GIVE or take a few, there are four thousand miles between the plastic red seats of Owenbeg and the floor-to-ceiling marble inside Karim Benzema’s apartment in Saudi Arabia.
You might get the odd sinner wrapped up in Derry’s autumn dreaming of the Middle East’s dead 40-degree heat but very few would be thinking in the reverse.
Barry Grant is still buzzing when he gets back to his own hotel, 20km down along the edge of the Red Sea from Benzema’s palatial rooftop abode.
He’s just back from meeting the man who would only hand the Ballon D’Or back to Lionel Messi fourteen days later.
Sat in his Ballinascreen training top, Grant opens his laptop and fires up the stream of Greenlough and Banagher in the Derry intermediate football championship, the taster for Glen v Slaughtneil later that evening.
The laptop bag contained three Al-Ittihad jerseys he’d bought for the former Real Madrid star to sign but in the haste of it all, he forgot to take them out during the meeting.
The world at home will always be part of him. The former Derry minor hasn’t given up hope of playing for Ballinascreen again next year.
A torn cruciate ligament on the left and a broken and dislocated knee on the right haven’t helped much.
The break is well behind him, though the plates and screws are an eternal reminder, and the cruciate was just over a year ago.
It coincided with the need to make decisions for his future away from football.
Chris Connolly did his surgery on August 9 and he went straight to Ollie Cummings for rehab.
Six weeks in, Celtic invited him over to make a presentation at their Lennoxtown training base.
These are take-it-or-leave-it offers. Rehab on the knee had to come second. He kept it up for a while but after delivering one of his ProBoots to Barcelona’s Ronald Araujo in March, he flew to London for three days and ended up staying six months, missing virtually the entire Gaelic season.
All of this is to try and jam his foot in the door of a world he didn’t even dream of until Covid hit the building sites in Sydney and he had nothing to be at.
A qualified accountant, he’d gone out to kill a bit of time before being able to resit the last module of his chartered exams.
He worked with his brother, a welder, before the virus struck. Then he passed a bit of time doing the books. But there was a lot of sitting about waiting on life to restart.
His broken leg had set him down the path of interest in recovery. It was a tibial plateau fracture, where he’d landed heavy jumping over a short wall trying to recover his phone from a thief who had snatched it from his hand on holiday.
“He went up through a wee break in the wall and I jumped over it to cut him out, and as I landed, came down with full force on a straight leg and snapped the knee joint,” he recalls.
Four nights in the Royal Victoria Hospital, two plates and eight screws later, the first big challenge of his playing career was upon him.
Damian Barton gave him a tryout with the Derry senior setup in 2017.
Grant had started at full-forward in Clones the day that Derry’s revolution began. Donegal minors were favourites for the All-Ireland. They’d hammered Damian McErlain’s side in the league and then beat them well in the final.
But when it came to their Ulster Championship meeting, the Oak Leafers survived a last-minute penalty miss by Conor Doherty to pull off a huge shock and create a reference point for everything that’s happened since.
They went on to win Ulster, with Grant sandwiched on the starting line-up by now-Allstar Shane McGuigan and Tiarnan Flanagan, who’s busy preparing for another All-Ireland semi-final with Glen.
It was in Watty Graham Park that his cruciate went last August. Not just that, but he dislocated the knee, tore the medial ligament and suffered a stress fracture on the femur. Apart from that, though.
In between times, he’d become really unsure about his own relationship with the game.
He was chipping in when Ballinascreen reached a rare county final in 2017, though their hopes of a first title since 1973 were dashed by a ruthless Slaughtneil.
“After that final, I fell out of love with playing. Marty Boyle [former ‘Screen and Derry minor boss] asked me one day, he could see I wasn’t the same.
“He was a bit taken aback when I said I just wasn’t feeling this any more and the only reason I was there was because my friends were there and if I was in the house, Da would ask me why I wasn’t at training.
“We’re doing drills and warm-ups, there had been multiple times through the year where I was doing warm-ups and saying to myself ‘what am I doing here? I just don’t want to be here’.”
Four years ago, he posted two clips on social media that summed up what he could do with a ball in hands and why he’d loved it.
The first, in a league game in Bellaghy, Benny Heron drops the pass in behind for him. The goalkeeper rushes him and without taking it in his hands at full pace from the 21′, Grant lofts the ball as it’s coming up off the turf with the top of his weaker right foot, watching it drop back down and into the net.
The other was a league game with Glen, where they’d been given a free on the 13′ for some off the ball holding.
He asks for the ball, receives it and with the defence sleeping, Grant sees the goalkeeper advancing again, crouching in anticipation of the shot. On the jog, he just deftly lifts the ball over the head and beneath the crossbar again.
“I said f*** it. Barry Dillon was manager and he wanted me to play with a bit of freedom. If it was going over the bar, it was going over anyway. If it hits the bar, you look like a d*****d. Thank God it went in the net.
“That’s when I was enjoying football, you weren’t scared to try those things.
“There’s been times I’ve had people saying why are you not playing, what the f*** is wrong with you? But there were days I genuinely didn’t want to tie my laces in the changing rooms to go out and train.
“I had lost inside of me every desire to play. I don’t know the trigger. I got fed up with it. I wasn’t seeing what I’d seen when I was growing up. The fun and the enjoyment wasn’t there.
“You grow up playing off the cuff and you get to senior, you play to the template you’re given.
“You do it but there’s times I was thinking ‘this isn’t really football any more’.”
He’d gone to America for a summer in 2018, went to Australia then two years later and didn’t really give it a proper crack until Mark McCullagh and Mickey Gallagher came in to the club.
Ciaran Meenagh had been over the 2017 team with Marty Boyle. McCullagh is Meenagh’s first cousin.
“If Ciaran Meenagh spat on the ground, Mark McCullagh would have rose!” he says, depicting their similarities.
Coming 26 that January, the realisation that he might only have “three or four years at any decent capacity” left dawned on him.
Grant lost over nine kilos. He was going to Loughmacrory to do extra sessions with McCullagh.
“I mind him making me run around their handball court, just him, standing with a whistle in his mouth and him screaming ‘who’s gonna call you a fat c*** now?’” he recalls, his boyish face lighting up with laughter.
The business was up and going. Things were all on a level.
And then he tore his cruciate.
***
IN some ways the injury took him down a path of less resistance.
Work and football were going to struggle to fit. He didn’t want to leave either behind. The injury removed choice from the equation for a while and within that, he found the answer.
PROTEC Recovery is the business. With local businessman Lawrence O’Kane as a ‘silent’ partner, they’ve produced a range of recovery equipment aimed at top-end sports people.
Benzema was the biggest name so far.
He and his friend Emmet Donnelly that had travelled over spent 45 minutes waiting in the foyer, growing more terrified by the minute that they were in the wrong place.
“Then the elevator buzzed, he came down wearing sunglasses, Balenciaga t-shirt, Balenciaga cargos, shoes, the lot.
“I said how do I even approach this man, do I shake his hand? He came over ‘ah my brother’ and did the big handshake, hug, tapped on the shoulder. His kids were running about the place.
“This side of my chest was beating like f***, the other side wasn’t moving at all. I had to concentrate not to stutter.”
Aside from that, the only time he’s found himself near tongue-tied and starstruck was when he was standing in Jonny Sexton’s kitchen wondering whether he should pet the dog or not.
By then, they’d signed a deal with Ulster rugby and the Belfast Giants, gotten the likes of Barcelona’s Ronald Araujo, Chelsea’s Omari Hutchinson, Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez, Arsenal’s Oleksandr Zinchenko and Man Utd starlet Charlie McNeill on board.
A lot of it has been on the rugby end though, with Sexton’s fellow Irish stars Josh van der Flier and Conor Murray, and England’s Henry Arundell among those to give it their approval.
It is a world apart, one he finds very different but with reminders that they’re all just flesh and bone too.
For five whole months he drove around Ireland and Britain on his own, spending the car journeys wondering if he was getting himself in too deep, getting to hotel rooms where he’d pack his Ballinascreen kitbag with as much weight as he could find lying around and try his best to do some makeshift rehab on the knee.
“I’m probably the biggest introverted extrovert. I could sit here and have this chat and go back to the office and do a day’s work but I could very easily go up to my room and not come out of it for most of the night.
“I like my own company, I’m kinda used to my own company at this stage. There has been a bit of wrestling mentally, it’s going well in elite sport and there’s still a lot to do.
“StatSports, where they were ten years ago, there’s potential for the same gradual progression, sustainable, not too many massive risks.
“But if this went another nine months and you turned the key on it, you’d be 27 coming 28 with no savings. To go and get a mortgage, you’d be laughed at. There’s a lot at stake. Moreso timewise.
“There was money I put in at the start. It is worth the risk. This or accountancy? This wins hands down.”
This and Gaelic football isn’t either-or yet. It will never leave him, even if he has to leave it.