GAELIC GAMES ULSTER SFC FINAL DERRY v DONEGAL:Derry manager John Brennan may be regarded as old school but for many he has been a breath of fresh air in this year's championship, as KEITH DUGGANdiscovers
“FOOTBALL IS a simple game,” John Brennan explains, nibbling a chocolate bun on a sunny morning in the sleepy foyer of a Cookstown hotel. This is the day after the 12th: Belfast smouldering, the beaches of Donegal packed and the Derry football back in the big time. Summer has come to Ulster.
“There are two things about it. Defenders are there to stop the opposition. Forwards are there to get away from the defender. That is all there is to it.”
Brennan has been a breath of fresh air in this year’s All-Ireland championship. A new boy at the age of 69 bestriding the sideline, shoulders back and peaked cap slung low and telling it straight. He has been fearless, spiky, funny, combative and, best of all, he has held a mirror up to the ultra-serious habits of contemporary Gaelic football and has made the whole thing appear a bit ridiculous.
He asks a question that has not been asked often enough – where is the fun gone?
And the more you hear him talk about Derry, the more it seems he had been lurking in the shadows and quietly pulling the strings of so many of their best moments. He is a godfather and uncle of Henry Downey, so far the only Oak Leaf man to lift the Sam Maguire. He trained the Lavey team that won the Derry championship in 1984.
“The best players and the best drinkers – ever,” he says of that bunch. Eamonn Coleman was a dear friend and the only time Brennan’s mood darkens is when he recalls visiting the Ballymaguigan man when he was gravely ill and listening again to how much Coleman was hurt by his treatment by Derry GAA officialdom.
“The things he told me in his dying days,” Brennan says quietly, fiercely. “There are people I will never forgive for how Eamonn was treated. I see those people about . . . ah, you’d love to do something that wouldn’t be right.”
He developed this brilliant knack for parachuting into clubs perceived as lost causes and delivering championships for them – Slaughtneil, Loop, Cargin of Antrim and Carrickmore in Tyrone have all benefited from the Brennan treatment. The things he did in those parishes differed except in one respect: “You are given a few boys as selectors and what not. Every club I went to – and I am not proud of this record – I discarded them. Except for the bagman.”
Last month, he became the only county manager in the 21st century to compare himself to a LP stuck on a needle answering the same question. This was after the Armagh game, Brennan leaning against the wall and firing machine-gun answers to rat-a-tat questions. And the LP remark was spontaneous but it helped to confirm this image of Brennan as old-school. “If they want to call me old-fashioned that’s fine,” he smiles. “I’m happy to go along with it.”
For the record, he is not averse to technology and uses a laptop on the farm that he runs. But at Gaelic football matches? “Well, you can’t send an email out onto the field. You have to be realistic.”
He has spent half his life involved in football because he loved it and, as he says, because the game gave him plenty back.
Brennan gave up full-time work with British Telecom, for whom he was a contracts manager, when his wife died suddenly at the age of 44. “That has been my one hardship. She will be dead 20 years on the 26th of this month. And at the time, my youngest girl was just nine and she didn’t want to be heading off to school with the neighbours so I started doing things like that. I was fortunate in that there was an incentive to leave the company at that time. But now I spend 99 per cent of my time alone and heading out and coaching football with young people: it is great.”
He first went for the Derry job in 2004 and reluctantly at that, a scene he describes in hilarious detail.
“It was like the Last Supper. I went in reasonably dressed – better than I am now. First thing I said was, ‘I’m not here to give a team talk’. I didn’t know who these people were – auld slovenly boys from this board or that board. I lost nine votes to eight to Mickey. (Moran) And there was another furore in Derry over that.”
He only took the position this year when the Derry chairman guaranteed him the conditions that he wanted would be met. He doesn’t try hard to disguise he has little time for the niceties of GAA officialdom and because his first love is provincial Irish rugby – his happiest sporting memories belong to the jersey of Ballymena – he has mixed feelings about the bitterness of parish rivalries. He had given up on the Derry job with no great regrets when it was offered to him with bells on. “So I’m in it now,” he says with a laugh.
Years ago, British Telecom bought a quality management programme from Harvard. Brennan was one of those they picked to implement it. Some of it he considered good, some of it blather.
“You get worried when they start using what I call the twinkle fingers and start extending these talks for the whole day. I suppose people have to justify their existence.”
But he took what he wanted from it and acknowledges he is highly organised. When he was appointed Derry manager, he wrote down the name of every backroom person on a small card and was staggered to learn that that wing of the set-up amounted to 18 individuals. That was before he even thought about players. At an early training session he suggested that his backroom team go for a walk with him.
“Over by the trees there.”
“We never did that before,” someone pointed out.
“Well, you’re gonna f***in’ do it now,” came the Brennan growl.
And with that, they strolled towards the trees. Small, important things that were annoying the players were taken care of. He banned the practice of crying off training sessions through texts. “You have to be man enough to pick up the phone.”
He insists players from different clubs sit together on bus trips when the team is on the road. He hates the old dressingroom hierarchy too. When he coached Carrickmore, he noticed the senior players took pride of place on the benches and the youngsters were in another corner. “So one evening I had the younger players come in early and sit where the senior lads always sat. When they came in, they changed where the younger lads did.”
He met with Bradley brothers, Paddy and Eoin.
“Sure you’ll never have a team until you get rid of the Bradleys,” Paddy told him, repeating the popular refrain. Brennan asked the elder Bradley to do two things.
“People say the Bradleys are loose cannons, all that. Paddy is an intelligent man. So two things is all I asked of him. Get fit, number one. Number two, become a team player. Stop giving out to a lesser player if a pass goes astray. Your team will love you for it. Your people will love you for it. And Paddy became a better player.”
Eoin was trickier, more volatile, more vulnerable. Brennan went out to bat for him over a suspension he was facing. His first match back was against Sligo and he lasted seven minutes before he got sent off. Brennan persisted and after the senior Bradley got injured, Eoin seemed to grow, to fill the void. And after Derry’s sparkling win over Armagh last month, Eoin Bradley told reporters he had never played under a manager like Brennan.
“Eoin might ring me three times a week,” Brennan says. “I think it is because I am that bit older, someone he can take a bit of advice from.”
He coaxed Conleth Gilligan, whose sublime club form was too rarely in evidence in the red and white stripe of Derry, back into the scene. Brennan had coached teams whom Gilligan had beaten on his own. And he had seen him being booed off the field for Derry.
In the league this year, he withdrew Gilligan with two minutes to go so the Celtic Park heartland could give him an ovation. He set up a development squad which, unlike the senior panel, could train through the months of November and December: it has yielded seven players, including goalkeeper Danny Devlin and midfielder Michael Friel. In short, Brennan applied his logic and organisation.
“I did my homework,” he says. And he got into their heads.
During the spring, Brennan took Derry away on a training weekend to Dunboyne. In the inevitable way of these things, the Armagh squad were staying in the same place that weekend. Derry played a challenge game against Wicklow in Aughrim and afterwards they heard a talk from Colm O’Rourke. Then they had dinner and headed out on the town.
“A few Armagh lads were sitting around in flip flops and shorts, sipping water. A few said they wished they could head off with us.”
They found what Brennan describes as a “loud pub” down the street. When they got back to the hotel, there was a disco on. “So we headed in, did the whole bucken thing,” Brennan says.
“Anyhow, there was a wedding on and big Joe Diver was chatting up the bridesmaid or the bride or something and they took exception to it. There was no trouble: there was threatened trouble. But sure, the story was home before us and there was an outcry. To me, though, that was a great bonding weekend.”
He shrugs. It doesn’t bother him. To Brennan, it seems unnatural not to allow 30 fellas out on the town every so often.
“We had a good drink after the Armagh game too. I’d enjoy chatting with the boys and having a bit of fun for a wee while. Then I’d go off with people of my own vintage and the players would head to a disco or whatever they do on a Sunday night. In fact, it is none of my business what they do on Sunday nights.”
His business is in getting the details right.
Before Derry played Armagh, Brennan discovered that several of the younger players had never been to Clones before. “Never been to the town,” he marvels. So they went on a dry run and he walked the field, getting the spatial dimensions. When he picked his team for that game, he dropped Kevin McCloy and Caolan O’Boyle. He had coached McCloy since he was a teenager.
“People saying, ‘ahh, you left the Lavey men out’. I had to say: ‘this isn’t about Lavey. It’s about Derry.’”
And during the game, he had to instantly ditch his homework. His moles in Armagh had been entirely wrong – Armagh did not drop an extra man back and were much more open than Brennan could ever had dreamed they would be. So they improvised and they won. This week, his hardest decision was not what team to pick. The first 15 doesn’t matter. It was when he had to take a young player aside and tell him he was not on the 26, that was tough.
“Gerard O’Kane is back from injury and we are glad to have him back. Gerard was disappointed not to be starting. But it is hard to change a winning team. And to go from injured to starting is leapfrogging a lot of players. And I said, ‘Gerard, I don’t feel sorry for you. It’s the man who has lost his place in the panel that my sympathy is with.’ This is not about any one player. It is about Derry. I need them all to understand that.”
It is ticking towards lunchtime. The sun is high and Brennan has a busy afternoon. He has no clue how the Ulster final against Donegal will go. “Hard to predict,” he says.
The recent injury to Eoin Bradley was cruel on the player and the county; he joins his brother on the long-term injury list. Brennan called up to see the brothers and spoke with them.
“So your wish has come true,” he told Paddy and reminded him about what he had said: “You’ll never have a team until you get rid of the Bradleys”. And Paddy started to protest and Brennan said softly, “Well, you did say it.” And Paddy thought about it and the penny dropped. It has always been Brennan’s way: teaching and provoking. There will be future days for the Bradleys, even if it is a shame that they are missing out on Ulster’s showpiece.
John Brennan cannot wait. He is enjoying this year and maybe it came at the right time. When he thinks back to the younger man who coached Lavey, he admits he was too hard on the players, too competitive and too intense. He is that bit mellower now and wise enough to enjoy the whole experience. He says a curious thing at the end of the conversation.
“Och, Ireland is Ireland. That John B Keane play, The Field, still applies. The wee bit of ground, the jealousies, the badness, the madness. It is all there.”
He could be talking about the country but equally he could be anticipating the scene in St Tiernach’s Park tomorrow.
John Brennan is on the Derry sideline long after many had given up the idea of ever seeing him there. You’ll hear his voice sounding clear through the din and the brass instruments and, win or lose, you’ll see a man who knows his own mind. And if you listen hard enough, you might just hear Eamonn Coleman’s delighted cackle too.
