LOCKER ROOM: The northern county may be better off taking the long route around in the qualifiers

FUNNY JOB this. Cyclical. There was a time when the GAA in Derry was thriving you could hit the road Easy Riderstyle and end up in Celtic Park four, five or six times a year. Now it's a rare adventure to hit Derry at all. Sign of the footballing times.

Celtic Park. It’s a funny ground, full of imperfections, not least the spanking new press box which denies hacks a view of 15 metres worth of the pitch in from the near touchline below and yet it is charming.

I love the drive over the Foyle, and instead of following the road back along the river it’s always more interesting to digress slightly into the little streets of the Bogside and take a bow to Free Derry corner before swinging back towards the hill and addressing the impossibility of getting a parking spot.

From inside the precinct you can see the graveyard sloping ominously down the hill toward Lonemore Road, and peek next door at the Brandywell, home of Derry City’s beloved Candystripes and the dog racing.

That’s another oddity of the Celtic Park experience. The ground is placed directly in that part of the county where the games of football and hurling are least loved. This is soccer territory, and those who bother to make the journey to Celtic Park have headed west from the hamlets of Lavey and Bellaghy and Ballinderry, etc, where football is a fundamentalist faith. Celtic Park should be transplanted to fields there.

Yesterday, only 10,000 or so bothered to make the journey to Celtic Park. As is their wont, the cognoscenti of Derry were more pessimistic about their side’s chances than the rest of us were.

Derry’s decline post 1993 is a mystery and a sorrowful one at that. That trio of northern teams who broke through back then had such distinctive personalities that it seemed their impact on the game would be long-lasting to the point of permanence.

Down had that insouciance which is the mark of their teams and their home. Never beaten in an All-Ireland final, never beaten by Kerry. But hey, no big deal either.

Donegal, with their inexplicable addiction to hand-passing, won an All-Ireland in 1992 with a full back, Matt Gallagher, who didn’t kick the ball once on the All-Ireland final day.

Funny, that Donegal team don’t really stand in the memory as models of iron discipline compared to the outfits that followed, but somehow Brian McEniff had such an innate understanding of the moods and whims of his countymen he was able to focus them and cajole them for long enough to take them to glory.

And then Eamon Coleman’s Derry. The most distinctive of the three counties who broke through. They had such a sharp intelligence about them, such an awareness within the group of their strengths and weaknesses as a team that they were destined to win an All-Ireland.

Possibly they were destined for the disintegration which followed, but the county board at the time can take the lions’ share of the credit for that.

They were the most traditional of the sides who dominated in those times. Brian McGilligan and Anthony Tohill in the middle. The cerebration of Henry Downey at centre back. A couple of corner backs who should have been jailers. Johnny McGurk’s magical sallies from wing back. The impossible glamour of Joe Brolly! Spoofer McNicholl!

They didn’t have it all, but they had most of what you would want if you were stitching a classic Gaelic football team together.

And at the heart of it was Eamon Coleman, the mischievous maestro. It had been so long since we had been in Celtic Park and there had been so many occasions when we made our way down to the dressingroom area to be berated or entertained by him that we actually had to remind ourselves he wouldn’t be there yesterday.

“Youse Boys” he would call us in the midst of a wry but passionate denunciation which paid scant heed to the diversity of age or gender among the press corps “youse boys know nathin about football”.

His accent was odd even for Derry and always seemed to have hints of Scottishness in it. Sometimes he’d come at us in a genuine rage, more often he would scold us for effect: neither option made him any the less likeable or fun. He held no grudges. Had no malice.

And he knew what we didn’t know. How to run a Derry football team.

I often think of him when I read textbooks or life-stories concerning coaching and management. He was proof, indelible and incontrovertible, that there is no single template for doing it right. He was neither patrician nor authoritarian. He wasn’t scary and he was friendlier with his players than any textbook would permit.

But he was shrewd and cunning and had passion and could persuade any player to do anything. Once, for an All-Ireland semi-final, he persuaded the immensely likeable Danny Quinn to go along with the pretence that he had been picked to play on the Sunday at full back. Danny, knowing he wasn’t playing and as a proud Bellaghy man somewhat devastated by the knowledge, had to let on to all and sundry he was starting. It was a tough one. Players are often asked to take one for the team. Only Coleman could have asked for and got such a sacrifice.

Watching Derry yesterday it was hard to avoid the remembrance of times past. They were flat and insipid, and, knowing Damian Cassidy and the influence which Eamon Coleman had on him in his day, you knew that here was another Bellaghy man who would be hurting badly last night.

There are few things tougher than following in the footsteps of such greatness and getting the feeling that you aren’t quite filling the space.

Derry, though, may be better off taking the long route around in the qualifiers. They have so much talent that it it going to take games on white-hot Sundays to make it all gel for them.

Derry people driving back across the top of the island last night would have been dismissive of that notion. The response to bad days like yesterday is always to proclaim that the team is going nowhere.

The pessimists need that stout little finger wagged in their faces and to be told they know nathin about football.

Derry have the talent now. As much talent as Eamon Coleman would have surveyed at the beginning of 1993 before he took his boys all the way.

They need the passion and the certainty and to find a way of playing that is an expression of their personality, not a contradiction of it.

Because that was the lesson of the early 1990s. Down, Donegal and Derry all came playing distinct brands of football that belonged to them and which were built for them.

Football needs Derry and Derry needs football. Watching Armagh and Tyrone over the past decade will have been harder in Derry than anywhere else. To see a new northern dynasty spring up from anywhere else in the province would be too much.

Anyway, we enjoy the drive to Celtic Park and all its bizarre quirkiness.

Let’s go again soon.