SEAMUS Downey’s final game in a Lavey jersey was just as memorable as the afternoon 30 years ago when they brought the Andy Merrigan Cup back up the road from Croke Park.
It was 2006 and Lavey were in a relegation playoff. Their existence as a perennial senior club came under almost annual threat for a lot of the early 2000s.
They beat Ballymaguigan and stayed up. Downey was player-manager at 38. His brother Henry was 39. It was the last game for the club for both of them.
“There was more pressure on that game than there was stepping out in an All-Ireland club final – a different type of pressure, to keep your club up,” he recalls.
“There was champagne corked in the changing room that day by older men involved in our club.”
A small village sandwiched between the towns of Maghera and Bellaghy, they remain one of the smallest clubs ever to have won an All-Ireland club title.
The story of their 1991 journey is well known. The late Brendan Convery headed the ship that took out Kingscourt before Anthony McGurk’s last-gasp goal rescued extra-time against a star-laden Tir Chonaill Gaels.
They’d get out of Ballinascreen just about alive before beating Thomas Davis and Salthill to claim a remarkable success.
There were five sets of brothers on that squad, and the names are known throughout Ireland. Two-and-a-half years later, Seamus Downey would score the goal and Henry would lift the cup as Derry won Sam Maguire.
Johnny and Colm McGurk and Brian McCormick were the other Erin’s Own men who would finish the year with a famous Boxing Day county title win over Swatragh.
At that time, it seemed their run of success would never end. Between 1988 and ’93, they won four Derry football titles, two Ulsters, an All-Ireland, five county hurling titles and played in two Ulster finals, reaching a third in 1995.
This was Slaughtneil in an era before anyone knew who Slaughtneil were.
Yet as last year passed with a first round defeat by Magherafelt, it turned the clock past 27 years without a Derry senior football championship. Reaching finals in 1998 and 2018 were all that they had to show at senior level.
The fruits of their labour in between times are starting to ripen.
Building a magnificent £2.4m dome beside their pitch was a sign of their ambition. Leaving the club debt free within nine years was a sign of community backing.
“We were training the young boys indoors and having to hire out either the hall in the Convent [St Mary’s Magherafelt] or St Pat’s Maghera.
“There was one night we were snowed off, we couldn’t get into St Pat’s, and three or four of us went and sat down in the local bar over a pint and said we’d do something about it. We said we were going to build a hall up there [at the club] so this wouldn’t happen again.
“The chairman at the time said ‘Seamus Downey, I think you’re mad’. If we had known the project would cost £1m more than I told him that night, I would have agreed with him.”
A facility that allows them to train 48 weeks of the year, taking four off either side of Christmas, has been a significant help.
Fifteen years ago, Lavey’s underage teams were almost exclusively playing ‘B’ football. They focussed on getting the right people into management with the fundamental age groups and went from there.
“If we have 35 kids at U8, we have 35 footballs. Everybody gets a ball. We work on the basic skills.
“It can sometimes be laborious but if you give an U6 a ball, he’s active. If you have him in a conga line of 10 people waiting for the manager to throw a ball up in the air, he can then be distracted.
“A lot of courses I go to have them jumping over hurdles and hoops, and that’s fine. But our view was that they’re doing a lot of that in their PE in school, and we only have them twice a week.
“When they’re with us, they all have a ball for the hour-and-a-half.”
The work behind the scenes propelled them but in remembering the great Eamonn Coleman’s statement “the players is the men”, Downey smiles that “nobody pays into Owenbeg to watch a committee”.
The club won their first Ulster minor title last New Year’s Day, and backed it up by making it consecutive county titles last autumn. Downey, who managed the team, believes they would have made it two-in-a-row in Ulster had the competition been played.
There is no denying the genetic links to the past. Those teams have been full of Downeys, McGurks, Regans, Collins’, Raffertys – all names that were there in ’91.
This crop will be generational, just as the last one was. The local St Brigid’s primary school in Mayogall reached six Castle Cup finals in nine years, yet were operating at times with tiny numbers. That’s how it goes for rural clubs.
“If you go back from that team that won the Derry minor championship last year, Enda and James McGurk were the only P7 boys who played football. There only were seven boys in the class I think.
“All through history, the underage titles in Derry have been won by towns. Dungiven, Ballinascreen, Bellaghy, Glen, Magherafelt – generally speaking, and that’s who wins underage titles.
“It’s not given out to the Glenullins, Laveys, Newbridges, Castledawsons, Slaughtneils. Now and again, yes you will, but Lavey don’t win a pile of underage titles and never will, regardless of how well we coach teams. That will be the domain of the big towns.
“What you want to do is if you can compete at ‘A’ level and stay there, even if you get three or four hammerings, you’re introducing lads to a quicker, better game, that will stand you in better stead.”
Success on the scale of an All-Ireland has become ever more difficult for small clubs, but not impossible. What Slaughtneil have achieved in recent years, the way Kilcoo had Corofin by the throat, there are still odd examples.
“For a small rural club to get up to that level again will be difficult. I’m not saying it’s impossible because you can land upon a really, really good group of players and with the right drive.
“We’re very conscious now of the fact a lot of the young people in our clubs can’t get houses, they’re having to go and live in neighbouring towns.
“When you have a young family and they go to that primary school, it’s very hard for that lad to leave his friends and come back to play for his father’s club.
“Not being allowed to build, the planning in all rural parishes, is something the GAA needs to be aware of. You will harm the fabric of the parish, let alone the primary school numbers can go down and the parish team can suffer.”
It has taken money, blood, sweat, tears, patience and some well-timed breeding, but Lavey are on the way back up.
27 years from their last county football title, it would be a major surprise if the next decade were to pass without their name finding its way back on to the plinth of the John McLaughlin Cup.
But while that is an important future milestone, the fact that Lavey will enter a thirds football team in 2021 for the first time ever is hugely notable.
So too are the numbers of over 60s that have attended their Young At Heart club on a Thursday afternoon, where they come to the club for a bite to eat and an afternoon’s chat to stave off the rural isolation that cripples so many.
Seamus Downey would like for his sons, his nephews and their friends to win medals, but not necessarily for the piece of silver itself.
“Of course you want to win a championship, that would be nice. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.
“The fact that your community is alive and breathing and doing so well, and you have something for everyone in your parish at your club, from the six-year-old to the 96-year-old is important.
“If Lavey don’t win a championship in the next ten years, will I be disappointed? I don’t know if that’s the right word.
“I think we’d like to be competitive over the next ten years. You’ve no God-given right to win the Derry senior football championship. It is so difficult to win.
“But you have to put yourself in a position to compete. I wouldn’t be happy if we’re not competing every year, with the good players we have at our disposal.
“What we’d also like is that the players have good memories of playing for Lavey in the next ten years, and that they leave the jersey in a better place than they’ve got it.
“Because when the All-Ireland winning team meet up, you fall into each other’s company seamlessly. But we never discuss a match, who scored what or who hit who.
“What we talk about and laugh about and reminisce about is the craic we had. My abiding memory of playing for Lavey and Derry at that time is that it was great craic.
“Winning adds to the enjoyment and gives you the opportunity to have good memories, and I’d like our players to experience the fun of winning, not just the pressure of playing.
“The fun of winning is more important.”
