DARREN Gleeson and I got off on the wrong foot right from the start. Although he’d been part of a couple of Antrim backroom teams before assuming the managerial reins himself in 2020, I’d never spoken to him until that first season.
Initially, Darren couldn’t get his head around the local media accessing the Antrim players for interview. In Tipperary that’s not the way things were done.
But Antrim hurling was a fair bit down the food chain and there were people among the county board who realised that they needed the media to drum up some interest among Antrim Gaels and to get more of them through the turnstiles at Corrigan Park.
After butting heads over the issue, Darren got in touch a week later to say he’d create a player rota for media interviews – one player per week and access to a member of the management team.
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Some of the Antrim public knew little about what was coming through up in Dunloy, Loughgiel, Cushendall or O’Donovan Rossa.
Darren soon warmed to the idea of giving some media profile to the Antrim players and I distinctly remember him telling me about this kid Keelan Molloy from Dunloy and how good he was going to be.
Things were good between us. Until the next drama. The thing that I resented most of all about disagreeing with Tipperary’s 2010 All-Ireland winner was that our tiffs always seemed to happen on my day off.
I remember pacing back and forth in my back garden trying to get my point across and defending a published article that Darren took issue with.
Another time, I was in my mother’s front room, standing up one minute, sitting down the next, wondering all the time why these disagreements were happening.
In the middle of these debates over the phone, I remember thinking that this big man was a damn good arguer and still, weirdly, very affable.
There were never any raised voices - just a lot of passive-aggressive stuff going on at either end of the phone.
Sometimes a sports journalist and a manager of an elite GAA team clash. This was a classic example of this happening.
For the first few months, I really didn’t know what to make of the Portroe native.
Our interactions, it must be said, weren’t always negative. In fact, they were mostly jocular. Darren’s dry wit and wily turn of phrase were always things in his favour.
With people like Ciaran McCavana, Donal Murphy and Tony Shivers - three main driving forces within Antrim GAA - it was no coincidence the senior hurling team started climbing a few rungs.
Darren took the job on the cusp of COVID – but it was clear in the first year he was a very canny appointment.
Playing Joe McDonagh, the Antrim players under his watch were the best version of themselves on so many days and often repeated the dose when they stepped up to Leinster.
Anyone that followed Antrim during Darren’s time in charge had a great affinity with the team. Every game was a rollercoaster.
Maybe the bleak days of COVID had something to do with that too because hurling was many people’s escape during that time.
Even with restricted crowds at Corrigan Park in 2021, Darren Gleeson’s Antrim turned the ground into something of a fortress. Clare and Wexford were just two big hitters that left the Whiterock venue with bloody noses.
From the view of the new Corrigan Park stand, you could appreciate Darren’s ability to read a game. His instructions were always clear and succinct.
He’d be spinning a dozen plates on the sideline and yet he always seemed in control of every aspect of match-day. He was definitely in charge.
For five years he raised standards in Antrim. He dragged as many hurlers as he could with him and made them believe they were good enough to be playing Division One and Leinster Championship hurling. And they were on many days.
Some players fell out with him - it happens in every squad - but nobody could question how hard the Tipperary man tried in his time at the helm to raise the bar.
His Antrim team experienced so many near-misses than he’d care to remember too.
One of the things I admired about him was that he hated soft-ball questions from reporters after games. He couldn’t bluff. He wanted straight, unvarnished questions.
Proper enquiry into a performance that saw his team come up short by a point or two.
He never cut himself any slack.
Even when reporters tried to provide context down in Westmeath last March, when Antrim travelled with just 21 fit players – five short of the match-day quota – he wasn’t biting.
“That’s something your mother would tell you and wrap her arm around you. We are where we are. No margins. That’s soft talk. That’s the reality of it. You have who you have - and you hurl with who you have.
“The conditions weren’t tricky at all. I wouldn’t blame conditions, light, anything like that. It was the same for Westmeath as it was for us. The best team won the game.
“We were the second-best team.”
In his last season, he admonished me for criticising one of his players in print. It’s not that his players were above criticism; he just thought, in this instance, I’d overcooked my assessment.
And he was right too. I held my hands up. At other times, he held his hand up too.
Even though he could be a cantankerous so-and-so, I liked Darren. Even though we argued, he was always a guy you would absolutely enjoy having a pint with, disagreeing with him occasionally, but having the craic nonetheless.
If I was ever in Portroe, I’d look him up.
I admired what he did in Antrim. He squeezed every bead of sweat that was in those who played for him. He knew the game inside out too.
He developed a real Grá for the people of Antrim and probably left at the right juncture. A few weeks ago, I sent him a photograph of me in a hospital bed after a hip replacement operation.
He fired one straight back of him nursing a broken arm, also from a hospital bed.
I was happy to hear he’d become Laois manager.
It was particularly shocking though to learn of his cancer diagnosis very recently and having to step away from his newly acquired role.
But I’ve no doubt the big man will be back on a sideline next season - living the game in its fullest sense, calmly directing operations, and raising bars in places they said they couldn’t be raised.
That’s what he did in Antrim for five seasons.
For now, though, he just has to mind himself and trust the process. But we’ll see him on the other side of this, that’s for sure.