns out we didn’t get to the final anyway. I was only kidding myself, I wouldn’t have been fit in time anyway.”

His Tyrone career came to a fairly abrupt end when John Donnelly took the reins in the early 1990s and decided to place his trust in youth over experience.

“John Donnelly came in and basically retired eight or nine of the team. Donegal went on and won the All-Ireland title in 1992 with near enough the same team we’d hammered in 1989, so I’d blame him for breaking up the team too early. If you’d kept the experienced fellas and added in the likes of Canavan, Adrian Cush and big Enda Kilpatrick, you’d have had a fair side.

“As it turned out, they were too young and they won nothing. Things only changed against when McRory and Eugene came back in and won back-to-back Ulster finals and reached an All-Ireland final.”

All the same, Skelton is fairly philosophical about how it ended up, and why wouldn’t he be? He made life-long friends, represented Tyrone with distinction for upwards of a decade, and he was as relieved as anyone when the county reached the promised land in 2003.

“I still see a lot of them, particularly the likes of Ciaran McGarvey here in the west of the county. But all of them are great. Take Eugene McKenna, people think he’s snobbish and wouldn’t chat to you, but you couldn’t meet a better fella. It’s the same with someone like Kevin McCabe, he’s another fella people might get a particular impression of, but they don’t actually know him.

“That 1986 team is as tight as any team that didn’t win an All-Ireland. I’d nearly say there were teams that actually won an All-Ireland that weren’t as tight-knit. Nobody was bickering or backstabbing, we were all singing from the same hymn sheet.” And all we can say is Amen to that.

Aidan Skelton pictured earlier this week in his prized 1986 All-Ireland Final jersey. Photo Jason McCartan

Aidan Skelton held aloft by spectators in the aftermath of the 1986 All-Ireland semi-final win over Galway.

Aidan Skelton, right, with his wife Frances, at an awards ceremony for the All-Stars.