BEFORE a recent Derry City game their manager, Felix Healy, told his players a story. It was about his brother, who had died in a car crash. Healy would like his brother to have been around this season as he had been a keen Derry City fan.
Then Healy moved on to his 11 year old son, who had begun to ask him about Derry City's 1989 treble winning side in which Healy was a stylish, goalscoring playmaker. "See, when you get to my age boys," he said to his players, "if you've never done anything in football, you'll have nothing to talk about.
"And at the end of the day, I've probably enjoyed the last year more than any other in my life, not just through football, but with my son talking about football so much. Boys, believe me, these are great times ahead and you don't realise it until you get older. Just cherish the moments boys, because they mightn't ever happen again.
Football is about people, Healy maintains, and so his team talks are about life This is particularly appropriate for Derry City Football Club. They are a community club in a way that no other National League club is, save for the possible exception of Sligo Rovers. For a time in the mid 1980s, the club seemed the very lifeblood of the town.
Crowds of up to 10,000 at the Brandywell were commonplace in the early years of their National League membership, and once reached 12,000 for an FAI Cup derby against Finn Harps. The travelling Red Army regularly numbered 5,000 in support of an exotic, cosmopolitan side, long before polyglot teams were in vogue, as they are now in England.
It was an unreal odyssey, something much more than a mere football story. It could never last. Last Tuesday, a crowd of 5,000 went to the Brandywell in anticipation of their first League title since 1989. They were mostly diehards of the mid 1980s or even the Irish League days of the 1960s. The age profile seemed higher than the norm, but it was purely a football crowd.
As usual, they watched and waited for disaster to strike. Amongst the self named intelligentsia" in one corner of the ground, next to the old stand and opposite the new one, the atmosphere was more akin to a mass.
They certainly were as quiet as church mice until Gary Beckett's equaliser against Shamrock Rovers gave them 12 minutes to win the league title. Emotion flowed as chances came and went. As Peter Hutton's injury time flick grazed the far upright, Eddie Mahon, a former Derry goalkeeper and one of the Gang of Four who began the crusade for National League membership, fell down the steps in his excitement. Sympathy was in short supply.
"You never used to get to the ground that quickly, Mahon," ventured Paul McGuinness, another former player. Derry City fans retain their wit amid their worrying and fretting. They'll return tonight in expectation of the coronation once more, when victory over St Patrick's will take them to their Holy Grail.
More may come out of the woodwork. During two, days in Derry, whether talking to the receptionist in the Trinity Hotel, having lunch with the almost revered Derry Journal football writer Arthur Duffy in the Delacroix pub, or an evening pint with the still popular if unmercifully teased former player Pascal Vaudequin (aka Paddy Quinn) in Davinci's, everybody wants to talk about the game the night before or the one next Saturday.
Many were in attendance. Some haven't for two years or more, but saw the live televised broadcast of the entertaining 1-1 draw with Shelbourne last Saturday. I think I might come on Saturday," they say.
Derry City are on an upward curve again. It's always been a bit of a rollercoaster with them. That much is reinforced during a poignant, funny, sad, uplifting two hour discussion with Tony O'Doherty and Eamonn McCann - two members of the intelligentsia the next day.
O'Doherty was playing for Coleraine at the time Derry were forced to play in the town, banished from the Brandywell, in the months leading up to their exclusion from the Irish League in 1972. According to McCann, that was the low point.
"That period, when we were playing our home matches in Coleraine, was just so disheartening. I went to two of the matches and I just couldn't take it. About a couple of hundred attended those matches. It was really, really grim."
From 1972 to 1985, Derry City were in limbo. Cue to the Gang of Four: Terry Harkin, a former Northern Ireland international who played for Finn Harps, Wolves and Port Vale; Eamonn McLoughlin, originally with Derry and then Sunderland; O'Doherty, another Northern Ireland international who played for Finn Harps and Coleraine as well as Derry; and Mahon, goalkeeper with several other clubs including Athlone, Finn Harps and Dundalk.
One Sunday morning, in 1984, Harkin rushed to O'Doherty's house with Mahon in tow and woke him up. "We need to get into the League of Ireland," he said. O'Doherty dressed and "we jumped into the car on the spot and down to Ballybofey to meet Fran Fields (then president of the FAI), Lord have mercy on him".
"And we got Fran out of bed. I remember going in to Fran's bedroom, waking him and saying: Willie - everybody called him Willie - we need to get into the League of Ireland. Jeezus, you've got no chance. That was his opening remark."
An unstoppable momentum quickly built up. Money was raised on the back of a friendly with Shamrock Rovers. On foot of this came a massive meeting in the Burlington Hotel, attended by the Gang of Four, McCann, Eamonn Dunphy, PJ Mara, and David Andrews TD amongst others - the latter making an impassioned speech.
O'Doherty said that the advent of Derry City as a League of Ireland club would give the men folk a reprieve from work and familial duties. "Mr Chairman, that remark is way out of order," said Nell McCafferty, who, O'Doherty recalls, "ate my balls" for that one.
Once membership of the League was secured for the 1985-86 season, when the League was expanded by four clubs to accommodate two divisions, 20 per cent of Derry's support was female.
After Noel King succeeded Jimbo Crossan - as manager, he added to the playing staff, which already included England's Dennis Tueart, with the South African Owen Da Gama, Brazilian Nelson Da Silva (who died of a heart attack in his late 20s on a Brazilian beach) and the prolific Yugoslav striker Alex Krstic. It would be fair to say that the women weren't just there for the football.
McCann recalls Krstic walking into a cafe called the Beehive whereupon the woman behind the counter fainted and passed out. "Oh God, aye," says McCann. "My sister in law in her first season never missed an away match. No interest in soccer whatsoever, but she was just caught up in the whole thing."
Da Silva and his wife lived in Maryville Park close to the Brandywell. A few doors up, a local character called Dougsie McFeeley would come into their house, voluntarily clean up, cook breakfast, wake them up and, serve it to them.
The players weren't just footballers or even sex symbols, they were gods.
"I always thought it was a particularly nationalist thing as well," says McCann. "That's not to say that there was any political interest behind it all. It just happened like that. I think the idea of a team from the Bogside being excluded from Northern soccer for essentially sectarian reasons, then breaking away and finding a home in the south... the symbolism of that is just too obvious to be missed. That's not to say anybody worked it out like that, but there was always a sense of cocking a snook in going down to the south.
Puzzled gardai outside Dalymount Park were told "f** you and "f** Harry Cavan (Irish League president) too".
O'Doherty recalls stopping off on his way back from Derry's first away game in the League Cup against Monaghan and seeing a window less, big blue van pulling up behind. When the doors opened "there were about 30 people inside, sitting on a mattress with their take outs, unbeknown to me including my son, who was 14 at the time".
It couldn't last forever and, on the back of promotion in 1987, King and general manager Jim McLaughlin bitterly fell out, leading to King's departure. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs, it badly damaged the club," says O'Doherty, "because the whole showbiz thing was built around a concept of family and suddenly here's the two figure heads at war. Quite a lot of King people didn't come back for a long time:
"I remember Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein) walking his two dogs in the Brandywell and saying to me, `What the f*** is going on?' and I said Martin, you're not going to believe this, but it's a class war'. And it was a class war. Kinger was working class. He took the team up to the Creggan to train, to Shantallow, the Bog, (side). The team was taken to the community.
McLaughlin duly delivered with the 89 treble, but as the Journal's Arthur Duffy concedes, "too much came too soon".
McLaughlin was hounded out less than to seasons later, the victim of some vitriolic personal abuse. "It got to the stage where he couldn't go to the shops to buy a coke, and it hurt Jim," says McCann.
O'Doherty describes the appointment of former Linfield manager Roy Coyle as "a brave move by both the club and Roy Coyle". But there was residual resentment. The nationalist business community shunned the club. Sponsorship and results gradually suffered. O'Doherty reluctantly succeeded Coyle in the middle of the 1993-94 season and took them into the top six and the Cup final before giving way to Felix Healy during the 1994-95 season.
Healy and the new chairman since the middle of that season, successful 37 year old local businessman Paul Diamond, have worked in tandem to energise the club once more. Duffy bemoans the mis management and lack of continuity in the last decade, when the club spent more money than it had.
"It cost us £333,000 to run the club in the treble year. Now that's totally out of the question for a League of Ireland club. In only one year since did they make a profit, as far as I know. Watching it grow, then, suddenly watching boards leave, no continuity and then voluntary liquidation. Nightmare scenario. Thankfully, there are guardian angels like Paul Diamond out there.
What the club needed was a benign dictator. "The club has cut their cloth to suit, and that's where Diamond has to take so much praise. There are no directors' meetings any more. It's a one man show. He would never admit that, but it is a one man show."
Amid the cost cutting, Healy accepted that his full time job would be redefined as a part time one. Clearly not motivated by money, it shows his pride and commitment toward his home town club. Thanks to his loyalty, local players have blossomed, a much talked about young reserve team holding promise for the future.
What's more, Derry City are here to stay. Stories of City returning to the Irish League, amid supposed disaffection with the National League, resurface occasionally. "The Irish League is not a reality, and Derry sees their future in the League of Ireland," is the uniform response from Duffy, O'Doherty, McCann, et al. "The experience of Cliftonville and Donegal Celtic tells its own story. End of story," says McCann.
"Derry City will never go back to the Irish League," says Duffy. "We pride ourselves in that there's no police presence in the Brandywell. I think that's vital. You see a very limited police presence at other National League grounds. But in the Irish League, could you put your hand on your heart and safeguard 2,000 Linfield fans, arriving by train on the Waterside and making their way through the Bogside? You couldn't do that."
The mood in Derry nowadays is, according to O'Doherty, "very hard to describe - right at the minute."
"Confusion," says McCann.
"It was very bullish during the ceasefire," says Doherty. "This is a good times town. This is a very social town. Roy Coyly says he's never been in a town like this in his life. The weekend starts on a Monday and finishes the following Monday.
"With all the events coming up and the marching season coming up, the reality is that we all want, to concentrate on football but you can't ignore it. Eamonn's right, there's a bloody confusion. Are we taking a step forward or are we going backwards?"
With regard to the football of the sexy 80s, surprisingly, pragmatism generally reigns over poignancy. "I think it's better now," says McCann. "Other people may disagree, but I am much more content at the Brandywell than I was then. , There was always something unreal about it. There was a sense of escape and there was a glamour and such a carnival about it. But you knew you were walking a tightrope all the time and you knew it just couldn't go on. It wasn't really about football.
"I think there's much more a sense now that the people there are football people and they're Derry City people. I think myself that it is one of the most positive and worthwhile phenomena in the whole of Derry at the minute. That's the way I see it anyway and part of that is that there's no longer this incredible media focus and glamour about it. It is a genuine local football team with a big, big, local content. And I think this is the way it should be and I resent the comparative lack of support it now gets.
"The fact of the matter is that the most intelligent and informed conversations you can have about European soccer and about the English Premiership are at League of Ireland grounds. I mean, you know the notion that Dunphy and people come out with at times there's two classes of supporters; the people in the real world, who watch United and in the future we'll bring Wimbledon here; and then there's these rather sad anorak people who go to League of Ireland grounds. Now this is utterly untrue. At half time in the Brandywell, you'll hear a far better conversation about the United match than you're going to hear in the bar from people who were never at a match."
Only now then, after a dozen years, has Derry City at last found its bearings as a football club. Running a club rationally, nurturing strong local roots with a potentially brilliant manager and chairman at the helm.
Healy will not doubt have another story about life to tell his players this evening. If Peter Hutton becomes the first local player to lift the League trophy, it will be very symbolic. For this, too, in its own way, will be one for them to tell their children and their, grandchildren.
