ACCORDING to reports, Derry have stood down the men who were appointed to bring in their new football manager.
Whatever they’ve been selling, their targets aren’t buying it and the big hole where the new Oak Leaf manager should be has been filling up instead with rumour and bad press.
A new committee, including two players, has been formed and the men who turned Derry down before might get another call.
This mess is a reminder of how sport has a way of biting you in the backside when you least expect it.
Just when you think you’ve made it, it turns out you haven’t.
At Wembley last Saturday night the stage seemed to be set for Anthony Joshua to become world heavyweight champion.
Even if you’d had doubts about him, the way he swaggered to the ring as fireworks went off all around the stadium would have convinced you there was no way he could lose. In a sea of thousands of people, he stood out in his pristine white robe.
The king, the guvnor, lord of the manor…
But it turned out they should have kept the fireworks until after the fight because the one person who didn’t believe Joshua was going to win was the one person who actually mattered – his opponent Daniel Dubois.
Joshua was blinded by over-confidence. He underestimated the man in the other corner and paid for it. Crash, bang, wallop… He was dropped in the first, the third, the fourth but, before he went out for the fifth round, he told his cornermen that Dubois was “shit”.
A minute or so later a Dubois right hand left him in a crumpled heap.
Joshua didn’t respect the sport and the sport took him down a few pegs.
I don’t take any pleasure from seeing someone knocked out and I certainly don’t take any pleasure looking on as Derry sink deeper and deeper into the mire.
Like Anthony Joshua at Wembley the other night, Derry seemed destined for success as a well-oiled machine with just the right blend of skill, pace, physicality and knowhow to win the Sam Maguire.
It seems like five minutes’ ago that they were the team to beat but sport has bitten them on the backside and mistakes bad luck and bad choices have left them in this hole.
Will they eventually come out of it?
If so at what cost?
Will this talented group of players reach their potential?
Not to do so would be a crying shame.
Derry fans probably won’t need reminding of this, but it’s just six months since Mickey Harte led them to a National League triumph – only the seventh in their history and the first in 16 years.
We all expected the Oak Leaf express to roll on towards the Sam Maguire but, as we know, that didn’t happen. After back-to-back Ulster titles, All-Ireland semi-finals and a National League, the Derry players, consciously or sub-consciously, it would be understandable if the Derry players got caught up in their own hype.
Martin O’Neill, a Derry player himself before he began a soccer career that led him to management success with Aston Villa, Celtic and the Republic of Ireland, once said that management was, and is, ultimately: “About getting players to play for you”.
For whatever reason, some of the Derry players didn’t play to their full potential for Mickey Harte after he had been brought in to restore order following the managerial turbulence of the previous season.
If anyone thought all Harte had to do was hand out the jerseys and the players would do the rest, they soon realised their error as a match that initially seemed to be working well quickly unravelled.
A Championship season was wasted.
It was Harte’s bad luck that his first Championship game in charge was against Donegal and Jim McGuinness who has had the Indian Sign over him. It was all downhill from there.
Like Joshua getting knocked down again and again on Saturday night, lessons just weren’t learned and by the time punch drunk Derry played Westmeath in Newry the once mighty Oaks were looking like a bang-average Division Three team.
The inevitable end came when they ran into a good team. Harte stepped down and since then we’ve had weeks of high profile names being linked with taking over the reins.
Malachy O’Rourke, James Horan, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, Peter Keane…
None have taken a job which tells us that it’s obviously not as attractive as it seems from the outside looking in. There are players in the panel with proven quality and a record of success with club and county. There is experience, pace, finishing power and after back-to-back All-Ireland minor titles (three in the last five years), a ton of talented youngsters coming through to swell the ranks.
So what is the problem?
The weight of expectation on the shoulders of the new management team will be immense. Will they be allowed time to sift through the county and bring in the players they want to play the game the way they want? Or will they have to stick with the players who have promised so much over the past few seasons and play the way they decide?
Kilkenny legend Brian Cody said ego had to be kept out of the dressing room because it “infects the place”.
A few years ago, a group of players in a different county approached their management to complain about the way things were being done.
The manager told them, in no uncertain terms: “You’re only county players as long as we pick you”.
He showed them who was boss and put down the revolt.
Who holds the power in Derry?
The players didn’t seem to want Harte so he made his exit. Names have come and gone since and it has been reported that the Derry players haven’t supported some of them.
Undoubtedly, there is a yearning among some players to go back to the 2022 management but it’s practically impossible to see how that could happen. Rightly or wrongly, the return of Rory Gallagher risks alienating rank-and-file supporters. They have to move on.
It’s a mess that is not all of Derry’s making, but it’s still a mess and to get out of it the players have to realise that they only have a limited window to get the most out of their county careers.
In sport you can’t believe the hype like Anthony Joshua - who believed he was world champion before the even got in the ring - did last weekend.
You have to keep those feet on the ground.
So these Derry players have to get behind Mark Doran, or whoever the new boss is, because managers aren’t exactly queueing up to take them on.
They can’t afford to think of themselves as the boys who came within a whisker of an All-Ireland final in 2023 any longer.
No, they’re the team that scraped past Westmeath in June.
