WITH the autumn sun making a rare appearance between days of torrential rain, Finbar Magill is able to kick back and shoot the breeze for a bit with a morning’s work already in the rear view mirror.
After all, he couldn’t have escaped talk of Sunday’s Tyrone championship final, even if he wanted to.
Bricklaying in Carryduff, he is sharing a site with Errigal Ciaran’s Tiarnan Colhoun and Trillick’s former Tyrone U21 ace, Simon Garrity. Colhoun will be in the matchday panel at Healy Park, Garrity might well have been starting had it not been for a summer stint in the States.
All week, it has been back and forth.
“Plenty of craic, but it’s all good,” he says, before laughing, “of course the Errigal man’s dead confident – he has booked two days off and everything…”
This is where Magill comes in.
If favourites Errigal do the business on Sunday, they will become the first club to successfully defend the O’Neill Cup since Carrickmore completed their back-to-back in 2005. And who was the match-winning hero that day?
You guessed it.
Brought off the bench in the second half, young starlet Magill soon marked his arrival by slaloming between two Omagh challenges and firing over from 30 metres to edge Carmen noses ahead - 1-5 to 1-4 - 18 minutes from the end.
With the blonde frosted tips, and wearing a beaded string necklace, he had the swagger of a Carrickmore Conor Mortimer.
It wasn’t an uncommon look in Tyrone around the mid-Noughties either but the rule has it that, if you walked the walk, eventually you would have to talk the talk. His moment arrived four minutes from time.
When referee Martin Sludden penalised Paddy McMahon for touching the ball on the ground, Carmen had a chance to go a point up again as the clock ticked down.
While Sludden was bringing the free forward following a bit of Omagh dissent, Magill was already marching in the direction of Peter Loughran.
Despite sending a free wide of the posts minutes earlier, Loughran had built up a fair bit of credit with the bank during the years. The young man, though, had his own ideas.
“I took the next free off him,” recalls Magill, “that was a big thing back then because he was the king around Carrickmore.
“I just says ‘here, I’ll get that’, and there was no arguing. The boldness of youth, the pure cockiness I suppose, and that’s great when it works, not so great when it doesn’t. I was just that kind of person back then.
“In my later years I would’ve been more worried about losing, but you’re sort of bulletproof at that age. I wouldn’t have been afraid to miss, not a chance.
“I would’ve shot from anywhere.”
To put that brashness into context, Magill was part of a Carrickmore side that would not only win back-to-back senior crowns, but U21 honours were claimed both years too. Indeed, right across the board – seniors, U21s, minors, hurlers, ladies’ - ’04 had been a year like no other for the club.
“That time was just mad… too good to be true nearly, especially for somebody young like myself, winning everything.”
With confidence coursing through his veins, he took the ball from Loughran and slung it over the bar with the minimum of fuss, punching his fists together as he spun around, focusing minds for the final push as Roger Keenan’s men saw it out.
“I’d been dropped for the semi-final - obviously I wanted to start the final like every young fella but, looking back, it was probably the right call.
“When we walked out of the tunnel and saw everybody from Carrickmore on the other side, air horns going, big tricolour draped across the fence - it was surreal. After that final whistle… nothing would ever come close to it.
“It’s just a different thing, winning with your friends.”
An Ulster club clash against Fermanagh champions Teemore lay just seven days away but, as had been the motto since Dominic Corrigan’s stint with the club, “anything worth winning is worth celebrating”.
“Like, even when you won a quarter-final, you knew you had won a game.
“So we celebrated that - we went out, even if we were playing the next week. That would probably be totally unheard of now, but it built up a great camaraderie among everybody.
“You had boys Brian Gormley, Ronan McGarrity, Conor McAleer, big ‘Oz’ [Plunkett McCallan], they had all been there and done it by then, but that approach Dom Corrigan brought in helped bring that younger group through.
“After the final we ended up in Belfast and everything… I think we eventually found our way back and made training on Wednesday or Thursday.
“There was nobody cracking the whip saying you can’t do this, you can’t do that, but after a few days up in Belfast every man wants to go home.”
With the yin, though, comes the yang.
Only 20, Magill would have been entirely justified in believing this was but the beginning. Indeed, in that week’s Ulster Herald, Barry O’Donnell reflected on the milestone for seven Carrickmore players landing a sixth county title – suggesting “a magnificent seventh could well be a realistic objective in 12 months time”.
And it was. Carrickmore duly reached a third final on-the-trot, only for their treble-hunters – aiming to emulate the St Colmcille’s stalwarts of 1977-1979 - to lose out to Errigal Ciaran after a replay.
A bump in the road soon morphed into a cavernous pothole Carmen couldn’t avoid, with further final defeats following in 2010, ’13, ’14 and last year, feast suddenly giving way to famine.
But, despite the regrets and what might-have-beens, Magill accepts it for what it is – the beauty of the Tyrone championship.
While Errigal are most people’s picks on Sunday, few would be hugely surprised to see Trillick turn them over. The same fate befell Carrickmore on occasions when they were fancied, that unforgiving nature seeing the elusive county crown prized above all else.
“When we went into Ulster, you had the likes of Cross and St Gall’s who were dominating their championships, they were playing Ulster football every year.
“The likes of us, of course we wanted to try for Ulster, but winning Tyrone was such an achievement. I’m trying to teach my kids this now, it’s a big, big honour to win the Tyrone championship, because it’s so hard to do. That’s what makes it so special.
“Any team can beat any time on any given day. That was the secret then, and that’s the secret now. That’s why everybody loves it.
“People give out about penalties, that it’s the wrong way to go out and stuff, but it’s all part and parcel of the Tyrone championship. Dungannon winning a few years ago was a massive shock.
“You could go out in the first round or you could go the whole way – look at Loughmacrory, I’m sure they’re sitting there now, beat in a penalty shoot-out by Trillick, looking at it thinking ‘that could’ve been us?’
“Players change, styles of football change, but the Tyrone championship always stays the same – boys would do anything for their club back then, and these boys would do anything for their club now.
“The ethos never changes.”
Magill called time on his playing days at 31, injuries and the evolution of a more defensive approach seeing him fall out of love with the game.
He went back and did a bit of hurling, tried his hand at golf, even MMA – “I was shit at both” – before eventually returning to Carrickmore to help coach the next generation. Nothing, though, can ever replace the feeling of being part of a trailblazing team.
“Sometimes I think it’s only yesterday, then I look in the mirror and it’s long gone,” he smiles.
“There’s no bleach blond hair any more, no socks pulled up, nothing like that. Then I turn round, look at my 14-year-old and he’s got bleach blond hair, socks pulled up… that’s the circle of life.
“As you get older you maybe dwell more on the ones you didn’t win, but you can only be thankful to have what you have. As Gavin McElroy always says, that’s the boy I gave blood, sweat and tears with, and that’s the boy I went into the trenches for. That always stuck with me.
“When you experience something like that, there’s a bond with those players that’ll never go away.”
