“Were we still up with ten minutes to go?”
“Five minutes to go, still leading.”
“Five minutes to go? F*** me…”
CIARAN McNally’s reaction tallies with all that he’s spent the past half hour saying.
Despite the rarity of such an occasion for Derry, it was only in the aftermath that they recognised the magnitude of their 2001 semi-final against Galway.
When Derry people talk of missed opportunities, they go straight to ’94 and Down. And then they start back at ’87, run through every year until ’95 and reflect on the small margins that stopped them backing up 1993.
When they’d met Galway at the same stage three years previous, the eventual winners absorbed the diluted dying sting of Derry’s All-Ireland winning team.
By 2001, still with a few old hands but a raft of new men in, it was a totally different team.
Of all the missed chances, this was the biggest.
When Eamonn Coleman came back in as manager in 2000, he saw Ciaran McNally as one of the missing pieces of the puzzle.
The Bellaghy half-back was regarded as one of the most supremely gifted footballers in Derry, a member of the 1995 minor team that reached the All-Ireland final, but neither Mickey Moran nor Brian Mullins had been able to coax him into the senior setup.
Everyone was aware of Coleman’s pursuit. McNally would be forgiven for losing count of the number of evenings he’d land home to Culbane and the car would be pulled in to his father’s yard.
“I wouldn’t think much of it and I’d go in, there’s him and Da sitting having a cup of tae on the sofa.
“He would have sat and chatted for maybe an hour before he’d have turned around and said ‘well, you’ll come out’… question mark! My reply was always ‘ach, I don’t know’.”
Having seen Derry beaten in Ulster by Tyrone in 2001, Coleman called one more time. McNally finally relented.
In the first summer of the qualifiers, they would take the Red Hands’ scalp back in the All-Ireland quarter-final, placing them into an unexpected last-four meeting with Galway.
John O’Mahony’s side had lost the National League final by a point to Mayo but held no cut of champions in early summer.
Star turn Michael Donnellan had refused to play their championship opener against Leitrim after his brother John, top scorer in the league, was dropped for Alan Kerins, who had been parachuted in out of a top-class hurling career and put into the game having never played a competitive football match for Galway.
All was smoothed out a bit but Roscommon still knocked them out of Connacht.
They led Cork by 1-7 to 0-0 but needed a late clearance off the line to deny Fionán Murray a goal that would have levelled it. Galway swept the length of the field and Matthew Clancy kicked the clinching score.
That would be the 19-year-old’s first major impact that summer, and far from the last.
Clancy now lives just outside the Dutch city of Leiden, slightly closer to The Hague than it is to Amsterdam, with his wife Elaine and their three children.
“You did well to track me down!” he laughs, out for a stroll in the midweek spring sunshine.
The obvious instinct is to go straight to his goal against Derry but he pulls up first at that Cork game, and then the Croke Park qualifier against a coming Armagh side that had lost the previous season’s semi-final to Kerry after a replay.
The Garda escort that was due to bring Armagh to Headquarters from Na Fianna’s grounds in Glasnevin never showed, and they were left to fight the north Dublin traffic on their own.
That was made worse by local residents slowing things up with a protest against matches being held on Saturdays. Armagh only made it on to the pitch at 2.10pm, five minutes before throw-in, and paid for it.
“The Armagh game was the first big game we played in the back door. I remember talking to Joe Kernan about it the time he was over Galway,” recalls Clancy.
“Armagh got delayed, something happened with their police escort, it had to go off to a car accident or something.
“They got stuck in traffic and had to tog out on the bus, they’d no warm-up, basically out on the pitch and started the match. We were six points up before they knew what was happening.
“We just held on. Michael Donnellan had an absolutely amazing play at the end to block down the ball [on a Justin McNulty pass from midfield] and Paul Clancy got a great score to win the match.”
It became typical of a summer that gave the new qualifier format enough oxygen to last until now.
Ollie Murphy’s last-minute equalising goal against Westmeath earned a replay which Meath won to put them into a semi-final against Kerry. There, the Royals rolled back the years to astonish in a 2-14 to 0-5 mauling.
They knew by then it would be Galway, not Derry, they would face.
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THE hour mark had just rolled around when Matthew Clancy fired a rash shot up into the air. It broke off a Derry fist, back towards their own goal and fell beautifully into the path of the ever-raiding Sean Óg de Paor.
With almost nothing to aim at, he finds an inch inside the near post above Owen McCloskey’s head. To get the ball there, he had to round Ciaran McNally.
The Bellaghy man goes to ground and doesn’t get up again.
“I remember coming over to take a sideline halfway through the second half in front of our sub bench and feeling my knee, thinking ‘something’s not right here’.
“Threw Tohill the ball, says ‘here, you take that a second’ and I went back.
“It could have been two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes after, I don’t know, but a high ball came into our square. It broke out around the 21’ and Sean Óg de Paor came on to it.
“I went to block his shot and I went down on the same knee. I knew as soon as I hit the ground that was it.”
McNally only ever played a season-and-a-half for Derry, the end of 2001 and the whole of ’02, and in his reaction to the way his knee started to swell you understand why.
“I remember [team doctor] Ben Glancy and the boys with the vests were on, hmm-ing and haa-ing over what they’d do.
“I was looking at it, the game was over, Ben said ‘you’re alright, there’s nothing you can do about it now’. I said ‘we’ve f***ing Magherafelt in the championship next week!’”
The knee was black and strapped to the hilt, but he played against Magherafelt anyway.
De Paor’s point had cut Galway’s arrears back to just two points. Enda Muldoon had scored one of the great Croke Park goals in the first half and with 52 minutes gone, Anthony Tohill’s first score of the day put Derry 1-10 to 0-8 ahead.
In that same moment, Matthew Clancy is sent on by O’Mahony.
Galway appeared to be wilting but Derry lacked the killer instinct to take advantage. A few bad wides, another couple dropped short, the chances to put the Tribe away were passed up.
“We just needed one of them. Just one. Football’s a game of momentum. There’s times you’re up and you have to make use of it,” says McNally.
Instead, it’s Derry who wilt. In 13 minutes, Galway go from five down to four up.
The westerners are still two down with five minutes to go though. Another Derry shot drops short. This time Galway work it the entire length of the Cusack Stand.
Declan Meehan carries down the line and pops the ball off past Johnny McBride. As the Derry man turns to tackle, Meehan pulls him to the ground off the ball.
“When you watch it back, I was marking Meehan,” McBride said in 2021.
“He’d given a one-two on the Cusack Stand side and then grabbed me by the jersey and swung me around out over the sideline. Nowadays that’d be a foul but at that time they didn’t give those things.
“But then I think there was a stat where we didn’t get the ball out over the Galway endline for the last 15 minutes.”
It’s worked in to Derek Savage, who had been a torment all day, scoring three points from play. He sees the run of Clancy inside.
The Oughterard youngster, with his son up on his shoulders as they stroll through home in the Netherlands, picks up the tale.
“The goal itself, most of my memories now are from the replays of watching it rather than the thing itself. It’s weird, like watching someone else doing it, I don’t really have that much connection to it.
“One thing I do remember, we’d played a club league game a couple of weeks before that. A ball came across in a very similar way to the way Derek Savage gave me that pass. I tried to catch it before it hopped and fumbled it.
“The one thing I remember about the goal is when it was coming across to me was thinking ‘don’t try and catch it until it hops, because you fumbled it the last time’.
“I didn’t fancy what happened after I fumbled it, getting tossed over the endline in a very ungraceful manner was the bit I was thinking of.”
Clancy had got the run on Johnny Niblock for a split second. The Derry defender was playing catch-up as Clancy cut back on to his left and fired into the roof of the net in front of the shell of Hill 16.
Ciaran McNally had hurt the knee just beside the goal and hadn’t made it too far when the green flag was being lifted.
“I was standing halfway between the goals and the corner flag in front of the Hill, walking off as you’re watching the game and stopping, looking over my shoulder. I hadn’t reached the corner flag.
“I just remember the noise. Croke Park wasn’t full [there were just over 40,000 there], half the stand wasn’t there, but Galway had more support than we had and they made the wile noise on the goal.
“Thinking about that and comparing it to semi-finals you’d been to as a wean, comparing that game to the Dublin semi-final in ’93, it was only after the year was over and somebody was talking about the semi-final and mentioned the Dublin one, that was the same game.
“I just didn’t realise how close we were.”
As McNally stands by the corner flag, Clancy takes off down the field celebrating in the form of Marco Tardelli.
“I dunno what I was going for but believe me, I got plenty of abuse for that over the years!”
Ciaran McNally’s inter-county career was short-lived. He enjoyed it when he was there, but had it not been for the fact that the Bellaghy players kept on training with their club across those two seasons, he would never have gone at all.
His injury was of huge consequence that day. Others on the Derry side would tell you that while the holes had started to appear on the boat, his injury was what capsized it.
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THE All-Ireland final was played against the subdued backdrop of the Twin Towers attack in New York, smothering the atmosphere around it.
Galway’s early-season fractures had been healed and Clancy readily offers, the luck had fallen for them all year, through Cork and Armagh and Derry.
Meath’s hammering of Kerry brought a world of expectation that bordered on unrealistic. They were sitting ducks.
Just over 10 minutes from time, Galway led by five when Trevor Giles stood behind a softly-earned penalty. Matthew Clancy stood half-ready to come in and protect a lead they expected to be narrowed.
But Giles pulled his effort wide, summing up Meath’s day, and as the game got further away, Clancy sat down again and the late substitute roles were given to captain Kieran Comer and Alan Kerins, who after all the early-season drama was then dropped to make way for Paul Clancy.
“I was ready to go after the penalty, Trevor Giles probably doesn’t want to remember it, but after that we pulled ahead and I was sitting back down again, which was disappointing after the high of Derry.
“But at the time I thought it would be like this for years. Unfortunately that’s not the way it panned out. What a summer it was for a young lad like myself.
“It doesn’t occupy my thoughts really. There are mixed emotions about it definitely, the high of the semi-final and the enjoyment of the year, but also being so close and never getting to play in a final, that was disappointing alright at the time.
“But some of that is just the level of maturity I had at the time as well. When I look back, it’s all positive things I have to say about it.”
He classes himself fortunate to have played on a forward line as good as any. Just look at those six names for the Derry game – Ja Fallon, Tommy Joyce, Joe Bergin, Alan Kerins, Padraig Joyce, Derek Savage.
“I look back now, I was very lucky to get to play with those guys, and the time where we got to play as well, where there was more of a premium on skill and inventiveness than there is now.
“We had six lads that were left-footed and myself on the subs, seven. Tommy Joyce was the only player that was predominantly on his right foot.
“And we had the personalities to match as well, it was a mercurial enough set of people!” he laughs.
Matthew Clancy got his All-Ireland medal, even if he didn’t get to play in the final. He finished with four Connacht titles and in terms of the “emotion and impact”, he compares beating Mayo in 2008, and winning Sigerson and intermediate club championship titles with that August day 21 years ago.
“I’ve never taken the time to rank it but now that I’m looking back at what was the most high-emotion, high-impact moment? That’s probably it.”
Derry would have been the same underdogs against Meath given the way the semi-finals panned out but the Oak Leafers had an Indian sign over Sean Boylan’s teams for almost his entire reign.
Yet as Ciaran McNally admits, for whatever reason, the magnitude of the game only really struck once it was too late to change it.
“I know looking back on it, and I know some of the other boys feel the same, we probably just didn’t recognise how close we were.
“It was only after it was over and you thought back on it, how when you were younger and you went to watch ’93 and the All-Ireland semi-final, or any of the semi-finals, the club used to run a bus for the underage.
“It felt like when you were watching it, it was a huge game, which it is. But playing in it, I didn’t understand that was actually the game that it was. It felt almost like just another game.
“It was probably only after the final and watching Galway beating Meath that I thought ‘f***, that’s how close we were, that’s an All-Ireland’.”