If you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
- Remember, Christina Rossetti
* * * * * * * * * *
SO much of the likeness that earned Caolan Finnegan his nickname ‘Stringer’ was in the disarming smile he wore permanently.
He was still a young high school student when his friends picked up on the physical similarities between Caolan and the Irish rugby team’s scrum-half Peter.
Until he was about 14, Caolan would have worn age 10-11 clothes.
Then he just sprang up.
By the time he was starting to tear things up for Crossmaglen he was touching six-foot. His pace and speed of thought meant he didn’t need much more than the 12-and-a-bit stone he carried.
When young footballers die, we’ll hear all the things that made them great footballers and not always what made them great people.
In the wide-eyed film-star smile, you saw how Caolan Finnegan the person ruled Caolan the footballer.
Carefree is the wrong phrase, because he cared deeply.
From he was no age going to games with his father, Caolan forsook the ice-cream van that other children lusted over. He would stand at Liam’s hip glaring at the game, taking in whatever he could, then go out at half-time and try to replicate it.
The Finnegans’ house in Lismore is so close to the field in Cross that it was effectively their back garden.
Caolan spent every evening, every weekend, every summer day out there.
But there was a freedom to his spirit that was one his best footballing qualities. Because for all they did have, Crossmaglen had always lacked really devastating goalscorers, and that’s what he was.
And when he scored, the smile returned. A knowing smile that in some ways revealed his inner confidence through an outward shell of shyness.
He’d have posted the odd TikTok during his illness, mostly clips of his playing days.
Armagh U20s played a game against Offaly not long before he took ill. A kickout from his own net comes out over the top of midfield and breaks his way on the Offaly 65′. The defender hangs off him, gives him every reason to pop a point or lay it off, but he has no interest. If there was any scent of a goal at all, he became a shark.
Goalscoring was something to relish and enjoy, and sure if it didn’t come off, try again next time. Isn’t that the whole point of sport, to do the things that make you love it?
For the 2022 county final against Granemore, manager Stephen Kernan presented each player with an individual clip of their strengths on the morning of the game.
Stringer’s was pretty much just one goal after another. That directness, that black-spot running and that instinct to know it’s on even when it isn’t, is almost uncoachable. You either have it or you don’t. He had it.
By half-time in that final, he’d added another brilliant strike to his collection, painting Rian O’Neill so many pictures with his runs that the quick free just had to be kicked in.
“I just go for goals, until I can’t get one. Always. If you score a point, nobody’s gonna remember ya. If you score goals all the time, everyone will remember ya.”
Everyone will remember ya, Stringer.
He spoke those words at his kitchen table early last November.
Caolan wasn’t long finished his first run of chemotherapy.
Sunday will mark a year to the date, August 25, since he underwent an operation that removed 90 per cent of a cancerous tumour from his brain.
The fight that he displayed was evident from the very first day.
Doctors were concerned that the operation might leave him paralysed or debilitated.
Within 24 hours, he was up walking through the hospital unaided, smiling. Home within a week.
He fought to the bitter end.
Doctors in Germany didn’t want to release him from the private oncology clinic where he was being treated.
A private ambulance said he was too ill to travel. An air ambulance said the same.
Nobody wanted to take him. But Caolan wanted to go home.
“He stuck it three days, I don’t how he managed it,” says Gareth O’Neill.
Gareth took the lead on the Care For Caolan fundraising group that helped generate not only huge financial resources for the family, but gestures of goodwill and the constant intercession of prayer that they so firmly believed in.
They cannot thank people enough for everything.
O’Neill and his wife Dora had been managers of the U6 team when Caolan first arrived through the gates of the club for training.
It was the parents of all those team-mates that ran the Care For Caolan campaign, a second family outside the four walls.
Their sons have been an inseparable group of friends that have been there through thick and thin.
When Caolan got sick, they visited all the time. When he was too ill to have them in the house, they’d hand buns in to Janette and sit out at the back window talking through it.
Caolan spent his final days in Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry, where the boys lined the corridors, staying overnight for his last two nights. Nurses had to chase them on Thursday afternoon but when Caolan’s condition worsened, they were straight back up the road.
He had found his place in the group very quickly as a young boy. The team built themselves around him but unless it was for a bit of mischief or devilment that he loved, he hung out in the shadows.
“He was shy. Quite comfortable in his own group but wouldn’t have pushing himself forward, stepped into the background when he got the craic going, having a giggle to himself.
“But he was a pure character too. Stringer would have stood out among them as the rogue of the group. He’d disarm you with that smile. A villain of the best possible kind, the devilment.
“He was so cute. He’d never be front and centre, he’d be in the background.
“Just a real nice, mannerly child. Well brought up, well mannered, good fun. He carried that right to the last. It would be ‘thank you, please, sorry, no thank you, yes’ – manners flowing out of him.”
Dara and Aaron O’Neill were on Caolan’s underage teams but Stringer developed so quickly into a senior football that he ended up close friends with Rian and Oisin, who’d visit regularly.
They brought Sam Maguire out to the house for an afternoon the week after Armagh won Sam Maguire, with captain Aidan Forker having already been there. Neil Lennon called in.
The Wednesday night after they’d beaten Kerry in the semi-final, Caolan was invited up to Armagh training where he was presented with David Clifford’s jersey.
Rian had referenced in a post-match interview how Kieran McGeeney had mentioned him before the game and that he’d been able to ignore his cramping legs in extra-time by thinking of his friend’s situation.
Those few weeks were, as his brother Stephen described them in a recent interview with this paper, bittersweet.
Kieran McGeeney alluded to the fact that if he’d been able, Caolan Finnegan would have been on that Armagh squad and would have been an All-Ireland winner himself now. They thought at 19 best to give him another year to develop. Then he took ill.
The youngest of five brothers, he’d grown up watching his heroes Stephen and Ronan win All-Ireland club titles with Cross.
Caolan was so close to his twin siblings, Patsy and Liam.
Liam and Janette gave everything they had to hold on to their son. They lifted and laid and nursed and nurtured and loved and fought for him every minute of every day.
On his 20th birthday, he woke up to a compilation of messages from Conor McManus, Damien Comer, Brian Fenton, Con O’Callaghan, Conor Glass and the rest. During the fundraising campaign, David Clifford sent a good luck message.
If the world was just, he’d have spent the next decade on the pitches of Ireland with those men, striving, tormenting, goal-hunting, overtaking.
And smiling.
Always smiling.
