The last time Derry won an All-Ireland semi-final, it wasn’t going to plan at half-time. Thirty years ago, having got out of Ulster at a time of plenty for the province, they were in many people’s minds the likely latest champions from the North.
In these pages, football analyst John O’Keeffe was clear about the probable outcome. “Derry may take a few minutes to settle but I feel they have the necessary desire and determination at this stage of their development to reach the final.”
In Croke Park, however, it was taking longer than a few minutes and they left the pitch at the break trailing by five, 0-4 to 0-9. Dublin had opened impressively and taken their scores. For a Derry pundit on the terrace, there was no doubt what was happening.
“The dressing rooms were in the corner between the Hogan and the Canal End at that time,” remembers Enda Gormley, who would finish the day as his team’s top scorer. “Our fans were at that end and I remember one so-called supporter shouting, ‘typical Derry — shitting the nest again’.”
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Yet many of the players shared O’Keeffe’s confidence in the team. All year, according to Damian Cassidy, wing forward and future county manager, he had believed strongly that Derry would win the All-Ireland.
In the aftermath, future Derry pundit Joe Brolly gave a command performance for the media in the dressing room.
“I had insane confidence out there,” he assured them, “even when we were being stuffed I thought we’d win the match. Dublin just seemed to be vulnerable. They had that old thing that they had against Meath, just something vulnerable about them.”
The reminiscence of what happened at half-time is brisk. Coach Mickey Moran made a brief speech, challenging the players were they going to be the latest Derry team to go home from Croke Park after one match. But they themselves knew what needed to be done.
“There was probably a two- or three-point breeze,” says Gormley. “But we knew we hadn’t been good. We hadn’t started.”
The second half played out with Derry catching Dublin and Johnny McGurk kicking the winning point, 0-15 to 0-14.
There’s no consensus that beating Dublin was the major breakthrough that gave Derry the confidence to progress. That team had served a hard apprenticeship in the previous two years, losing in Ulster to Down after a replay and in 1992 to Donegal in the provincial final. Both counties won the All-Ireland.
Cassidy acknowledges that the semi-finals were the stage at which the music generally died for the county.
“A number of teams in the past had come down and got broken at that stage so that aspect had to be tackled — getting over that — but I also think that getting over Donegal was massively important for us. The difference was that in the previous two years we had beaten Down and Donegal. They were All-Ireland champions. Dublin were not.
“The importance of the match was that we were five down at half-time and came out and turned it around in a full Croke Park that Dublin would have been more used to than we were.”
The missing ingredient for Derry was the arrival home from London in 1990 of the late Eamonn Coleman, for whom “feisty” was too anaemic a description. His scolding persona was leavened with a twinkle of mischief. After the first 1993 championship match against favourites Down in Newry had ended in a big win for Derry, he deadpanned the reporters.
“Youse boys are no tipsters.”
Coleman wasn’t just a vaudevillian turn outside dressing rooms. He had walked the walk, bringing a minor All-Ireland back to the county in 1983. In 1992, Derry won the NFL and previously he had piloted University of Ulster at Jordanstown (UUJ) to their first Sigerson Cups in 1986 and 1987.
Gormley was on both of those UUJ teams. He remembers being struck by Coleman’s implacable views on what would be good enough for Derry. How had the manager affected the county team?
“Unbelievably. It wouldn’t have happened without him. I remember the night before a Sigerson final, we were discussing the Derry team and naming players. I came up with someone and Eamonn said, ‘no, he’d never cut the mustard in Croke Park — too slow’. I said sure we have to win Ulster first but his attitude was if a player wasn’t good enough to win an All-Ireland, he wasn’t good enough. I was struck by that because for me Ulster teams never came into the reckoning for All-Irelands. Eamonn’s ambitions were different.”
After two years of coming close, Derry needed something different, according to Cassidy, a member of Coleman’s All-Ireland winning minors.
“We were still not playing the football that was good enough to win an All-Ireland. After we lost a league quarter-final in ‘93 to Donegal, there was a team meeting in Ballymaguigan.
“The outcome of that was we decided we needed to develop our game. We had to add a possession-based, running game.
“Before we had used very much a kicking game. That meeting and the subsequent coaching changed the options. I’m not entirely happy with calling it a ‘possession game’ because of the modern implications. It was more a support game, running off the shoulder.”
He concurs with Gormley on the impact of the manager.
“There was no getting away from how important he was. We had been rudderless. Eamonn had a strong relationship with quite a few players on that panel due to his work with minors and under-21s. He was instrumental in getting the team to a point where they had the confidence.”
After the Dublin match, Coleman addressed the media. “I don’t think I should talk to ye. You’ve been getting it wrong since Newry. I’ve been saying for 12 months we’re as good a team as any in Ireland. Now we have proved it. We’re in an All-Ireland final.”
Four weeks later, they beat Cork and no team in Ireland was as good.
