In Derry, the air that went out of the balloon four weeks ago is taking its time about finding a way back in.
A spring that was so full of promise and life has given way to a summer that feels leaden and stifled. Although everybody starts from square one in the All-Ireland series, Mickey Harte’s team have a greater need than most to quickly get a foot on the ladder.
It wasn’t just that Derry were defeated by Donegal a month ago, it was more that they were humiliated. And although they have a nucleus of older players who were around for their freefall into Division Four, humiliation is an entirely unfamiliar feeling for most of the Derry panel. They have no reason to be used to it or to know what to do with it.
Going to Salthill this weekend raises another new possibility. You have to go back a full six years for the last time Derry lost two games in a row. They went down to Donegal by 2-16 to 0-16 in the Ulster Championship in May 2018 and followed it up three weeks later with a 2-22 to 2-14 defeat at home to Kildare in the qualifiers.
Since then, they’ve played 62 matches in league and championship without ever posting back-to-back defeats. For a sense of how rare that is, consider the records of every other Sam Maguire team. Dublin, Mayo, Galway, Tyrone, Monaghan and Roscommon all lost back-to-back games in this year’s league alone. Kerry lost last year’s All-Ireland final and the first game of the 2024 league – at home to Derry, as it happens.
Drill down into the results and you find that the second longest streak without losing two matches in a row belongs to Armagh – the last time it happened to Kieran McGeeney’s side was against Galway and Tyrone at the end of the 2023 league, 19 matches ago.
Through four different divisions, three different championship structures and three different managers, Derry have always been able to do what no other team has managed – consistently respond to a defeat with a performance and a result the next day out.
As you’d expect over the course of six seasons, the team and panel has been completely overhauled. Of the Derry players who saw game time against Donegal, only four survive from those back-to-back defeats in 2018. Outside of Chrissy McKaigue, Brendan Rodgers, Shane McGuigan and Emmet Bradley, it’s just not something any of them have had to contend with as senior intercounty footballers.
Does any of this matter? Externally, there must be a good chance it does. While an early exit from Ulster needn’t dent their broader All-Ireland ambitions, if it’s followed up by a defeat to the second good team they meet it will make those ambitions seem pretty fanciful. All that goodwill within the county that buoyed them through the league could be frittered away.
Internally, the question for Derry now is what do they come back with. They’ve had four weeks to shape-shift, if shape-shifting is what’s on their mind. If it isn’t – and this may be a more likely scenario – they’ve had four weeks to remove the possibility of what happened against Donegal happening again.
Clearly, the role of goalkeeper Odhran Lynch will be the feature most eyes will be trained on from the start in Salthill. Where do Derry station him for Galway kick-outs? How involved in open play do they allow him to be?
Even if the Donegal fiasco hadn’t happened, it must be in Lynch’s mind that the last time Derry played Galway in championship – the 2022 All-Ireland semi-final – Damien Comer was able to score into an open goal after Lynch had been caught out the field.
Whether deliberately or not, Derry are at least trying to give the impression that some manner of change is coming. Speaking at the launch of the All-Ireland series last week, defender Pádraig McGrogan defended Lynch, as you’d expect. But he also went slightly further in suggesting an attitude change for the All-Ireland series.
“The poor goalkeeper really has nowhere to hide, has he?” McGrogan said. “He’s subjected to quite a bit of attention. Look, it’s something that we worked on most of the year and it did benefit us in quite a few games. Donegal just really exposed it and I don’t really know how much of that was Lynchy’s fault.
“Yes, he wasn’t on his line but at the end of the day when you look at some of the goals, it was going to be a walk-in even if he was on his line anyway. They were just going straight over the top of our press, taking five or six men out every time.
“That’s something we have to learn from. We can’t be so naive. It was clear early doors that it wasn’t working, we didn’t adapt.”
How will they adapt now? It might be worth digging into a potted history of Mickey Harte and Gavin Devlin for clues. Both with Tyrone and Louth, their instinct has always been to set their teams up defensively. What has been interesting to watch over the years, however, are the occasions when going more attacking has worked out badly for them and how they’ve reacted.
Two occasions in particular stand out. After Dublin had schooled them in the 2018 All-Ireland final, Tyrone came with a broadly more attacking set-up in 2019. They had a decent league, finishing third in Division One. They started Ulster in flying form, running up 1-19 against Derry and 2-23 against Antrim. But in the semi-final, they ran into a Donegal side that shut them down with a full-bore blanket defence and stopped their momentum dead.
Four years later, when Harte and Devlin brought Louth to face Dublin in the 2023 Leinster final, they began by taking the game to the perennial provincial champions. The pressed up on kick-outs and refused to sit as deep as other teams had – and as Louth themselves would in 2024. They got a sound hammering for their troubles.
The interesting thing about both games is what came next. In 2019, Tyrone drew Longford in the qualifiers. They were heavy favourites and the result was never going to be in doubt. Nonetheless, no sooner had the game started than they withdrew all 15 players to their own 45. Reversion to type was swift and unyielding. That approach brought them all the way to the All-Ireland semi-final.
Louth last year took a similar approach to having their attacking knuckles rapped. Once they went into the All-Ireland series, they took their lesson from the Leinster final – defending en masse, doing their damnedest to draw more fancied teams into arm wrestles. It ultimately didn’t work out but, though the results didn’t go their way, the performances were perfectly respectable.
In advance of the Kerry game in their All-Ireland group last summer, Devlin spoke to The Irish Times at length about his and Harte’s tactical approach to the game. He couldn’t have known at that stage that his next gig would be with Derry but he had clearly seen a lot about them that he liked even then.
“I don’t agree with the narrative that says defending in a low block is negative football,” Devlin said. “Think about it – you are giving the other team your half of the pitch. If you’re going to do that, you better be good at it. Playing the game in your own half comes with a lot of risk. And it comes with the imperative that you must be aggressive once you turn the ball over.
“Look at the way Derry attack, look at how they get men ahead of the ball. You can’t call that negative football. But the key to it is they start off in a low block and then break out as a collective. There is nothing easy or straightforward about playing that way.
“We have to be tactically astute. We’re not naive. You can’t be defensive for the whole game and expect to win them. You have to go and try to win. There’s no way to be defensive on your own kick-out, say. The game is there to be won.”
Trouble is, an All-Ireland is there to be won too. And nobody knows better than this Derry panel that Croke Park in July is where deeply defensive football meets its maker. They scared the life out of Kerry last year by flipping the script and pushing on with a version of the carefree attacking game that got them into trouble against Donegal.
If they’re going to win an All-Ireland, refining that game plan surely has to be the way. But if they’re going to learn the lesson of Celtic Park a month ago, the temptation to clip their own wings for a game or two just to steady the ship must be enormous.
Do they go to Plan B? Or just come back blazing with a better, more effective Plan A?
That is the question.
