The Wee Uprising
A few pubs that do a good passing trade with the N2 lorry drivers, a shop, 300 houses and a GAA club currently capturing the imagination of everyone inside Louth and many outside it.
The club is named for the river Mattock, a meandering slip of water which passes from Louth into Meath. Scholars of Irish mythology might note the Mattock is mentioned within the pages of the Táin, Cuchulainn having one of his many battles with Maeve on its banks. In more recent times, the 14th century to be precise, monks landed on the river and constructed Ireland’s first Cistercian Abbey.
“Not many monks left there now,” one local says with a pained wistfulness when that fact is brought up. “But, they must be doing some praying for us. As long as they keep praying ’til after Sunday,” jokes Brendan Reilly, the light hearted orchestrator of this footballing revolution on the Louth Meath border.
While Reilly lives in the Meath town of Slane, nobody should doubt where his heart resides. He has been Collon from his first breath, will be until his last. When a knee injury curtailed his playing career, he immersed himself in the coaching side of things. Now three years after taking over Mattock Rangers senior side, he stands on the cusp of something unimaginable.
Mattock Rangers are much more than the first Louth side in 26 years to reach a Leinster club final. They are more, too, than the injection the arm of Louth football so desperately needed. In the era of the superclub, of teams like the league of counties down in Belfield, Rangers are a thriving symbol of the ethos of the club. One life, one village, one club.
On a Thursday evening, when the saner among us are nestled in front of the fire with a hot toddy and video, 21 young lads don their jelly bags (what the locals, rather bizarrely, term woolly hats) and jog onto a field in Termonfeckin.
“A Mattock Rangers team have probably never trained in December in their history,” one player smiles.
Circumstances illustrate that. Although, there is admirable development work ongoing in the clubhouse (including the construction of Collon’s first gym), the small field where this bunch of players grew up together has no lights. They have relied on the kindness of rivals to train for the past two months.
“All the local clubs have been very good to us,” Reilly says, through a puff of frosted air. “They have all offered their facilities.” As they should. On an evening to chill the bone marrow, Drogheda is a slave to the season of crass consumerism, all shops opened late, people carry more shopping than usual. But, the town is talking of Mattock. Taxi drivers and old men in bars. A Louth club in a Leinster final has that sort of effect.
Success like this has been a long time coming for the Wee county. And only the most cynical can say they don’t deserve it. In the previews that accompany the start of every GAA season, there are certain things you are guaranteed to see. One, of course, is the breakthrough of Louth footballers. This year, the soothsayers almost got it right.
Ninety seconds away from causing the summer sensation in Navan, they took their eye off Graham Geraghty. A minute later, he had sounded their championship death knell with two expert finishes. Once more, Louth lost a game they controlled by a solitary point, and were left kicking their heels for the remainder of the summer. Bring that memory up here, and the shudder is still visible.
“This will give the county a bit of belief, if nothing else,” Christy Grimes remarks. Although, the team is scrubbed together from local lads who would die for each other, one or two names have become marquee in their remarkable run to the Leinster final. Grimes, long a white hope for Louth football, is one such name.
“Nothing will ever make up for the disappointment of what happened in Navan. That was the worse feeling I ever had in football, but this has softened the blow,” Grimes said.
“People were saying after what happened in Navan, that it would take Louth football a long time to recover, but if they see a tiny club like Collon doing so well, they might get a bit of belief back.”
It’s 40 years since a group of locals gathered in Collon and formed Mattock Rangers. For years, the trophy cabinet lay empty. They reached three county finals, one in ’62 and two more in the early seventies. Village life stopped for an afternoon, but there was nothing to celebrate.
In the eighties, the club suffered as all small clubs suffered. The effects of that depressing decade ravaged the team, effects that would be felt well into the nineties. As Gerry Hanratty, Grimes’ midfield partner and the longest serving outfield player, recalls: “We were within one point of dropping down to junior football in 1996. One kick of the ball.”
HANRATTY looks back at the bleak times now and sees the seeds of success being sown. “Any club that wants to be successful, they have to graft, go back to the basics. We came through intermediate football, the following year, ’97, we were in the intermediate final, then we won it in ’98. Four years later, we are in a Leinster final. But, it has been a hard road to get here.
“Intermediate football is hard and tough. With senior football, it’s a quicker brand of football, you don’t have as much time on the ball, but with intermediate football, you have to be willing to get hit hard. A lot of these lads know what it is like to play intermediate, and they have used that experience.”
They may carry the scars of intermediate football, but Mattock are not a side that grind opposition down with toughness. They have been making a mockery of the Irish winter by some of the scores they have been totting up. 3-9 here, 2-11 there. Don’t they know provincial club games in the midst of winter are all about heavy shoulders and scoring just the bare minimum to win.
“That’s been the really surprising thing,” Hanratty says. “We like playing on top of the ground. So realistically, coming into winter with the ground hardening up, I wouldn’t have thought we would have a chance of getting to the Leinster final. But, we have proved everyone wrong. We are adapting and adapting fast.”
Like so many sides, Mattock swallowed a bitter defeat before learning how to win. Last year, the club reached their fourth county final, their first in three decades. Although inside Louth, they were thought a flash in the pan, most of the players felt they could win. Only to let themselves down on the day.
“That was one of the worst days of my life,” team captain Donal Geraghty remembers. “There is no other feeling worse than losing a final. When you lose something like that, it is so hurtful, you never want to feel like that again.
“That has been the motivation, we know what it is like to lose on the big day, how much it hurts. And losing the Louth senior final last year, that will be on our minds on Sunday week when we go out onto the field (to play the winners of the Dunshaughlin-Rathnew semi-final replay). Not to lose. And the feeling not to lose.”
So, they went into this year’s county final with the awful memories as fresh as if they happened the evening before. St Brides didn’t know what hit them. Mattock were county champions. “It was uncharted teritory for us. So, we went into Starlights and we fancied our chances,” Geraghty recalls. “And we were four points down with four minutes to go, and we came back. That triggered something. We had never won a senior championship before that, and we were realistic coming into Leinster. “
Even beating Starlights in Enniscorthy was not enough for the team to dream of a Leinster final. Brendan Reilly and Des Lane, the team coach, have dealt a nice line in realism all year. Going down to play Tullamore, Geraghty says the team knew this would be a whole different test.
If anything, they dispensed with Tullamore even more clinically. A semi-final against the Kildare champions saw Mattock written off for a third time, but Moorefield didn’t even get going. It has become a carnival ride for a bunch of people in a village where everybody knows everyone else by name. And now, they have entered the realm of dreams.
“Take a look around you, We aren’t Nemo Rangers. We have only used 17 players in 10 games. People ask me for a population of our village, there are only 300 houses, so it gives you an estimation of how small our village is,” says Geraghty, one of the many Mattock players, who commute daily from Dublin.
Gerry Hanratty scans the scenes being played out in Termonfeckin tonight. He has trained all year, since January. In 14 years playing with the senior side, that has never happened before. “It’s like Pat Comer’s documentary, y’know, the one he made when Galway won the All Ireland, that is what this year has reminded me of.”
Around him, Des Lane is turning the cold air blue with some harsh words on this harsh evening. One young lad lets the ball slip through his hands, Jerzy Dudek’s name playfully passes across the winter air.
Mattock Rangers training for a Leinster final in December. And in their Jubillee year, of all years. People have gone to their graves in Collon never believing they would see this day. Gerry Hanratty himself never thought he’d see it. “I always thought Leinster finals were for bigger clubs than Collon, but we have got the heart of any club. For the size and population of the parish, it really has a big heart.
There isn’t a club in the country with a bigger heart than ours.”
