Tommy Martin: Glamour, no. But with Finn Harps the ride is always interesting

ORIGINAL OF THE SPECIES: Losing 11 players, including their top three goalscorers Finn Harps’ chances of survival rest with manager Ollie Horgan, a near-mythical figure in League of Ireland soccer. Picture: Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile

The least fashionable of the unfashionable. The most marginal of those on the margins. The dreamiest of dreamers.

If there are certain things that mark out League of Ireland people and the clubs whose tumultuous fortunes they follow, then Finn Harps are all that and then some.

In a league in which everyone is tilting at windmills, they are the dons of defiance.

And if Finn Harps are quintessentially League of Ireland, then this season might be the Harpsiest of them all.

Stripped of 11 players who helped them finish eighth last season, including their top three goalscorers, (they got better offers elsewhere) defiance will be a useful quality. Survive again this season and Harps will equal their longest-ever top-flight spell since two-division League of Ireland began, matching a five-season stay in the late 1990s.

Their chances rest with a 53-year-old secondary school teacher from Salthill, Co Galway. Manager Ollie Horgan is a near-mythical figure in League of Ireland lore. Wild-eyed, beak-nosed and with an untamed blonde mullet more typical of a Dusseldorf heavy metal club, he is famously bellicose on the sideline, doom-laden about his own team’s chances and, even in domestic football’s cavalcade of quirk, an absolute original.

Is it true that he can play Beethoven expertly on piano? That he can conjure mathematics theorems as readily as training drills? That he steals from country to country in the close season like a sort of shadowy BFG, whispering sweet nothings into the ears of troubled professionals who suddenly find themselves spirited away to European football’s north-west frontier?

Yes, all these things are true. Well, probably. This is, after all, a club who listed among their trialists in a pre-season friendly the WWE wrestler Rey Mysterio. Rather than a masked, muscle-bound grappler, the player turned out to be a journeyman Croatian striker called Filip Mihaljevic.

He is one of a motley squadron of exotic names and local prospects that Horgan has assembled in the hope of heaving the boulder up the hill again. There’s Spanish defender Jose Carillo and French midfielder Elie-Gael N’Zeyi Kibonge, both signed from Slovakian football, and Dutch-born, Turkish qualified midfielder Erol Erdal Alkan. Madagascan international and League of Ireland stalwart Bastien Hery has also joined up.

Horgan can’t offer these guys much in the way of money. And if you’ve been to Finn Park, you’ll know that neither can he promise glamour. Instead, there is the chance of a career stepping-stone and the sense that whatever happens, the ride with this tracksuited shaman will at least be interesting.

If any of this sounds overly romantic, then check the pages of this very newspaper from last October, in which former Cork City star Graham Cummins paid a backhanded tribute to Horgan’s powers of persuasion.

“Having played in Finn Park on numerous occasions throughout my career,” wrote Cummins, “I have no idea why a player — apart from those who are Donegal natives — would choose to sign for Harps. I don’t see any attraction in playing for the club. Anyone who mentions a cold, wet Tuesday night in Stoke has obviously never been to Ballybofey on a Friday night... Yet Horgan somehow manages to do it.”

That bruising assessment contains multitudes: the bewilderment at their very existence that Harps have attracted since their election to the League in 1969; and the enduring, stone-mad love of the individuals who have kept them going all that time.

Horgan, after all, is merely the successor of Patsy McGowan, a three-time holder of the Finn Park managerial reigns and the man whose crazy dream of senior football in Donegal took them from the junior ranks to the top of Irish football. Spilling out of the League of Ireland board meeting which narrowly voted them in, a pressman walked up to McGowan and said, “I’ve seen it all now — we’re taking a club into the League of Ireland with a set of goalposts and two junior players!”

Speaking to Austin O’Callaghan on Ocean FM last year, the now 83-year-old McGowan still remembers the scepticism that greeted Harps. Their first game was against the mighty Shamrock Rovers. They were hammered 10-2. It was an embarrassment. McGowan was asked by a reporter if Harps would last the season. “Not only will we last till the end of the season,” McGowan replied, “we’ll be in Europe in four years.”

He wasn’t far off. Four years and a month later, Harps played Aberdeen in the UEFA Cup. That season they won the FAI Cup, beating St Patrick’s Athletic 3-1 in the final. McGowan was possessed of the sort of belligerent, visionary qualities of many more celebrated 20th-century football managers: a sort of Finn Valley Clough. Watching the YouTube footage of that cup final win, you see the grainy glory that has sustained the club’s band of supporters through decades of seemingly eternal struggle.

In truth, Harps never really became a club for the whole of Donegal. The county was too vast and the population too scattered behind mountains and great, sweeping peninsulas to unite behind the struggling team from a small town somewhere vaguely in the middle of county. For most, trips to Ballybofey were more likely to be for a Donegal match in McCumhaill Park or to buy a mother of the bride outfit in McElhinney’s department store.

That may change. If Horgan and McGowan were quintessential characters of the League of Ireland’s past and present — pugnacious obsessives sworn to battle the odds to the death — then Kevin McHugh might just symbolise its future. A legendary figure for his goalscoring exploits with the club, McHugh is now head of Finn Harps academy and a passionate and articulate champion of League of Ireland clubs’ capacity to become hotbeds of talent production and thereby focal points for their wider communities.

Harps won both the U14 and U15 National League Cups in 2021 with players and coaches drawn from all over the county and there is hope that this approach will fuel Harps’ future with something stronger than heroic defiance.

Government grant money for women’s football, academy facilities and a long-mothballed new stadium in nearby Stranorlar gives a further sense of upward mobility, even if the immediate focus for Horgan must, as always, be to somehow avoid moving downward.