They buried Pádraig O’Neill on Wednesday. The funeral was in Carlingford, at St Michael’s Church at the top of the village where the Cooley Mountains finish their tumble down into the Lough. He played for Louth and for Armagh back in the day, a hardy corner back alongside his brother Gareth. He won three Sigerson Cups in the 1980s with Ulster University. He played for Cooley Kickhams until he was nearly 40.
A fortnight ago, Pádraig O’Neill left Croke Park after watching Gareth’s boys Rian and Oisin see Armagh through to their first All-Ireland final in 21 years. He and his wife Susan headed for home but they weren’t in the car long before he suffered a heart attack. It happened seven minutes away from Beaumont Hospital, so he couldn’t have got quicker or better treatment. But the damage was too great. He died six days later, at the criminally young age of 58.
The last game Pádraig saw his nephews play, Oisin came off the bench to drive home the closing quarter-hour of normal time and the whole of extra-time against Kerry. Few players involved in the final have had a longer, harder road – despite making his senior debut in 2017, he has only made 18 championship appearances for Armagh. Injury robbed him of two full seasons and he has never quite cemented his return to the starting team.
Rian? Rian is a different story. The win over Kerry will go down as one of the signature displays of his career. Three points from play only sings a few bars of the song. His extraordinary kick pass in the 89th minute took out 12 Kerry players and sent Conor Turbitt away for the point that put Armagh two ahead. In the game’s final play, he took a soaring catch in his own square – over David Clifford no less – to ice the victory.
Afterwards, as he accepted his man of the match award, his interview was shown on the big screen. With Armagh fans dancing in the aisles and the defiance of victory coursing through him, he gave his call to arms straight down the camera. “Listen, we’ve had setback after setback over the years. We lost on penalties. We never let that affect us. We keep coming back. They said we couldn’t win tight games. We won a tight game there today.”
That last bit wasn’t so much said as growled, the vein in his neck popping, the fist on his right arm pumping. All the good and all the bad of his Armagh career was in there, all the expectation and all the disappointment. For the people who know him well, it was a little out of character for him. They couldn’t have been more delighted to see it.
“Rian is so reserved most of the time,” says Aaron Kernan, his Crossmaglen clubmate. “That interview was completely abnormal for him because he is so quiet. Unless you would go and speak to him, he mightn’t speak to you. Obviously, once he gets to know you and trusts you and gets comfortable with you, he’d be outgoing and conversant and he’d talk away.
“But for someone of his stature, he would be incredibly quiet and reserved and keeps himself to himself away from football. That interview was so out of character for him. But to me, it was just an outpouring. If you think of everything they’ve had to deal with these past few years, they had just beaten the powerhouse that is Kerry, they’re in an All-Ireland final.
“That’s a massive turnaround in six, seven weeks. I know coming out of Clones on Ulster final day, I could not for the life of me see how they were going to turn it around. So to do that, to get to a final, I would say that was pure frustration pouring out of him. That was a bit of defiance, a release of emotions. He usually keeps himself in good check.”
No mystery as to why that might be. Most of us have the good fortune of growing up in our own little world, with no one terribly interested in who we are or what we do. In Crossmaglen, in Armagh, in Ulster and beyond, the O’Neill boys were never going to have that kind of liberty.
It wasn’t just that their father played for Armagh or that their uncle Pádraig played for Armagh. Famously, uncles Jim and Oisin McConville on his mother’s side did too. And when their Crossmaglen underage teams started coming through, they were so successful that there was no option to do it all without people noticing.
Cross won Féile at under-14, the Paul McGirr tournament at under-16, an Ulster club title at minor. Rian was the best player on the St Colman’s, Newry team that made a MacRory Cup final in 2017, by which time he had already played a full season of senior championship for Cross’. Fresh out of school, he got a call-up to the Armagh seniors the following year but turned them down.
“That year did so much for him,” Kernan says. “He held back from going in with the senior team because he wanted to play under-20 and you couldn’t do both. They got to an Ulster final and lost to Conor Glass’s Derry team. But I think what stood to him even more was that he played a full season of club games.
“He was playing week-in-week-out with us, developing himself in senior football before making the jump. He made that decision himself. It meant he was ready when the time came. He scored eight points and was man of the match on his debut against Down in Newry.”
That introduction meant he had something to live up to from the first crack of the starting pistol. It’s one thing having a reputation as a coming force. It’s another to arrive and do the thing immediately and leave everyone wondering what’s next. O’Neill was nominated for an All-Star in three of his first four seasons, despite Armagh only making it to the last eight in one of those championships. He did his bit.
It wasn’t always dainty. He never pretended to be a choirboy. He was involved in a one-in-all-in dust up against Donegal in the 2022 league, albeit his subsequent one-game suspension was rescinded on appeal. He got sent off against Tyrone in the championship last year and had to serve his time. His initial profile as an out-and-out baller morphed into a reputation for low-level crankiness and generally being a busybody when the push-me-pull-you stuff got going.
“He threw his weight around a bit, definitely,” says one Armagh All-Ireland winner. “And I don’t know if he was that liked beyond Armagh because of it. But he had to fight for everything. He didn’t come into a set-up where there were a load of senior guys to mind him and get him through the first couple of seasons. He was expected to be the main man from the start.
“He still has that abrasiveness to him but I think he has matured a lot over the past couple of seasons – and this year especially. He’s a bit more reflective and a bit better at not getting involved. It’s been his best season, partly because of that. His performances have been full of maturity.”
He has been helped immeasurably by the fact that Armagh’s attack has evolved and spread out over the past few seasons. It’s a Swiss Army Knife of options now, with Conor Turbitt and Andrew Murnin the focal points inside, Oisin Conaty and Rory Grugan scheming around the place and Stefan Campbell a live grenade when lobbed in off the bench. In that environment, O’Neill doesn’t have to be any more than another brick in the wall.
“People have an idea of a marquee players,” says Kernan. “And when they start naming them out, they go to names like David Clifford, Con O’Callaghan, Shane McGuigan. But that’s not who Rian is. They’re all inside forwards and okay, he definitely has that ability. But he fits an awful lot of roles that you wouldn’t be using those boys for.
“To me, he’s much more like Michael Murphy. He can play on the edge of the square no bother. But if you’re leaving him there, you’re taking him out of all the different roles he can fill. He has that X-factor ability to influence a game, as long as he gets his hands on the ball. He can be a victim of his own honesty sometimes. It’s about finding that sweet spot of getting him involved as much as possible in the right areas.”
About a decade ago, when Gareth O’Neill was over the Cross’ senior team, Kernan would see the four young O’Neill boys at training every night, living the same life he did when his father Joe was the manager a generation before. Two things struck him about them. One, for a man who played his whole life in the full-back line, there wasn’t a single defender among Gareth’s offspring. And two, not unrelated, they had an uncanny ability to kick long-distance points.
“Outside the 45, it didn’t matter. This was when they were 13, 14 years of age. It was an out-of-the-ordinary ability and it made you go, ‘Right, these lads have something.’ And what I would have seen from them ever since – and Rian is the same now as then – is just repetition. Over and over again, booming points from everywhere.”
Here he is, then. A decent display coupled with an Armagh victory would leave Rian O’Neill with few enough rivals for Footballer of the Year. There has been plenty of sadness along the way, no end of heartache – some of it all too fresh in his mind and that of his family. Nothing is guaranteed, other than the chance to go out and be the player everyone hoped he’d be way back then.
He’ll take it.
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