Chrissy McKaigue could see it in Rory Gallagher’s eyes. McKaigue’s “mental scarring” from Derry dressing rooms over almost a decade and a half was telling him different though.
The Slaughtneil man had heard enough “token gesture pieces,” but this wasn’t one of them.
Derry’s promotion campaign had just unraveled spectacularly on a rotten March afternoon at Owenbeg as Galway hit them for four goals. Where would they go from here?
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A meeting with All-Ireland champions Tyrone was just a matter of weeks away in an Ulster Championship they hadn’t won for 24 years - or taken a serious scalp in since the 2008 victory over Donegal? Some might even say the 2006 win over then All-Ireland champions Tyrone.
It’s only natural that some of the mental baggage over 14 years would weigh down on McKaigue, who turns 33 next week and made his Derry senior debut straight out of minor, back in 2008.
He admits there were major doubts after the Galway game, but the way Gallagher framed it that wintry afternoon set the tone for what was to follow. A remarkable run to an All-Ireland semi-final, with victories over Tyrone, Monaghan, Donegal and Clare followed.
McKaigue says, “to be blunt about it” that at the start of the year he didn’t expect to be in the last four of the Sam Magurie race.
“I suppose when you take the emotion out of it, as much as Galway deserved to win that game, and as good a side as they are and were on that day, the vast majority of their scores were given to them by us and our poor play.
“That's fair. I'm not saying we deserved to win the game. We didn't and we weren't going well enough to win the game at that particular time but yes there were doubts that night. We are all human at the end of the day.
"But, the one thing I will say now is, Rory Gallagher had no doubts. I can still vividly remember what he said to us in the changing rooms after Galway and I can still remember what he said to us on the Tuesday night after.
“He had no doubts. He said he didn't believe that that game had been us. He didn't believe we had anything to be worried about. We had had our bad day. He mentioned that our league preparation hadn't been great but also that it was outside our control. We were victims of our own success in having very strong clubs.
“He was unerring. I have been in plenty of changing rooms when managers have come in and said the token gesture piece. But you could hear in his voice, you could see in his eyes, he had no doubts.
"I'm not saying I totally believed him. I have a bit more mental scarring having been around Derry set-ups before and was thinking 'Here we go again.'
“That is just who he is and when someone of his intellect is saying things like that, even the most sceptical like me start to think, 'Well, maybe he knows more than me on this one.' In fairness, he has been proved correct. It was one bad day.”
Gallagher says he calls McKaigue ‘Christopher’ when the player is annoyed about something. Otherwise it’s Chrissy. Never Chris. He says the pair have similar natures in ways.
Chrissy or Christopher dipped his hand into local club management with Desertmartin during lockdown, a family connection taking him to the club. “Glutton for punishment that I am,” he says.
“The strange person that I am, believe it or not, it was almost like therapy to go away and coach. To go away and work with people, do a bit of managing because it is completely different.
"You get a flavour of it (management) from working with school teams but working with adults is a completely different scenario. I would share similar characteristics with Rory in the fact that we would be fanatical and obsessive about Gaelic football and trying to squeeze the margins to become the best we can be.
"You are always learning but no matter what I've learned on my own - and I know the players would say the same thing - what we have learned over the past two and a half years under Rory has been mind blowing - the level of detail. You only thought you knew football. You only thought you knew what a set up was.
“You only thought you knew what competing at the top level was in comparison to now. I suppose in many ways I would love to be Matthew Downey and Lachlan Murray's age again to go forward from that but no - Rory has to take huge plaudits for what he has done.
“Not just the success but the education and the culture that he has given me and the players has been unbelievable.”
McKaigue says for all the talk of squads being ‘player-driven’, you need a serious leader at the top of the tree, directing it all and setting the standards.
“The management now are very much the standard bearers,” he said. “As much as we talk about it being player driven, we talk about players having to take initiative.
“If you don't have the leadership from the management team and that ambition and ruthlessness that Rory and his backroom team have, it is very difficult to establish it within the playing group. It is not dissimilar to Slaughtneil.
“We were very player driven but it was Mickey Moran who unlocked it to the magnitude that it had the potential of. We can talk about players and other things but you need a leader and a very, very special one to unlock special things. I would hold Rory at this stage in the same sort of charisma and specialness as I would Mickey Moran.
"When you analyse the two of them, you see success is never too far away from either of them.”
McKaigue says Derry’s goal at the start of the year was to gain promotion to Division 1. But with preparations hit by Glen and Slaughtneil’s club runs, the former Sydney Swan says Derry underwent “a crash course preseason” between the League and Championship.
“It galvanised us,” he says. “I'll pull no punches. We had a fairly good league campaign by most people's standards. Five games out of seven won - one draw and one defeat.
"I think I'm right in saying we made history in that we finished with the highest points total ever not to get promoted with, so that was a bit of a downer but the reality is our league performances weren't great.
“Our pre-season wasn't great. It was scattered obviously because Glen had the Ulster club football championship and Slaughtneil were in the Ulster club hurling.
"When you look back on it now, no wonder why our league performances weren't great and we knew that. The management made no secret of it, the players, and there was a lot of frustration.
“We were still getting results in the league and, most times, relatively comfortably but we knew that there was going to come a day when we were going to come unstuck and Galway in Owenbeg was that day. It was a really bad day in terms of weather but I don't think it would have mattered because our performances prior to that game weren’t good enough.
"Once the league was over, it was sore but it was nearly like a reset button because we knew then we had a 30-day run in until we played Tyrone. We knew then we would get our house in order.”
McKaigue says Derry targeted the Tyrone game “like the biggest game in the world - because it was for us.”
He continued: "We are probably still benefiting from the preparation prior to the Championship. Our preparation is still very good but we needed that after how scattered our league preparations were and it just took on a life of its own after that. When we beat Tyrone, we knew we were capable of beating anybody.
“Monaghan came next. Donegal after that and Clare came after that. It's just been like the flick of a finger. We have a flavour of it now and we don't want to let it go.”
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