Mourne men ready to take to the throne
Down were in a good place going into that game having impressed in seeing off Donegal in Ballybofey and they were in an even better place after the first 20 minutes of the provincial semi-final in Belfast.
Eight points to four up at that point, and playing into a stiff Cement Park wind, Down were tearing through Tyrone’s defence at will and Stephen O’Neill had already limped off with a heel injury.
The promised land beckoned.
Instead, Tyrone circled the wagons, regrouped and launched a counter-offensive that ought to have killed Down off long before Danny Hughes’s late shot on goal was turned aside by Pascal McConnell to seal the win.
The post-mortem was grisly. Same old Down, was the popular refrain. James McCartan admitted as much and Coulter echoed his manager’s thoughts when he picked up the phone to Hughes a day later.
“Same old s***e,” Coulter told his attacking colleague.
The mood was still grim when the side gathered on the Tuesday night, two days after the deflation in Belfast. The immediate future didn’t promise much in the way of relief as Down had traditionally viewed the qualifiers as a path to be endured rather than embraced. They came together that night to train but they passed the hours deep in conversation instead. Home truths were laid out for all to see. When they were done, the sense of despair had lifted.
“I’m glad now, looking back at it,” says Coulter of that get-together. “If that goal had gone in, we wouldn’t have had that meeting. If we’d won that game, it was a 50-50 game against Monaghan, who could have beaten us.
“Then we would have been out a week later against Kildare and probably have been dumped out of the All-Ireland. That’s the way it works and, in hindsight when you look at it, it might have been a blessing in disguise.”
So, what were the words that changed everything?
“We won’t give it away here but there were a couple of things that we didn’t do at certain points of the game. That happened against Kerry at certain points too but we changed that, unlike five or six weeks earlier. A couple of us were able to get it sorted a couple of times on the pitch against Kerry. James and Paddy (Tally) and Jerome (Johnson) had nothing to do with it.”
The fruits of what Hughes jokingly calls their “Camp David” deliberations weren’t immediately obvious. Four and two-point backdoor wins over Longford and Offaly didn’t exactly get the grapevine humming. Even the evisceration of Sligo was coloured by the Connacht team’s loss to Roscommon six days earlier.
The sum total of their efforts in the qualifiers were, nevertheless, more impressive than the individual parts as it was the first time that the county had managed to emerge into the bright lights of the All-Ireland series from such a route.
Kerry had yet to be faced and beaten but Down had already gone some way to laying ghosts of summers past to bed. Heaven knows there was enough of them to vanquish. Longford from 2002, Sligo four years later when they only managed four points and Wicklow last year in Aughrim had haunted them most.
“The first real low point of mine was the Longford one,” says Coulter. “It was Pete(McGrath)’s last game. At that stage, we weren’t going anywhere. We were all over the show as a whole team, as a county, as everything. We just weren’t prepared for championship football the way we should be.
“The second one was Paddy (O’Rourke)’s last game against Sligo. We had a brilliant set-up. We had everything going for us. We had a great manager and backroom team, everything bar players really. I don’t know what happened to us that year.”
Hughes graduated onto the Down senior panel around about the same time as Coulter and bears many of the same scars but he is less reluctant to dive into the past when prodded. When he does, it is to rue some bad luck, particularly during O’Rourke’s time in charge. His memories of Ross Carr are equally complimentary but none of them can erase the disappointments accrued over the past decade because the reality is, that for all the county’s storied traditions stemming from the 60s and 90s, defeat has been a far more familiar bedfellow.
“You do take a lot of heat,” says Hughes. “Obviously the media can write and the supporters will say what they want and we didn’t deliver in a lot of those marquee games. There was times when you would have to look at yourself and admit you hadn’t delivered. There were low points down the years but I’m sure if you ask James he will say that he had low points too. You only get very few successes in any inter-county career, bar the likes of Kerry and Tyrone who have had a number of them, but it is hard to take.”
The defeat of Kerry changed everything.
Suddenly, a side that few were paying any attention to had catapulted themselves into the glaring light of August football for the first time since James McCartan et al captured Sam Maguire for a second time in four seasons with the defeat of Dublin in the 1994 final.
Long a darling of those living the shadow of the Mourne mountains, ‘Wee James’ has gilded his reputation as the man who can do no wrong in his first season on the line but McCartan seems all too aware of the painfully thin line that separates success from failure.
The manager admitted: “We knew we had gifted players when we started the year. We had gifted players last year and we will have gifted players next year. Now, maybe we will get dumped out of the Ulster Championship in the first round next year but the players are there.
“It is just about trying to get the best out of them. I don’t think I have done anything spectacularly different to the likes of Ross or DJ (Kane) or Paddy. Maybe we got the wee bit of luck, the wake-up call against Tyrone and the rub of the green (against Offaly) in Tullamore. Maybe its better to be a lucky manager than a good one.”
His players are less reticent about his influence. Coulter expected a firebrand who would tear up and down the sidelines but has been taken aback by McCartan’s level-headedness, particularly in the emotion-charged atmosphere that makes up a half-time changing room. Hughes points to his consistent selection policy and the fact that the man in charge decided against wholesale changes after the Tyrone game when others would have been sorely tempted to do so. Small things, maybe, but ones that all add up.
Nor is it just about McCartan.
Martin Clarke’s return from Australia has been an obvious boost. Less publicised have been the contributions of other ‘newcomers’ such as Kalum King, Danny McArdle, Mark Poland and Conor Garvey. New faces, all. Not just in the squad but in the first 15.
All of them have emerged from successful minor and U21 county sides in recent years and their success at the underage grades have served to wash away much of the pain suffered by their seniors in past campaigns. They have yet to be infected with it. Coulter described it as an absence of fear.
There has been a similar injection of fresh blood off the pitch. Johnson and former Donegal manager Brian McIver have been drafted in while the retention of Tally as physical trainer who held the same role under Carr has provided a sense of continuity that the players have welcomed.
“That’s the one thing you have to look at,” says Coulter. “He has done a great job. He is a great manager and he has a great backroom team there with Jerome, Paddy and Brian. All in all, he has brought a lot of change.”
Their presence in Croke Park on Sunday will be proof of that.
