“Seanie. Seanie! You’re going on!”
THE nudge comes at his side and Sean McGreevy blinks his way out of a daze.
A sea of Saffron that surrounds him on all four sides of St Tiernach’s Park came to breathe in the air of an Ulster final for the first time in 39 years, but the Papal flags that had so vividly fluttered in the pre-match breeze have been hidden away from the breeze since Sean Cavanagh’s early goal.
It’s not a place McGreevy ever thought he’d be.
The Ulster final itself? He always believed he’d get there. Always.
But having given 16 years, to be sat on the bench looking out at it?
On this day of days, Clones is the last place on earth Sean McGreevy wants to be.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
SOCCER was in the blood. His father, Pat, was a fanatic. An uncle, Jimmy McGeough, managed Larne to a rare Irish Cup final in 2005.
As often he could, Sean McGreevy dipped his toe. Antrim came first but he managed to squeeze in spells at Cliftonville, Ballyclare Comrades, Omagh Town and Donegal Celtic.
He had just signed for Cliftonville in 1993 when their number one, Paul Rice, suffered a broken wrist in pre-season training.
A debut came at him very quickly in Kieran Loughran’s testimonial against Derry City, where he kept a clean sheet in a 0-0 draw.
His new manager Frankie Parks came over afterwards and told him he’d start the first league game against Coleraine.
“But he said: ‘I need you to give me commitment, you have to knock Antrim on the head’.
“Point blank I just said ‘no way’.
“I was 19, I was just getting settled with Antrim. I wanted to be playing in front of big crowds in the summer. I had these visions of being in Croke Park, lifting Sam Maguire – it was gonna happen.
“So I told him I could play soccer on a Saturday and Gaelic on a Sunday no problem, and that he’d have me first at the weekend, thinking this would be fine.
“He said he’d bring another ‘keeper in. I thought he was joking.”
Within days, 31-year-old Nicky Brujos was signed from Sligo. McGreevy dropped into the reserves and was plucked away by Donegal Celtic to come and play intermediate football again.
He was no sooner there than Ballyclare came calling, and in their manager Alan Campbell, McGreevy found a completely different kettle of fish.
“Alan would have said ‘any Gaelic players that are half-decent, get them down. He always said they don’t even need to be good, don’t need to be Irish League standard. If they were half-decent, they’d be fit and strong and they’d man-mark men to the toilet.
“He actually introduced a GAA warm-up, where we were doing a few runs and then handpassing the ball, getting physical.”
Anto Finnegan, Pat O’Connor, Frank Wilson, Tony Kearns, Barry Forshaw, Brendan Allsopp, Fergal McCusker – these were all his team-mates.
“There was a snippet on Newsline one night about how many GAA players were playing at Ballyclare. I think in one game there were 10 inter-county players started.”
McGreevy settled nicely but the open door ultimately hit him in the face. When he picked up an injury, Derry number one Damian McCusker was drafted in.
“He was incredible, high balls coming in, nobody was touching him. I remember it being said that if he was a few years younger, there were a few clubs in England would have had interest.
“One of the Sheffield clubs had interest in him and then found out his age (he was close to 30).”
Campbell called McGreevy in and said the club couldn’t afford two goalkeepers. He moved on to Omagh Town, played three games, broke his foot and they folded soon after.
For the rest of his days, he bounced in and out. He won a Steel & Sons Cup with Donegal Celtic in 2003 but never really gave it a proper crack.
“At best, I maybe would have been an Irish League player. I always put Gaelic before soccer. It’s easy to have regrets but I got so much out of Gaelic and still do. Money can’t buy that.
“The GAA’s amateur status is unique. I played a lot of soccer with guys the other side of the fence and they can’t get it.”
He looks at Tyrone’s Niall Morgan, who is still dipping into the Irish League with Dungannon Swifts of winter, and sees the benefits of it.
“Being small for an inter-county goalkeeper, I learned presence, and I learned it from soccer.
“I benefited massively in soccer from playing Gaelic, competing in the air with big men over six foot. When a cross came in, I felt really confident going because I knew they couldn’t put their hands up.
“I found crosses in soccer were a gift because nobody could touch you.
“I’d always recommend that Gaelic goalkeepers play soccer in the off-season, for the benefit to their own game.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE phone rings. Halfway down the motorway to Dublin, Sean McGreevy pulls in to the hard shoulder. Looks at the phone. ‘Baker’.
Liam Bradley, a former Derry player who managed his native Glenullin to their first county title for 22 years in 2007, had given Antrim football an instant lift upon his arrival at the end of 2008. They would end up in Division Two and an exceptionally rare Ulster final.
“In fairness to Liam Bradley, he did good things for Antrim. He came in and put a bit of steel into us that hadn’t been there for years after Brian White.
“He got numbers to training. You get used to going to training thinking if you got double figures at it, it was good.”
An unbeaten run to promotion from Division Four was taken for little when it came to the idea of beating Donegal in Ballybofey. Back where Sean McGreevy and his team-mates left one behind them in 1993, they went with a bullishness that had been missing from Antrim teams for most of his career.
He had been struggling with a groin injury. Kickouts were an issue and on his fourth of the game, the groin goes numb. The ball falls badly short and a goal chance is fashioned out of it.
Eight minutes in, Conall Dunne cuts through. Drills the shot low but McGreevy gets the point of his toe to it. A brilliant save, but a costly one. The groin’s had enough, and Peter Graham comes in for a championship debut.
Tomás McCann’s goal seals a famous win and with Cavan awaiting them in the semi-final, there suddenly grew this idea that history was in the offing.
Oxygen chambers, laser treatment on the groin, the pool, constant physio with Danny Turley, his own training – McGreevy was determined that he wouldn’t miss it.
Cavan just came too soon. In an emergency, he could have stood in but the decision was made to stay with Peter Graham for his first start.
“I was at 85 per cent and I said I’d be willing to play.
“I could have got through the game and I wanted back in, because I didn’t want anyone else to have a chance to take my final opportunity.
“The line that will stick out was being told: ‘Get yourself right for the final’.
“There was no written agreement but it was very much an understanding I had that I wasn’t being risked and had to get ready for the final.”
And then the Wednesday before the game, the phone call comes.
“I was ready, I was buzzing and all of a sudden the phone rings. You see Baker’s name and your first thought is ‘why am I getting a personal phone call?’
“He just said he was gonna stick with a winning team. I was trying to explain to him I was part of a winning team, and I contributed to the Donegal game because I’d made the one save in a match that we won by a point.
“I remember feeling really angry on that phone call, pulling the car over. Caught between telling him where to go, and trying to convince him I’m ready.”
The team is released to the public that night, with McGreevy’s omission confirmed in black and white. Two days later, the team has its final training session together in Creggan.
Afterwards, he goes upstairs and out on to the balcony with Bradley and his assistant, Niall Conway. After 17 years, McGreevy was achingly desperate to play.
“I remember literally begging these guys to play me. Literally begging them. It was evident they’d already decided it wasn’t happening.
“Angry wouldn’t be the word, I was beyond that.
“Looking back, I have to respect he made the decision because he wanted to keep a settled team.
“I certainly didn’t think I was gonna unsettle the team, and that I’d have brought more plusses – my experience, my proven ability, and I’d know how to control the defence and talk to players when things were backs against the wall, when to take the sting out of the game.
“That conversation went ‘at some point in this game, you will play’. I was gobsmacked. As a goalkeeper, you’re not going to play unless the other guy either gets injured or he’s having such a ‘mare that you have to go on.”
Minds were made up and between there and 3.30pm on Sunday, there would be no turning.
Before the game, he made a point of sitting down beside Peter Graham and wishing him all the best. None of this was his doing. He was just a young man with an opportunity that he took.
“I remember sitting with Peter and thinking I’ve a role to play, to be able to say to him to enjoy it, take it in and remember you’re a damn good goalkeeper. I told him he was there on merit.
“It was hard to get that out of me, but I was glad I did it.”
Peter Graham would march behind the Enniskillen band for Antrim’s first Ulster final for 39 years.
Sean McGreevy, having been about the squad for almost half of the time in between, would not.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
WITH five minutes to go, the call comes. This time it’s not on the phone, but a bellow from the sideline into the stand.
He doesn’t even hear it. The nudge is needed.
“Seanie, you’re going on!”
Antrim have recovered from the stickiest of starts to bob along in respectability, maintaining a six-point swinging distance at the All-Ireland champions without ever threatening to get inside.
The enthusiasm that crawled up the hill in the shape of thousands of saffron-clad bodies has been extinguished. All that’s left to do now is wait.
The end can’t come quickly enough for McGreevy.
“I was sitting in the stand that day and it was the last place in the world I wanted to be. I did not want to be anywhere near Clones.
“Even though I wanted to see Antrim winning the match, I wanted to see it from afar. I wanted someone to say to me ‘Antrim have won’ and I’d celebrate it as an Antrim man, as much as I’d still feel I should have been part of it.
“I genuinely didn’t know I was being called on. I was in a daze, sitting seeing this green haze in front of me.
“The last thing I wanted to do was go on a pitch and try to perform. For a split second, I thought about saying I wasn’t going on, but common sense kicked in.
“I remember walking down the steps and almost feeling embarrassed. An element of ‘och, here’s the oul boy coming on’. I have to say, the applause really lifted me.
“I was looking forward to having a kickout because I wanted to show there was nothing wrong with me. The amount of people said to me afterwards ‘I thought you weren’t fit’ and I’m telling them I was as fit as I’ve ever been.
“There will always be a bitterness in me. It angers me, genuinely. I just thought I deserved to be treated with a bit more respect.
“You have to call it as it is. As much as I’m angry about that happening, I can never change it.
“I didn’t want to be in that arena that day. I was delighted as an Antrim man that we were there and I wanted us to win it, of course.
“But I’ll never get over not starting that game.
“When you’re in Dublin a few days before that game and you get that phone call, it’s worse than a kick in the b******s.”
It was Graham’s third championship game for Antrim and would prove his last. Seven days later in Tullamore, John Finucane wore 16 but started the game.
McGreevy was confident he’d get back in and when the team was named late the night before the game, he considered going home before settling and staying.
Sure enough, Finucane went down injured at one stage. Not knowing who’d get the call, both McGreevy and Graham went down the line to warm up before returning to their seats, their services not required.
As winter settled in, McGreevy thought about turning away an invitation to rejoin the panel for 2010, but went back feeling he had something left to prove.
Finucane edged the battle to play the Ulster tie against Tyrone, but McGreevy was between the sticks again for the qualifier draw with Kildare on the warmest of summer’s evenings.
An emotional air swirled around a baking hot Newbridge as Dermot Earley played on the evening of his father’s burial. McGreevy says Kevin McGourty’s first half was “the single best performance of an Antrim player I’ve ever played”.
The Saffrons missed their big chance in a 0-15 all draw with the eventual All-Ireland semi-finalists before falling heavily in the replay at Casement Park.
That would be McGreevy’s last game for Antrim. Bradley chopped both him and Finucane that winter and ended up with a goalkeeping crisis the following summer, with Armagh native Willie McSorley playing in the championship.
“I’ll always give Baker his place for calling me and saying that I deserved to retire on my own call, but I wasn’t ready to retire.
“I thought after the Kildare games, I still had done enough to be considered, to get the same call as the year previous.”
An SOS from Frank Dawson in 2013 brought him back into the championship squad at the age of 40, but he acted as Chris Kerr’s understudy for their two games.
The All-Irelands he dreamt of when PJ O’Hare called him up at 18 never came, but he achieved a remarkable feat of playing for his county in three different decades.
He’s doing goals with Antrim Masters now, reunited with the men of 2000 and their old boss Brian White. Still plays 5-a-side every Thursday, and coaches goalkeepers in both GAA and soccer. His last senior reserve game for St Paul’s was last summer, and he could step in yet if needed.
Sean McGreevy was built to last.
