Steven Poacher: Leitrim can make their own history

GAME ON: Sligo's Manager Dessie Sloyan and Niall Murphy, Leitrim's Manager Steven Poacher and Ryan O’Rourke, Tommy Kelly and Seamus Cronin, Mayo's Jack Coyne and manager Andy Moran and Roscommon's Diarmuid Murtagh and Manager Mark Dowd. Pic: ©INPHO/Tom O’Hanlon.

Selling Leitrim. Selling a dream. Selling an endless string of possibilities. Nothing cast-iron can be sold. Well, nothing glamorous anyways.

Steven Poacher is in his second year as Leitrim manager. Twenty-one new players were brought in during his debut season at the helm. Sixteen further fresh faces arrived in the door at the beginning of the current campaign.

Such a year-on-year influx of debutants is the way of life on the Division 4 backroads. If there’s one guarantee when signing up for life on the bottom rung of football’s ladder, it’s the maddening levels of player turnover during the off-season. Indifference to the county cause is a fermented attitude.

Poacher was thoroughly engaging conversation at last week’s Connacht SFC launch. He spoke of Jack Kelly and the young forward’s motivation to march behind the local band in Carrick-On-Shannon on Connacht Championship Sundays.

But Connacht Championship Sundays at a well-populated Páirc Seán Mac Diarmada are very much the exception to green and gold existence.

Every other spring and summer weekend, while not exactly plummeting to the sparsity of the 141 people that attended the Tipp-Waterford Division 4 League encounter last month, play out in the shadows.

There’s a sizable carrot for Leitrim to chase this Sunday. They haven’t beaten neighbours Sligo in the championship since 2011. But beyond that is a Tailteann Cup where they failed to emerge from the group phase last year and in 2023. And all this after a League campaign where they ultimately wound up seventh in Division 4.

Maybe the indifference is at times justified. Maybe you need to be wired differently to commit.

“Oh, 100%,” Poacher replied to the latter remark. “And the beauty of our management team is that Daniel St Ledger, who played 150 games for Carlow, will tell the lads that ‘I had more dismal days than I had good days’.

“I was lucky enough to be part of Daniel's great days. Carlow had their first promotion in 40 years when I was there, they had their longest championship run in 75 years. But they were only two years. Daniel says outside of that, 11 years of his career was in the gutter. And he’d say a large part of that was just mindset.

“If people are looking for instant success in Division 4, it doesn't come easy.” So, how then do you sell Leitrim? What do you sell when attempting to fill the dressing-room seats vacated during the off-season?

“I can't sell them a training camp in Portugal for a week in December. But we can sell them the fact that you can make your own little piece of history and tradition.

“We've lads on the panel whose fathers played on the great Leitrim team of 1994. I'm saying to the players, they've left their bit of legacy so you can leave your little bit of legacy. That in 30 or 40 years’ time, your children or your grandchildren can say, my father played for Leitrim and he was part of that great Leitrim team.

“So, for me, you're selling to a group of young lads and you're saying, can we win the Connacht Championship? Realistically, they probably think, no, we can't. But our glass ceiling is a lot higher than a lot of counties that are at the top.

“For us, we can get out of Division 4, stay in Division 3, give the Tailteann Cup a run, there are so many aspects to life with Leitrim that are more attractive than other counties. It is just trying to get the group to stay together.” What Poacher has now gives him hope of someday carving out success for the green and gold.

“In my own county of Down, we are probably going to build a centre of excellence in Ballykinlar, which is 40 minutes from Newry. People in Newry will give off that the centre of excellence is in Ballykinlar.

“But I say, hold on, I have 18 Leitrim lads travelling from Dublin every Wednesday. It takes them an hour to get out of Dublin city, not to get over to the centre of excellence, and then two hours to get to Leitrim. They leave at 3pm and don't get back until 1am. How many inter-county players are doing that?

“Sometimes inter-county life in the glamorous counties can be nice, but those young lads are making some commitment. If we can keep those characters, Leitrim will be in a good place in two or three years' time.” Sold on a dream.