Winning habit breeds confidence in Oak Leafers

You can see it in his eyes even now. Dermot McBride didn’t play in Ballybofey last year, didn’t play in Longford either, but you can see it in his eyes.

The boyish complexion, akin more to an U14 than an inter-county corner-back, hardens momentarily. He talks openly about how much it hurt him watching those two defeats, but it’s the last thing he wants to think about.

“It’s horrible,” said the Ballinascreen man. “Donegal, they’re neighbours, and they beat us two years in a row. It was horrible. I was watching it and it was very, very hard to watch. Last year we were decimated by injuries.

“I don’t even want to look at it because it hurts looking back. When you’re losing… we’ve just got to make sure nothing like that happens again.”

And yet those two defeats could prove a watershed. Year one of John Brennan’s project went perfectly, a decent league followed by a run to a first Ulster final in 11 years. In spite of defeat by Donegal, and a subsequent exit from the qualifiers to Kildare, there was optimism heading into 2012.

It transpired to be a disaster. A league campaign in which they only narrowly avoided relegation was followed on by a championship that lasted 140 minutes, all of which Derry fans would peer through the eyes at.

So what’s changed? Where did a relatively experienced Derry team that almost got relegated and whose championship was over before it started become a team that 12 months later, with a raft of new bodies, was winning Division 2, wowing with its attacking football and heading in now to play a Division 1 team, Down, as favourites?

“We’re winning games,” McBride offers with a level of conviction. “We’d started the league off with a poor enough one in Galway but we picked it up and when you win games, the confidence keeps going and building.

“Last year, we lost a few games, the heads were down and people were starting to talk about relegation and things. When you have that, it just goes negative on ye. This year, thankfully we started winning a few games early in the league and things just started to look up. We took it one week at a time and it took us to the league title and promotion, and we’ll be up there next year playing with the big boys.”