Deep thinker: The genius of Rory Gallagher
Derry manager Rory Gallagher. "The man sleeps and breathes football. It’s all he does and all he worries about, 24/7."
Irish News, November 1998:
THE first man to lead three different counties to an Ulster final, Rory Gallagher is a complex and confusing figure in the GAA.
A lot of what he did runs contrary to accepted norms in GAA. He played for four different clubs in four different counties. He was an All-Ireland club winner with St Gall’s. At St Brigid’s in Dublin he won a county and Leinster title. He won two Corn na nÓg titles with St Michael’s Enniskillen, an All-Ireland Vocational School’s with Enniskillen Tech, and a Sigerson Cup with Sligo IT.
As a teenager he attracted significant interest with Manchester United and Blackburn. He captained a Northern Ireland Schoolboys team that featured Philip Mulryne and the Fermanagh Milk Cup team, before featuring in the Irish League for Portadown.
Here, we speak to some of the figures he has encountered through his early, formative years to find out what went into the making of a formidable coach and manager.
"He had everything. Everything. All the high-end skills of vision and so on, he had all those things. He possibly lacked a bit of pace, but that suggests how much better he was at everything else because it wasn’t something that held him back.
"He very quickly became a ‘manager’, literally, even as a young player. He would be full of suggestions but he was always very knowledgeable. When you have a team, he would have stood out from that point of view. He would have been a spokesman for the rest of the players from a very early age. It wasn’t that he put himself forward, that was just the way he went about things. He’s obsessive in nearly everything he done. As a player, he needed to win, did do everything he could to win, within and without the rules. Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing is too unimportant to be ignored."
"He had played for and captained Northern Ireland Schoolboys, and had been to Ferney Park (Ballinamallard FC) at some stage. He was a very strong, physical central defender. But more than that, he was a great reader of the game. He was a good organiser, he talked a lot to players around him on the park and organised extremely well. And that was part of the reason that we did so well and got to the final for the first time in the competition. You would have known he was talented. Not only in his own age group, but he could play and compete with those in an older age group and he didn’t look out of place."
"He was the centre-half. He had been at Man United and he had broken his leg and he came back from that and signed for us. He was right up there in terms of his positioning and reading the game, comfortable on the ball. He did well for us, but he was always torn between Gaelic and soccer. He would have made a good soccer career for himself. He dad and mum used to come to all the matches as well. I couldn’t speak highly enough of him. But he was a quiet lad back then! I watch him now on the television and, well…!
"I have followed his career, who all he has played for and I am not surprised that he has done well on the management side of things."
"What came across for me in the early days of him arriving at St Gall’s, when you saw him out the field, he was organising people around him. He was talking, a good communicator and he was talking to some of the younger players like CJ McGourty or Kevin Niblock. One of his first big impacts he had was putting a bit of structure in making a focal point in full-forward, by staying in around there, having the patience. Talking to younger players around him so as to keep a bit of shape in that full-forward line. His movement and ability to either score or bring others into play was excellent. It was probably the catalyst as to why we kicked on to win the All-Ireland. I would say it was the X-Factor because the guys were very strong in the Antrim scene, (but) had blown hot and cold in the Ulster Championship. They were just missing something, and in my opinion, Rory was the missing link in terms of giving that focal point and communication. He and I connected quickly and from speaking to him, he had a good idea of what to do with our attack. At the end of the first year, going into the 2010-2011 season, Jim McGuinness asked him into Donegal and he was still playing with us. We had a lot of discussion around defending the field and he felt it was a lot easier defending the last 45 metres of the field than the whole field.
"We would talk about defending in numbers, hitting teams quickly on the counter, getting three and four men to do hard, hard running with the ball. Those principles you can see over the last number of weeks with the wins over Tyrone and Monaghan."
"You knew from a really early stage that he knew what he was talking about. He knew his football. You got a sense of his encyclopaedic knowledge of players, both our own and other teams. Neither (Rory or Jim) would have dominated. It would have been a really joint effort with the coaching and the lingo and the speaking. It would have been rare if one took a bigger part of the session than the other. I’m not at all surprised at his success. The man sleeps and breathes football. It’s all he does and all he worries about, 24/7. When you have that level of interest you will always find a way to be involved. When you are as highly thought of and sought after, people will always come knocking at your door. Any of the jobs he has got, he has been courted and hasn’t gone looking for them. He is a high-end football man and if he stepped away from Derry tomorrow, he would never be short of offers. That’s partly why he has been involved in intercounty teams for over ten years without a break, if I am not mistaken."
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