GAA - Derry Under 21s feature

The darling buds of May By Steven Doherty AN extremely harsh red card on midfielder Neil McNicholl mid-way through the first half against Monaghan brought an end to Derry Under 21s season last year on a chilly and unwelcoming night under the cold cruel floodlights at Inniskeen. The Under 21s have often been the forgotten team, and their latest campaign was over once again by March. The 2015 season began with much optimism for Paul McIver’s side who brushed aside Fermanagh in the preliminary round, but it ended prematurely as every other Oak Leaf season has done in this age bracket since 1997 in disappointment and defeat. The new year has brought fresh hope and a new man at the helm – Fergal P. McCusker. McCusker needs no introduction, but he is an impressive man nontheless. Better than that he’s a winner. An All-Ireland champion with Derry in 1993, the Maghera man has overseen the end of the Watty Graham’s underage production line that has swept through Derry and UIster over the past few seasons. With his former team mate, Enda Gormley, holding the reins in 2011 and 2012, winning back to back Derry minor titles, McCusker has stepped in seamlessly as the trophies continued to stack up. A broken leg brought an end to a long and distinguished playing career at the age of 36. The bank official then started coaching Glen’s Under 14s up into minor and was with those high achieving minors for the last four years. After nine years cutting his coaching teeth and formulating winning structures and habits with the Watty’s, the lure of the county set-up proved too strong for the 45 year old who is as ambitious as a manager as he was cultured as a player. “County football is the pinnacle of any club player and you want to play and manage at the highest level possible” McCusker told the County Derry Post. “It’s a great experience to see how the county set-up operates. There’s a fair bit of interaction with the county senior management and panel. You’re knocking about Owenbeg and seeing how the seniors are doing things. You have to test yourself and I suppose, instead of standing on the sidelines and giving out about the boys that have been there previously, you go in yourself and see how you get on.” Every manager must cut his cloth accordingly, but although still early in the season, the new man at top of the Under 21 system is quietly impressed with the material he has to work with in the forthcoming few months. “It’s a very good panel. The quality, the talent is there. We don’t have an over-reliance on the senior players either. Niall Toner, Niall Loughlin, Terence O’Brien, Peter Hagan and Jack Doherty are currently on the senior panel. I think in other years we were at a disadvantage in that way but this year we’ve been lucky enough that there is only five. There’s quality throughout the team now and it’s coming from all different clubs – north Derry, south Derry, Derry City. It’s not any one club really dominating as people might have thought. Looking at it from outside people maybe would have thought that the panel would have been made up of primarily Glen and Slaughtneil players. “We looked at 73 players in the trial games. We trawled the county. We got it to 43 and we have to get that down to 36. Myself and the boys and Enda will have to sit down next week and look at it.” Just how ambitious can McCusker and Derry Under 21s be this season? “It’s very hard to judge. Players you thought were going to be superstars at eighteen can fall away and they discover other things. Some players come in and get better and stronger. But that happens in every county. You look at Tyrone last year. They wouldn’t have thought at the start of the year they had much of a chance of winning an All Ireland but you get momentum and it develops. “That’s one thing that’s very hard to do. We have our game on the 9th March against Antrim. If you get over that we have a game immediately the next week against Donegal. Everything comes thick and fast and it’s unique in that way as a competition because it’s completely all over in 8 or 9 weeks. You can be All Ireland champions in the first week of May. I think that’s good in many ways. I like the idea of games coming thick and fast, rather than sitting and scratching yourself for three or four weeks in between. That’s why you need a good sized panel, because with games in quick succession you will get injuries so you need to have cover in all the positions.” Anyone who had the good fortune of catching many of the Ulster club football games this year cannot help but be impressed by the very open style of football played by the likes of Crossmaglen, Scotstown and Slaughtneil. The new Under 21 boss would certainly count himself an advocate of that particular style of football. “I would always be an exponent of attacking football and I would certainly be a traditionalist in the fact that the ball will always travel quicker than the man. Any teams that are doing well at the minute, the likes of Crossmaglen have good strong kick passing skills. It’s not rocket science. You can have all the blanket defences in the world but if you’re only scoring five or six points you are still going to be beat. Kick passing is something we are working strongly at at the minute. You still have to be realistic in that you can’t be gung ho and have everybody driving forward, there has to be some sort of cover. I certainly like the idea of a good 40 yard kick pass is always going to do more damage than five or six lateral passes across the half back line.” The Glen man has surrounded himself with what he describes as “good mix of experience and boys I would trust” for his backroom team which includes Enda Muldoon, Declan Bateson and Hugh McGrath. Indeed Muldoon played midfield in the last Derry team to win the Ulster Under 21 championship in 1997, a team that went on to lift the All Ireland. “The lads have a lot of respect for Enda because he’s still playing and he’s an icon of Derry football. A very talented fella and a very modest fella. And we have Hugh and Declan who are invaluable. You need to be challenged and those boys are certainly willing to do that.” With no Under 21 league and having missed the opportunity to get into the likes of the Hastings Cup and a North West Cup, it has left McCusker having to arrange challenge games against the stronger club teams and other counties or colleges. Upcoming challenges matches have been arranged against Tyrone, Loughisland, Armagh and Glen Under 21s as well. It’s a short sharp playing season, and it was all over by March last time out. McCusker will be hoping to stretch that season to May this time round.