Oisín McConville: Sometimes the qualifiers let you spread your wings and enjoy the journey
Oisin McConville, Armagh, in action against Waterford's John Hearne in Walsh Park in the 2003 qualifier. Picture: Matt Browne / SPORTSFILE
In the mid 1980s, St Patrick’s Primary School in Crossmaglen played Armagh CBS in a McGreevy Cup schools quarter-final. On the way to the match in Ballymacnab, the bus broke down. We were stranded and going nowhere - until a sand lorry appeared around the corner.
Your boy driving the lorry asked us if we needed a lift. We all nodded. We didn’t want to miss the chance of having a cut off the CBS lads. So your boy lowered the bucket of the lorry and we all climbed in.
By the time the lorry pulled into Ballymacnab, the CBS lads were beside themselves laughing at us in the back. They nearly collapsed when your boy lowered the bucket again and a gang of young boys and a handful of teachers rolled out instead of sand.
Armagh CBS were decked out in brand spanking new gear. We had a mixture of jerseys which somebody had rustled together from the club. We resembled Ragball United. The CBS players spent the first ten minutes laughing at us. But we had the last laugh. We beat them by 67 points.
We put on a display that afternoon but the spin to the match made the day. Executive travel with advanced air conditioning. You couldn’t make it up for a comic book skit if you tried. But could you imagine firing over 20 kids and a handful of teachers into a sand lorry now? You’d be locked up.
During the first year of the qualifiers in 2001, I was involved in another episode with a bus on the way to a game. The big difference this time around was that it didn’t break down – the bus just wasn’t going anywhere. Fast.
Before we played Galway in Croke Park in Round 3 that July, we met at Na Fianna’s club pitch on the Mobhi Road, not far from Croke Park. Around 90 minutes before the game was due to start, we were sitting on the bus waiting for a Garda escort to guide us to Croke Park. But the outriders with the motorbikes never arrived.
After 15 minutes of waiting, the bus pulled off out the gates and into traffic gridlock. The match was on at 4pm on a Saturday afternoon so the streets were clogged with cars heading to the stadium and Saturday shopping traffic. So a journey that should have taken no more than ten minutes took close to an hour.
Lads were going out of their minds with stress and worry. Some of the more serious guys were nearly having heart palpitations. We were more concerned with potentially missing the match than facing a Galway side which had been in the previous year’s All-Ireland final.
All the while during this chaos, Paddy ‘The Bishop’ McNamee, the kitman, was hanging out the door trying to tell the lines of cars in front of us and all around us to pull into one side and let us pass. Lads were looking at ‘The Bishop’ like he’d two heads on him. Paddy might have had some chance if he was donning a mitre and waving a crozier. Everyone else on the bus didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
We only arrived in Croke Park ten minutes before the game. It was chaos. There was zero opportunity for lads to be strapped. We barely had time to warm up. People say we used it as an excuse when we lost by one point, but it was more than a legitimate excuse. Of all the things you prepare for, you don’t prepare for that kind of a shambles.
For years, I think that experience coloured my view of the qualifiers. I hated them – until we needed them. I actually only played in eight qualifier games, and we won six. Four of those wins came in 2003, when we reached the All-Ireland final through the back door.
One of my most memorable experiences of the qualifiers was going to Waterford in 2003 for the first round. We were All-Ireland champions but Monaghan had dumped us out in Ulster in our first match. We were really low but we went down to Waterford the night before the game and had great craic on the way.
The Waterford people really embraced us. As the team was being called out on the loudspeaker before the match, when it came to my name the boy with the microphone said: ‘And number 15, the one and only Oisín McConville’.
I got a great kick out of that because we were used to going into Ulster when everything was on a war footing. I think that was the real beauty of the qualifiers, especially in the early days – it gave teams the chance to spread their wings and play teams they normally wouldn’t.
I remember enjoying the journey in 2003 but I can’t really say that I ever embraced the qualifiers because we didn’t need them that much, especially with Armagh winning four Ulster titles between 2002-06. My last game for Armagh was a qualifier defeat to Derry in 2007.
It was my first qualifier game in four years. And my last.
