Born leader Darragh Canavan bears the load of great expectations lightly

Whatever Darragh Canavan’s footballing life was going to contain, anonymity was unlikely to be part of the deal.

The first time he played senior for Tyrone was a McKenna Cup match a week before Christmas in 2018. Festive season or not, Mickey Harte rostered on a good chunk of his frontline staff, as well as bringing back Kyle Coney for his first game in four years. Coney scored eight points, Darren McCurry scored five, Tyrone gave Derry a thorough rinsing.

Even so, the news market afterwards was cornered by an 18-year-old sub who came on for the last 15 minutes. The intro to the match report on The42.ie read: “Darragh Canavan, son of Red Hand legend Peter, made his senior debut for Tyrone in tonight’s 0-20 to 0-11 win over Derry in the opening round of the Dr McKenna Cup”.

The Irish Independent ran a small item on the game but made sure to use him as the picture. RTÉ’s round-up of the night’s preseason matches across the country contained two sentences on Tyrone v Derry – one mentioning the result, the other announcing Darragh Canavan’s debut. He was never going to get to do any of this unnoticed.

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In that context, maybe the most remarkable thing about Darragh Canavan now is that he has done the thing. Think of what it takes to be an intercounty footballer. Think of what it takes to be one in Division One. Think of what it takes to be the best forward on a Division One team, the player the others turn to when they need something to happen. Now think of what it takes to do that while carrying your county’s most storied surname.

“It’s not an easy burden to carry with you,” says Coney, who was there the night Canavan made his debut and is a radio pundit on RTÉ these days. “Definitely not. The weight of the surname would be a burden on its own. His father having the career that he did, one of the greatest to ever play the game.

“Let’s be honest, as Darragh was coming through the ranks, he was being talked about from under-14 level. So whenever you started to hear the name Canavan, even when he was only 15 or so, people immediately linked him to the Tyrone senior team. It was as if people were counting down the time until he’d make the step up. I remember being told to keep an eye on him by people around Errigal back then. He’s handled it so well ever since.”

Sunday is Canavan’s 50th appearance for Tyrone in league and championship. Last weekend in Breffni Park, Cavan tried four different markers on him across the afternoon. He still kicked seven points, including four from play and the free gave them the lead in extra-time.

When the lactic acid snipers were picking off victims left and right late on, it was Canavan who found a spurt to dip inside two Cavan tacklers to break the line that led to the score that pushed Tyrone two ahead. He kicked while off balance but the ball still found a Tyrone chest, Ciarán Daly popping up at the back post to feed Niall Devlin. The best are entitled to fall the right side of jammy from time to time.

The talent was always there.

Enda McGinley tells a story from back when Peter Canavan was over the Errigal Ciarán senior team. It was the late 2000s so Darragh could only have been nine or 10, his brother Ruairí two years younger. The senior team was in a huddle, circled around the greatest player their club and county had ever produced, listening to whatever team talk he was giving.

The way McGinley has told it, the whole squad found it hard to concentrate because they kept getting distracted by the noise of the ball hitting woodwork at the other end of the pitch. Any lesson Peter Canavan was trying to impart was being upstaged as his two sons took turns at their own private crossbar challenge. Ping. Ping. Ping.

That’s the flipside, of course. You can look at Darragh Canavan – and Ruairí too, for that matter – and wonder what it must be like to have to forge your way with all the attendant pressures, all the comparisons, spoken and unspoken. But when it comes right down to it, none of that stuff is real. It’s out there in the ether, it’s in the crowds or online or in the heads of judges they will never meet or hear or see.

At the very least, it’s only as real as they allow it to be. And it can definitely never be as real as their day-to-day lives, growing up with parents who know every inch of what it takes to love the sport enough to try to make it to the top.

When Errigal Ciarán was formed in 1991, one of the driving forces behind ending the nine-year dispute in Ballygawley was that they had a young player with such incredible talent that it would be a disgrace to deprive him of club football any longer. You think Peter Canavan might be able to tell his boys a thing or two about expectation? About living up to the dreams others have decided for you?

Around the club, they watched Daragh Canavan blossom through his teenage years to eventually lead their minor team to a county title. They saw him go from being a lovely player to a leader to someone who gradually came to relish the responsibility of expectation.

“You could see at the start that he was really conscious of being modest and unassuming,” says one clubmate. “But that minor year, it was noticeable that he just became far more comfortable with leadership. As if he revelled in being asked to do more than some of the boys who wouldn’t have his talent.

“When he was with Tyrone at underage level, you could see him at times trying not to overshadow other players. He didn’t take the frees, for example. It was as if he didn’t want to be seen to be making himself out to be the main man. He scored a brilliant goal against Kerry one time and just turned away after it as if he was nearly bashful to have done it. He didn’t want to stand out. He was determined to show that he didn’t think he was any different from anybody else.”

All of which is fine and nice and highly commendable and all the rest of it. But all intercounty panels are stuffed with good lads who are a credit to their parents, who say the right things and act the right way. Tyrone didn’t need him to be that, not when he could be more.

“As time passed,” says the clubmate [who asks to be anonymous to try to keep the hype tamped down], “you could see he nearly came to realise that he had a duty. Yes, you have to work hard and tackle hard and be a team player the same as the rest of the squad.

“But there’s a process you go through if you do have that talent and that ability, you have a duty above and beyond what the others have. You have a duty to play to that level. And I think it’s very noticeable over the past couple of seasons that he has become so much more comfortable in his own skin. There’s an acceptance of leadership there.”

Since the start of 2023, Tyrone have played 21 games in league and championship. Canavan has played in all but one, only sitting out this year’s thumping from Dublin in the league. Of his 20 games, he has been Tyrone’s top scorer from play in 14 – including six of seven so far this season. He has been the top scorer from play on either team in 11 – including five of seven this season.

Tyrone rely on him now. Both for his scores and, though it feels sometimes like he has only just arrived, his seniority.

Brian Dooher handed out nine championship debuts last weekend – according to the great bible keeper of Tyrone football, Eunan Lindsay, you have to go back to 1972 for the last time there were that many in one game.

Of the 22 players who saw game time against Cavan, only seven made their championship debut before Darragh Canavan. In the Tyrone panel, Mattie Donnelly and Peter Harte are 33. Niall Morgan will hit that number in July. Pádraig Hampsey turned 30 last week. Canavan’s role is only going to get bigger as the years go by.

It makes 2024 a quietly pivotal season. He doesn’t yet have an All Star. Both his Ulster and All-Ireland medals were won as an impact sub. For all the talk and all the progress, last year’s quarter-final against Kerry was his first championship start in Croke Park. About the best thing you could say for Canavan’s day was he kept Tom O’Sullivan to a point. He has lots still to do, with the sole guarantee being that his every move will be pored over and picked clean.

He’s never known anything else.

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