It was only a Division Two National League game in early March, but both of us knew it was much more than that. Derry were Gaelic football’s coming force. Long before we arrived at Celtic Park that evening, they had been lining Dublin up.
We had been relegated from Division One the previous year. Derry had spent the seasons beforehand climbing steadily from Division Four up the league tables, while also shaking a few trees in the championship.
Both of us probably believed we’d be heading to Division One at the end of that 2023 league campaign irrespective of what happened in the game between us, but it wasn’t just two points on offer when we met that spring.
Dublin hadn’t won the All-Ireland since 2021 but we were starting to build again towards a push for Sam Maguire that year. Players are smart and they realise who are likely to be their main competitors when it comes to winning an All-Ireland in any given year. At that time Derry certainly would have been in the conversation in our dressingroom.
Over the years, I found that league games against your main competitors tended to carry more weight because you were trying to set little markers. Even under Jim we would have identified the Mayo games in Castlebar or Croke Park, or the Kerry games away, as key fixtures.
Preparation in those weeks would have been at a really high standard, not that it slipped for other games, but there certainly would have been a bit of a gear change in terms of the tone of the messaging around certain matches.
In 2023, Derry were a team on the move – they were very much a rising tide. We knew they would have targeted the game against us to pick up a win as evidence of how far they had come in their development. They wanted our scalp.
You could feel the buzz around Derry that night, the team had built this aura around them – the crowd, the players, the management all seemed to be on the same wavelength, a county pulling together.
Conscious to not allow them the oxygen of momentum, we started strongly in the game and led by five points at half-time. We pushed the gap to six after the break, but Derry rallied and ultimately Brendan Rogers kicked a winner in the fifth minute of injury time.
A pitch invasion followed for Derry fans and a long trip ensued back down the road for us.
[ Brendan Rogers wins it at the death for Derry as they come back to beat DublinOpens in new window ]
It was hard to get away from a sense that night of a team with real purpose on a journey. They had wind in their sails from achieving several promotions in the league, while the previous summer Derry had won their first Ulster title since 1998.
Three months after beating us in Celtic Park, they retained the Ulster title. It seemed inevitable the next part of their journey would be to contest an All-Ireland final and be in with a real chance of winning the big one.
Derry progressed to beat Dublin in the Division One league final last year and entered the 2024 championship as one of the favourites to lift Sam Maguire. Having retired at the end of 2023, I looked on at Derry beating the Dubs in that league final and felt they would take some stopping in the championship.
Where has that Derry team gone?
I find it hard to compare them to any other intercounty team in terms of a side suffering such a significant fall in such a short space of time. How do you go from league champions in 2024 to becoming whipping boys in the same competition 12 months later?
Not only were they relegated from Division One, but they fell through the trapdoor carrying a scoring difference of -44 – and without winning a single match.
Indeed, it is coming up on 12 months since Derry have actually won a competitive game of football in regulation time – a round-robin victory over Westmeath last June. Their subsequent win over Mayo was after a penalty shoot-out. They have not yet won a game under Paddy Tally.
They begin their All-Ireland series away to Armagh on Saturday with most pundits agreeing that Derry will struggle to emerge as one of the three teams from a four-team group.
From being among the All-Ireland favourites last year, they are an afterthought now. It’s quite the fall from grace.
Some of the tail-off has been attributed to the departure of Rory Gallagher as manager, but there also appears to have been a loss of form within the playing group.
A manager at the top of the dressingroom does have a massive influence on players, and some managers do get a better tune out of guys, that’s just the nature of it. But players have a level of accountability and ownership of things as well.
Mickey Harte appeared to have them moving well early on last season and they ended the league as champions but then, inexplicably, they jammed on the brakes. Before hitting reverse. It all unravelled so quickly.
[ Tactical breakdown: How Mickey Harte’s side have evolved into Derry 2.0Opens in new window ]
Tally has been handed the task of reviving Derry this season but it has been a tough campaign so far. For their opening league game against Tyrone in January, both Shane McGuigan and Rogers started, but I wonder would it have been better to give those experienced players some time off?
They had been involved with Slaughtneil in the club hurling championship all the way until December. I appreciate a new manager will want to build some early momentum, and also with the new rules it’s likely the players themselves wanted to feature, but it might have been more beneficial to give them a break and have them fresh midway through the league.
It looks like some of their key players have stagnated a little bit, the likes of Rogers, McGuigan and Conor Glass have played a lot of football/hurling over the last three or four years – Derry can only hope the break since their Ulster exit has allowed those players to rediscover some level of freshness.
And putting myself in that dressingroom over the last few weeks, I can only imagine the conversations that have taken place – player-only chats and also as a group in terms of, “What do we want our season to be from here on in?”
The business end of the season remains in their control, they could still turn it around, but they need to pull together, they need to play with a little bit more heart.
All too often this year the players have been going out and almost accepting errors and mistakes. The body language has been poor. All the negative elements you wouldn’t have associated with Derry in recent years.
From a player reflection perspective, they will definitely be disappointed in how their form has dipped.
I’d imagine there are strong characters and leaders in that dressingroom who will not want their Derry careers and this good team to end the way it currently is.
Donegal, admittedly a very good team, dismissed Derry with minimal fuss in the Ulster preliminary round, so they have a lot of improvement to unearth if they are to make an impact in the All-Ireland series.
[ Armagh ensure Division One survival with emphatic win over DerryOpens in new window ]
But Saturday is set up perfectly for them because Armagh pretty much laughed at them in the last league game with the hammering they dished out. There was a lot of in their faces stuff, Armagh scored four goals and of their 4-24 total, 4-22 came from open play. To compound matters, McGuigan was sent off. It was a bad day for Derry, they showed no fight or spark, and I’m sure this week they have been referencing back to that game a lot.
To get something out of this season, they must make a stand in Armagh on Saturday. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a win, it might be enough to be really competitive and bring the All-Ireland champions down the stretch.
But they need to show the team considered by many as All-Ireland favourites last year is still inside that dressingroom somewhere.
