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IT WAS as if nothing had changed. Two weeks ago, playing for St Gall's against Monaghan champions Clontibret, it was all still there – the craft, skill and swagger. By game's end, Rory Gallagher trotted off the field with 2-3 to his name, all but one point coming from play. It was the kind of tally that a lot of teams in Ulster would settle for scoring, but then this was Gallagher and Monaghan football were well familiar with the kind of damage he could inflict.
Seven years earlier the same player took the county team for 3-9, the highest return ever registered by an individual player in the Ulster championship. He was an All Star nomination that year, his second time in three seasons earning such recognition, and the outstanding player on the Sligo IT team that had won the Sigerson Cup. At 24, he seemed set to terrorise intercounty defences, including Monaghan's, for years.
Instead he would never complete a single championship game over the next seven years, exiled to the intercounty wilderness.
In some ways it was a self-imposed exile but in many ways it was not. That same 2002 season that Gallagher was at the height of his powers, he was torn by two observations. Fermanagh had the talent and potential to challenge the Armaghs and Tyrones for Ulster titles and win big games in Croke Park. What they did not have was the support structure their northern rivals enjoyed. The night before their league win over Mayo, the players had a meeting in which they seriously contemplated going on strike over not receiving mileage expenses.
Within a fortnight of racking up 3-9 against Monaghan he felt his hamstring pull in a challenge game. He notified the team's management and medical set-up, hoping they would get him the best rehab available so he could be fit for the Ulster semi-final against Armagh, but he claims nothing was put in place and that he was told he would be fine. "Then before we went out I was told by the physio I'd better not sprint full out or I'd tear my hamstring. I tore it three minutes into that game.
"Our next game then was against Westmeath in Mullingar in the qualifiers, and in fairness to [team manager] Dom [Corrigan], he had us playing with a four-man forward line and getting men back behind the ball long before it was fashionable. We beat them 0-14 to 0-7, when only the year before they'd reached the All Ireland quarter-finals. So it looked like we were back on track when next thing we drew Kerry and the management team decided on the eve of the game to bring Tommy Carr in to give us a team talk on 'how to beat Kerry'.
"We went and played Kerry straight up man-to-man and within five minutes Gooch Cooper had scored a goal and set up another and we were destroyed. It was crazy. No disrespect to Tommy Carr but he had no experience of Fermanagh football. Dublin might have shook Kerry the year before playing orthodox man-to-man – without actually beating them – but we weren't Dublin, we were Fermanagh."
There is no hint of bitterness about Gallagher when he speaks; more a striking, assured candidness. He makes the point that Corrigan was pivotal in his role as a coach at St Michael's, Enniskillen, in producing so many of the good players that fuelled Gallagher's belief that Fermanagh could win Ulster titles. And when he looks back, he could have perhaps have been a tad more diplomatic himself in demanding better standards of the board and management. But that didn't change the bottom line. He felt the county board weren't geared for success and that Corrigan's training lacked the competitiveness and intensity that Pat King and John Maughan's set-up entailed. That same year McHugh lauded Gallagher as "an exceptionally hard trainer who demands the highest standards". In Gallagher's eyes, Corrigan didn't meet them and so he withdrew his own services.
Fermanagh went on to enjoy the best two seasons in their history, reaching the All Ireland quarter-final under Corrigan in 2003 and then going one better under his successor, Charlie Mulgrew, in 2004. In the meantime Gallagher was stationed in Dublin, playing the best club football of his career. In the winter of 2003 he inspired St Brigid's to a Leinster club title, prompting speculation he would be called up to the Dublin set-up. Like Mulgrew though, Tommy Lyons never picked up the phone.
Whenever Brigid's weren't playing, he'd go along to Fermanagh games. Often he'd get volleys of abuse, usually from supporters with a few drinks in them, sometimes even from well-known figures in the Supporters' Club, but that didn't perturb Gallagher. He'd got abuse when he played for the county as well, and that didn't dilute his love for his county and the dream of winning an Ulster. At the end of that 2004 adventure, he phoned Mulgrew, asking if he could try out for the team.
His request was granted and the following spring he would finish as the team's leading scorer in the league. Even when the team lost a Division Two semi-final to Meath, Gallagher kicked seven points. Come the team's first round clash with Armagh though Gallagher found himself on the bench.
"Something very strange happened 15 minutes into that game against Meath. I'd just kicked my second point from play from centre forward when next thing I was moved into full-forward and Stephen Maguire was moved out to centre-forward. Now, Stephen was a brilliant full-forward but never a centre-forward. Still, I said nothing, kept the head down, trained hard, certainly didn't do anything untoward. I didn't think for a moment I wouldn't be starting against Armagh.
"One night then the week of the game Charlie pulled myself and Ryan Keenan aside and told us we wouldn't be starting. He said to me, 'Armagh have a fear of Stephen Maguire and that's why he's full-forward.' That was fine but I couldn't believe he couldn't play me somewhere else and I basically blanked him. But later that night I got my head around it, phoned Charlie and said in a nice manner that while I was disappointed, I'd be ready to come on if he needed me."
Gallagher would indeed come on and score a goal, enough to start the next day against Down, but midway through that second half he was whipped off when he was playing no worse than most of the team. After the game and the team's exit from the championship, Gallagher let Mulgrew and his selectors have it outside the dressing room in Newry.
"I didn't hold back. I told them that our preparation was a joke, in terms of training, discipline, analysing opposition. I didn't rate his man management either. If he didn't like my style of play, fair enough, tell me – I'm a big boy – instead of making up a bullshit excuse."
It could well have been that Mulgrew had a fear or loathing for big names just as he had, to his credit, a capacity to hone unknowns into big names. Whatever, Gallagher knew they could no longer work together and sat out 2006 in the hope he'd come back later under new management. After a decent '06 season, however, Mulgrew was signed up to a three-year extension in Fermanagh, so if he was to play intercounty football ever again, Gallagher accepted an overture to play from Cavan. He would break a bone in his hand the week before their first Ulster championship game and though he would come on in the qualifier against Mayo and score a goal, it would be his first and last championship game with Fermanagh's greatest rivals. "It was great working with Paul Grimley and the boys," he says, "but through no fault of anyone it was very hard to fit in."
When Mulgrew passed on the final two years of his extension, Gallagher contacted new manager Malachy O'Rourke but O'Rourke passed on Gallagher's services, feeling the player had too much baggage. At the start of 2008 Gallagher was invited to try out for the McKenna Cup panel and while several Fermanagh players felt he impressed at those trials, he didn't make the cut, as management wondered if he'd have the pace and industry for the team's high-octane game. He spent another summer as an analyst with the BBC and Gaelic Life but his form and Fermanagh's recurring free-taking problems meant when O'Rourke called up 40 players for a recent team meeting, Gallagher was there. When St Gall's adventure winds up, Gallagher intends to don the green and white again, and hopefully start his first championship game in eight long years.
"When I started off playing with Fermanagh Malachy was still playing," says Gallagher. "I know that when he makes a decision, it's only for what's best for Fermanagh football."
The same sentiments drive Gallagher. He first played minor football for the county at just 14 years of age, as a corner-back on one Oisín McConville. He was 17 when he first played with the seniors. And he still feels he has something to offer it, even though he's now into his 30s.
"I don't feel as I've lost anything I've ever had. No doubt it's a quicker game than it was in 2002 but there's still room for all type of players. One of my big regrets was that around '06, '07 I became too focused on what I wasn't great at and forgot to concentrate on what I was good at. Not every player can be a Paul Galvin. Like coaches I became obsessed with getting in hits and tried to change my game when I now realise if I see a shot is on, take it."
He's taken this opportunity with Gall's. Work as a personnel man in the construction business brought him up to Belfast at the start of the year, but now he's in Killybegs, running a Supervalu shop with his wife Nicola, who he married in September. It's a five-hour round-trip to train with Gall's and he doesn't know how long more he'll keep making that, but he says for a city club they're as close a group as he's ever met. He appreciates that and that they've given him a platform.
His talent deserves that kind of stage, just as Fermanagh deserves his talent too.
kshannon@tribune.ie
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