GAA:TONIGHT IN Newry, Paddy O'Rourke and James McCartan will shake hands and then resume separate football lives. Once, these two men were at the epicentre of impossibly bright years for Down football. More recently O'Rourke, the captain of the 1991 team that swept to an All-Ireland title, tried his best to get his native county rolling again before eventually passing the torch on to Ross Carr.
McCartan, a forward whose combustible brilliance seemed perfectly suited to Down’s capacity for catching fire in any championship summer, watched his friends and former team-mates put everything into getting Down rolling again. And now it is his turn.
It hasn’t been a bad spring, his first season on the job. A narrow win against Donegal in Ballybofey – a dry run to a championship date in May – left Down riding high in Division Two. The visit of Armagh tonight, breathing down their necks and under the tutelage of O’Rourke, makes it feel as though Down are on the verge of the big time again.
McCartan is blue in the face trying to put the good results in perspective along with the bad. With Down, there has never been much appetite for the middle ground. Whether by accident or design, Down have accumulated the reputation of being thoroughbreds. Everything or nothing. McCartan is the latest fabled son to try to prove it can be otherwise. He laughs when asked if he had thought hard about taking this job.
“Well, yeah. How it came about was a strange one. I suppose the first reaction was I would be mad to take that job because of the ridicule the previous men had to put up with. And because I know Paddy and Ross, I suppose I had an inside line as to how much work they were putting into it. That gave me food for thought. Another consideration was, when the post became vacant, there was talk Pete McGrath’s name was going to be put forward. And I wondered if it would be right for me to go up against a man of Pete’s stature and against someone I have such respect for.
“I remembered hearing Colm O’Rourke would never go forward for the Meath job as long as Seán Boylan was in the running. But I thought about it and I took into account too when Pete McGrath takes a Down job, it tends to be for a 15-year period! So I went forward and it was a bit of a strange situation for me but when I got it, Pete was, of course, the gentleman that he always is.”
For McCartan, the chief task is to figure out why Down have been misfiring in recent years. As he notes, in a one-off situation, Down have often been a match for any team in Ulster. He cites the 2008 championship opener against Tyrone, when the team scrapped for a draw and then took Mickey Harte’s side to Newry for a famous extra-time victory. But Down fell flat against Armagh a week later and Tyrone sneaked through the qualifiers before taking flight at the perfect time and winning their second All-Ireland in three years.
When McCartan was a young player coming up, that audacious timing, allied to stunning quality, was Down’s speciality. It is no accident he twice makes reference to Meath during our conversation: the Royals were probably the toughest team going when McCartan was busying proving he was more than Dan McCartan’s son. Meath were ambushed by Down in the 1991 All-Ireland final, a season that was defined by Down’s growing self-assurance.
Three years later, they did it again with a series of victories that confirmed Down’s status as the ultimate boys of summer. It was a distinction created by the indelible influence of the Down teams that won All-Irelands in 1960, 1961 and 1968.
By the 1990s, sufficient time had passed for it to seem like a second coming. But the cold – to those who witnessed the 1960s and 90s – fact is Down have failed to win an Ulster title since 1994. Can the legacy of the teams McCartan played on have any bearing on the young Down players of today? “Well, we are talking about a lifetime ago for some of the young lads coming through since Down have delivered anything in Ulster or nationally at senior championship level,” McCartan says.
“The funny thing is this reputation Down have, the whole phoenix from the flame thing, persists. I have family living in Dublin and they often hear, you know, ‘Down are going to come again’. And they say: ‘based on what?’ Meaning we have to show some evidence of that. If there is a certain mystique about Down football, it goes back to the 1960s team, I think. But it is something that is maybe attributable to Down football supporters and maybe a national perception more so than to Down teams themselves. We have seen it here ourselves recently. We got a good win in Donegal but look, we could easily have been turned over there. It was a draw at the end of normal time and thankfully, we got the win. But if we had been beaten, it would have been two losses on the trot and then people would have been in a different frame of mind this week.
“So it is a matter of trying to strike a balance. There is going to be a lot of excitement about Armagh coming to Newry and playing under lights. What it gives this Down team is a chance to pit themselves against the county that has been dining at the top table of Ulster football for the last decade. And that is a great test for us. But regardless of the result, it is just another step.”
McCartan admits he is as mystified as anyone else as to why the oomph just went out of Down football. One basic explanation is that the team on which he played was shimmering with exceptional football men. But it is surely more complex than that. There are still plenty of good footballers within Down and the failure to reap the rewards of a scintillating minor team that won the All-Ireland in 1999 and 2005 has arguably set them back. It is also true, like every other team in Ulster, they have had to live on the scraps left by Armagh and Tyrone.
McCartan has always been aware of the precariousness of form and reputation in Gaelic football. Back in 1995, he sat down with Tom Humphries and said something that seemed at odds to anyone who had watched him destroy opposition teams with the sheer speed and brightness of his game. This was in May; Down were All-Ireland champions and warm favourites to open their Ulster account by beating a Donegal team who had been torn apart by Derry in the league final a week earlier. “I’m a pessimist. I am always looking for what’s wrong. I’m apprehensive about everything.”
This was Wee James, a minor All-Ireland in 1987, Sigerson Cups in ’90 and ’93, All-Ireland senior titles in 1991 and 1994, International Rules selections, All-Star awards – all had been achieved. It hardly made sense he should be downbeat about anything but as it turned out, his words presaged a bad day. Sure enough, Donegal silenced Down with a famous coup. Nobody, not a sinner then, would have believed that Down would remain locked in Ulster until the present day.
One by one, the great players bowed out and several have tried to resurrect the fortunes of the county.
Now it is McCartan’s turn. He has surrounded himself with good, experienced men: Paddy Tally, a key figure in Tyrone’s first All-Ireland success, and former Ballinderry and Donegal manager Brian McIver are his selectors, and Jerome Johnson, a Kilcoo man who was involved with St Gall’s All-Ireland run, is also part of the backroom team.
What he wants to cultivate is the quality that has always proven elusive in Down: consistency. “There are a lot of teams in this division with their aspirations, promotion or whatever. You see Tipperary beating Meath last weekend; teams are taking points off each other. What we want against Armagh – and in all our games – is to get a performance out of the team.”
So a strange homecoming, then, for O’Rourke and another test for McCartan, whose presence on the sideline is enough to persuade Down followers with long enough memories that those irrepressible summers cannot be far away. McCartan laughs when it is put to him that like Pete McGrath, he might be at the beginning of a stretch in charge that will take him to 2025. He admits he hasn’t even clarified how long his role has been sanctioned far.
“I never asked and they never told me!”
