During a month marked by a deluge of last calls by heavyweight intercounty names, Benny Coulter walked away with the smallest collection of medals and honours but his departure stings his county just as deeply.
A true and true son of Ulster, the Down player was, in a theatre of attrition and physicality and relentless intensity, a rare streak of guile and elusiveness and pure football delight. Even opposition supporters enjoyed watching Benny Coulter. How could you not?
This week’s decision to retire confirmed what Coulter must have begun to suspect a couple of seasons ago: there would be no Ulster medal around which his 11-year senior career would revolve.
“There is no doubt about it: that will eat at me until the day I die,” Coulter admitted when we caught up during the week.
Although the Downpatrick man is serene about his decision, there was an inescapable sense that he couldn’t quite believe he had pulled the trigger on his intercounty life. He was hardly alone: in Kilkenny, Brian Hogan and Adrian Fogarty had also informed Brian Cody their time was up but they have eight and seven All-Ireland hurling medals respectively.
Physical graft
Coulter’s fate was the more common: he gave much more to the county team than he got in terms of winning competitions. In the end, it was the sheer physical graft involved that persuaded him, aged 32, that enough was enough.
“It was probably the length of time it was taking me to recover from sessions. I was finding that it was taking me three days to recover so you would have to sit out a few sessions.
“Like, after training on a Tuesday night, I would just about be right for Thursday’s training. Just about. I could always play through a pain barrier; that never bothered me. But it was playing on my mind for the last few months and I knew there would be a whole new scene at training and I would have wanted to go in and give a 100 per cent and I just didn’t think that I could.”
Jim McCorry, the man who has taken over as Down manager, also gave Coulter his club debut with Mayobridge in the late 1990s, when he had begun to catch the eye with a game based upon a unique combination of talents. Coulter had the pace and wit of a small, inside forward but the height and a deceptively effective leap to operate from midfield. Best of all, he had a daring eye for goal and finishes up as the all-time top goal scorer in Ulster football championship history with 18 goals.
He was the perfect age to be directly influenced by Down’s irresistible All-Ireland seasons of 1991 and 1994 and seemed hewn from the Mourne county’s self-styled tradition for flamboyant, expansive football. Coulter embodied that.
After graduating from Down’s All-Ireland winning minor side in 1999, he admitted he anticipated further success but the Down sides he played for reached the Ulster final just twice: 2003 and 2012. It could be argued he was unlucky to arrive on the scene just when Armagh and Tyrone were redefining the standards, not just provincially but nationally. Still, Coulter won’t deny that there were Sundays when Down just didn’t show up. “That was the thing. We were able to put it up to Tyrone most days. In 2003, the year they won the All-Ireland, we should have beaten them in the Ulster final. In 2008, we did beat them. We just never seemed to be able to get our game together between one Sunday and the next and that let us down big time. Maybe, subconsciously, boys were feeling pressure in games we went into as favourites.”
Memorable comeback
Down were as much a mystery to themselves as to outsiders. When they clicked, they were fun to watch. Ask Coulter to single out a highlight from his decade of Ulster championship matches and he settles for the June day in 2010 in Ballybofey when he was at the epicentre of a memorable comeback against Donegal. He finished with 1-4 and a black eye after an extra-time win.
True to form, Down couldn’t follow up, but after being eliminated by Tyrone in the semi-final they tapped into the county’s tradition for all of a sudden turning it on. They went a riveting run, with a swaggering 1-16 to 1-10 win over Kerry in Croke Park before a nail-biting semi-final tussle with Kildare. With James McCartan on the sideline, it looked for all the world as if Down had rediscovered their knack for conjuring All-Ireland winning seasons out of nothing.
“Yeah, it was after we beat Sligo down in Breffni I sensed something was happening,” Coulter says. “We beat them well and had played Longford and Offaly before then. And then the draw was announced that we were playing Kerry in Croke Park and it just gave everyone a huge lift.
“Because Down people look up to Kerry and it was always a dream of mine to play against Kerry. And we took a confidence into that game . . . it wasn’t cockiness but Kerry probably weren’t as up for it as we were. It was just another game but every man in Down looked up to the Kerry people and players.”
They lost the final by a point to Cork, a final that was defined by Cork’s desperate need to make good on too many seasons’ of unfulfilled promise. For Coulter, it was bittersweet: the disappointment was acute but the run was so unexpected that he had begun to reconcile himself to never being involved in a September match.
Small consolation
“It is a small consolation for sure. The three weeks before hand were brilliant, the whole build up in the county. And the fortnight afterwards, we had a trip to New York and I also got on the All-Star trip that year . . . those were all new experiences for me. I had been away with Ireland on the International Rules, but to get away with the boys that you train with week in and week out and knew very well was definitely brilliant.”
But in tandem with the personal disappointments, Coulter was also grappling with a changing sport His native province had never exactly been an encouraging stage for out-and-out stylists to exhibit their stuff. But the tactical shift in Gaelic football dismayed him. When he played in what would be his last Ulster final in 2012, he faced a Donegal side that was totally re-imagined from the team he had outfoxed two summers earlier. Facing a drought that was even longer than Down’s, the Donegal men had abandoned their free-spirited approach in favour of a defensively impenetrable system that yielded instant success under Jim McGuinness.
“We had done our homework and there was a period in the first half when big Ambrose [Rodgers]came through with the ball and struck it well and it just went over the bar. If it had have hit the net, it might have been a different game. But Donegal got a goal afterwards and got men behind the ball and went four or five points up and then it was very difficult.
“But I have played in games where you are wondering: am I going to do well here . . . you don’t know how many people are going to be marking you or what sort of defence you will meet. When I played against the Donegal defensive system, I hardly got a touch inside so I had to go outfield and try and get on the ball.
“It is very hard when you train hard all year and go into a big championship game to be thinking no matter what you do, you are probably going to have a poor enough game because the way they are set up, it is just not going to happen for inside forwards.”
Gradual erosion
As a full-time GAA coach and current manager of the Mayobridge under-21 side, it is a trend that bothers him. He refers to Gregory McCartan, “a midfielder who was comfortable kicking of either foot” and fears that the pattern of the game will see a gradual erosion of those skills. “I do feel that players like him are being replaced by athletes. There are more athletes than Gaelic footballers now.”
There is an irony in that the defensive systems were designed to try to cope with the brilliance of players like Coulter and Tyrone’s Stephen O’Neill, who bowed out last week. He accepts the logic and effectiveness but doesn’t pretend to be a fan of the new order of football in the province.
“Ulster is far more defensive than any other province and for a forward, it is a nightmare to play in. Just a nightmare. I would say that this year, all the Ulster teams are going to be very defensive in how they set up. Including Down. We will put a lot of bodies in defence and try and counter at pace. You have to play teams at their own game. If you go man to man against that system and try to push out, it just wouldn’t work. So I can see this kind of game being here for quite a while.”
It is not his problem now. On the day we spoke, he knew that his former Down team-mates were to meet that night for training in Downpatrick. It would be dark, wet, soft, gruelling. “It is just so much of a relief to think that I will be able to chill out and relax,” he laughs. “If I knew I had training tonight, I’d be in bad form all day at the thought of it.”
His departure brought salutes from across Ireland and through his leaving, the Down football tradition will lose one of its most vital exponents of its trademark qualities – the excitement, the verve, the goals. But Benny Coulter is bowing out with a sense of unfinished business.
“We got very close to the All-Ireland, it is just a pity that we couldn’t pull it off. It is a massive regret and it will stay with me. And someday I would like to come and try and manage Down and maybe if you can’t win one as a player, you might do it as a manager.”
