LOCKER ROOM: Tomorrow's club football final is between two of the best-run clubs in the country

WENT TO Parnell Park on Saturday night for a starter course before the main business tomorrow. It was odd looking at Dublin playing Derry through the prism of a week which is essentially a celebration of the club game.

Tomorrow two hugely successful clubs contest the All-Ireland club football final. On Saturday two counties who, by the standards they set for themselves, are painfully unsuccessful tussled for two league points. Makes you wonder.

Can it be 16 years since Eamon Coleman, the most loveable curmudgeon in GAA history, brought Derry down to Croker to wipe Dublin’s eye in the All-Ireland semi-final? Sixteen years since Johnny McGurk’s point curled over at the Canal End, thus becoming at once a grace note, a full stop and a moment of legend?

When the Derry boys would tour the States afterwards they would bring a supply of old boots to be auctioned off as the very boot with which Johnny McGurk scored the most famous point in Derry GAA history. They were that sort of team, bright and fearless and infused with the wry wit of men like Coleman and Joe Brolly and Henry Downey and Johnny McGurk himself.

And, of course, because there is nothing new under heaven and earth, their county board soon messed it up and long before the Cork hurlers were sending up distress flares the footballers of Derry were forming socialist collectives and appealing to the proletariat.

Somebody in Kilmacud Crokes said to me last week that the benefits of the 1995 All-Ireland win for the club are really being felt now and that the challenge, win or lose tomorrow, in Kilmacud is to plant the seeds to 10, 15 years’ time.

Would that such vision was commonplace in the GAA because as a theory it holds water. Post 1995, Kilmacud got into the minds of the kids who went to Croke Park with their faces painted. And they have built sustained success. That’s the way it works in places like Crossmaglen and Nemo too. Places where the success never quite goes away.

It was fascinating on Saturday night to look through the Derry team and their points of origin. There on the sidelines was Damian Cassidy, not an ounce above his fighting weight and still the serious student of football he always was.

When Damien was playing, the defining rivalry which propelled Derry football was that between Bellaghy and Lavey. The aftermath of games between the two would often look like a more vividly-coloured version of Picasso's Guernica.

And that was just the juvenile camogie clashes. The clubs represented great communities and great families. The McGurks of Lavey. The Diamonds of Bellaghy and so on.

Lavey and Bellaghy won three Ulster championships between them in the first half of the 90s, with Lavey winning the All-Ireland title in 1991 and Bellaghy going under to Crokes in the final in 1995. They were heady times for Derry football and winning the National League became almost a reflex, with wins in 1992, 1995 and 1996.

But success for Derry petered out. There was one more Ulster title and sporadic under- age success but never so much of it that you reflected on the benefits of 1993 really beginning to percolate through.

(The same goes in spades too, of course, for the other participants in the Ulster revolution of the early 90s. Donegal fell away into perpetual indiscipline. Down just vanished having bookended the period with two All- Irelands. And when Ulster next flaunted itself in Croke Park it was Armagh and Tyrone, two counties who got heartily sick of congratulating their neighbours in the early 90s who muscled their way into the limelight. Which goes to show that, as Lavey and Bellaghy used to teach us, neighbourly spite is as as much an ingredient of success as anything else. )

And as for Dublin? The All-Ireland of 1994 slipped away on a rainy day in September. And the holy grail was grabbed (just about) in 1995 on the day Charlie Redmond got sent off twice and Tyrone’s late equaliser was disallowed for lifting off the ground.

Dublin finished that year with the club and county All-Ireland titles residing in the city.

It was time to build and get into the minds of the kids. And yet, 14 years later, the sky blue jersey hasn’t seen another All-Ireland Sunday in September. For all the go games and development squads and games’ development officers etc, success won’t come.

Anyway, on Saturday in Parnell Park, Bellaghy were represented in the first XV solely by Fergal Doherty, a good Bellaghy football name but one missing the customary sideorder of Diamonds, Cassidys or Browns. There were no Lavey men, let alone a McGurk in the starting 15 and just one on the bench.

And the great hope of Derry football, by the way, James Kielt, comes from Kilrea. Which neat digression allows us to seque into a tale we once heard Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh tell. It concerns Martin O’Neill who, before he went off to be a soccer player, was a fine Gaelic footballer with Kilrea. So much so that there was awful grief in the O’Neill house when he left the Kilrea club to try his hand at the soccer lark. Anyway, on the night of the 1980 European Cup final in Madrid, when Forest retained the trophy, Martin had his family in the city for the occasion. He stood with his father amidst the singing and the fervour and the fireworks and said: “Well, Dad do you think now that I made the right decision?” And his father looked at Martin and said: “Aye it’s great son. But it’s not the same as winning a senior championship with Kilrea is it?”

I’ve always felt that understanding exactly what Martin O’Neill’s father meant is the one thing which defines a person as a GAA person. I’ve told that story to soccer men and they’ve always turned their noses up and muttered bitterly. GAA people just smile and say, ‘true, true.’

Bellaghy Wolfe Tones are surviving but not thriving as of old. The last century ended with three county titles in a row for the Blues. They have won just one since. Lavey haven’t had a big celebration since 1993. Derry are gone from the shark tank of real big-time football for quite a while without ever looking like they are going to shrink back to the status of minnows.

Tomorrow’s club football final is between two of the best-run clubs in the country. Crokes and Cross. It is no accident or no twist of romance that has them there. It is planning and perpetual effort.

It’s spring time and everybody wants the same thing. To end the year with some silverware and a nice presentation and the feeling that success is the start of great things for the club or the county.

Looking at Derry and Dublin on Saturday night was sobering. It reminded us that, as often as not, success can make a failure of your home. Cross and Crokes won’t slip away to join their ranks of those who are forgotten but not gone but that is the fate of so many.

In that regard, consider Mullaghbawn’s fate; Ulster champions in 1995 having won their first Armagh title in 31 years that summer. How many speeches were made to the effect that Mullaghbawn would be going that wee bit further the next year, that this was the platform which would make the club great etc. Nearby Crossmaglen have won every Armagh county title since and bring back the All-Ireland most times they put their mind to it. Success? Ya might as well have the open-top bus tour and a few heady sips from the cup and forget it happened because, unless you are smarter than the average bear, success won’t automatically beget more of the same.