Paul Hegarty waited until the midnight hour. That was when his ire came tumbling down.
He was seven days into his caretaker stint at Derry City, tasked with steering them away from the relegation zone, when a defeat to Bray signalled trouble. Two days later they had a training match, X1 versus X1. “And it was awful, shocking quality.”
At that point Hegarty turned to his young assistant.
Ruaidhrí Higgins was 30-years-old at the time, yet to retire from playing, but eager to learn on this short-term assignment.
So he had no hesitation in saying yes when Hegarty called because years earlier, when Higgins was making his way as a player, it was the then Derry assistant he regularly turned to for therapy.
“Often when he’d be out of the team, I was like his agony aunt,” laughs Hegarty.
But on this September night in 2015, laughter was the furthest thing from Hegarty’s mind.
If the training game had been frustrating, Higgins’ opinion on it made him angrier.
“What did you think?” Hegarty had asked him.
“Not too bad,” Higgins replied.
There was silence … a first for anyone who knows Hegarty.
He drove out of Derry that night, crossed the border at Strabane, arriving at his home in Donegal just after 11.
A forester by trade, he’d a busy day ahead.
But sleep would have to wait.
“I remember the clock ticking past 12 when I phoned him,” says Hegarty.
“I ate him. ‘Don’t ever pull that on me again,’ I said to Ruaidhrí. “Don’t ever say something was good when it was bad. I don’t want you just to agree with me. That’s not why I brought you in. You’ve much more about you.”
Eight years on the rest of Irish football is making that same discovery.
He’s no longer the reserved young man shy to deliver an unedited opinion. “Oh he’s his own man now, alright,” says Hegarty.
A player who was good enough to be signed by Coventry City as a 14-year-old, who won Cups with Derry, a trophy at Bohs, a League with Dundalk, Higgins still managed to fly under the radar.
But he can’t do that anymore.
Few managerial jobs in Irish football are bigger than the Derry one, especially now they’re backed by a local benefactor and are possessors of one of the League’s biggest budgets.
Ordinarily that kind of responsibility isn’t handed to an untried manager.
But Higgins knows what he is doing. He cracks down hard if players are slacking but part of his skill is knowing to be selective with his words. “He’s more an arm-around-the-shoulder type,” says John Gill, who, along with Higgins, was part of Vinny Perth's management team the year Dundalk won the 2019 League.
“But he’s well able to give someone a kick up the hole, too.
“Like that season, we had a slow enough start. A game was lost in Sligo and I will never forget Ruaidhrí's speech in the dressing room afterwards. It was powerful. His words struck a chord. He and Vinny were a brilliant double-act.”
A year later the double act was broken up when Stephen Kenny called to offer Higgins an analytical role on the senior international team. “Ruaidhrí is really sharp, worth keeping an eye on,” Kenny told me.
Many people were already doing that. Coleraine approached him when he was Perth’s No2, Gill in the same room when that management job was offered.
“We were on a training camp,” Girl recalls, “and he was certainly considering it, no doubt about that.
“We always knew he’d just be passing through Dundalk; that management was where he was eventually heading to. But I remember saying, ‘what’s the rush here? You’re working with the best players in Ireland; you’d be giving that up to enter a part-time set-up. Trust me, part-time jobs will be there for you when you’re 40, 45. Take your time, you’ve more to learn’.”
Yet Gill, who has worked for some of the great League of Ireland clubs, Dundalk, Shamrock Rovers, St Pat’s, quickly discovered Higgins was an educator as well as a student.
“You’re always learning, even now at my age (59). That time with Vinny and Ruaidhrí, I picked up so much. Their opposition analysis and tactical sharpness during games was excellent. I rate the pair of them highly.”
Specifically, in relation to Higgins, both Gill and Hegarty referenced his football intellect, arguably the finest in the League.
Initially headhunted by Kenny to be Dundalk’s opposition analyst in 2017, he recommended Michael Duffy, Jamie McGrath and Niclas Vemmelund to the club.
It’s an overlooked skill, a manager’s eye. Yet the best ones made their name on the back of spotting an uncut gem, Brian Clough especially, Kenny in League of Ireland terms.
“Ruaidhrí has that quality, alright,” says Gills, “I mean look at Ryan Graydon. He picks him out of nowhere and look at the football he’s playing now at Derry.”
It’s not just talent-spotting that sets Higgins apart, though.
There’s his man-management.
This is Hegarty again: “He always had a rapport with any type of player. You’ve different characters in the dressing room, so I might think someone is a bollox but your best mate might consider him a cracking fella.
“Ruaidhrí, he has a way with everyone … no matter who they are.”
Here is Gill: “He would have learned a lot of that from Stephen (Kenny) and it’s a quality only a few people have.
“League winning players can be hard to manage. Their standards are high. They expect good information. They sniff a bullshitter a mile off. They respected Vinny and Ruaidhrí because they knew their stuff.”
“He always did,” says Roy O’Donovan of Higgins.
The former Cork City and Sunderland striker shared a dormitory with Higgins, Stephen Rice, Richard Brush and 16 others when they were teenage apprentices at Coventry City back in the early years of this century.
“It was a testing environment,” says O’Donovan, “20 competitive young lads, going through puberty, living in our work environment.
“Football is such an emotive game, if things aren’t going well for you, you are going to get a bit low. Add in the fact you are away from your mother’s nest for the first time, you aren’t a fully formed adult, you are 15 years old, in an unnatural environment, it could get difficult pretty tough place to be at times.”
Those formative experiences shaped Higgins. “It was sink or swim, you had to toughen up,” says O’Donovan. “The fact Ruaidhrí is still in the game, still making a living in it, doing so well as a young manager, well, it’s no surprise to me.
“He’d take me aside, and say, ‘look Roy, the best way for me to get the ball to you is if you start making outside to inside runs behind the centre backs’. He’d draw a picture in your head of what he wanted from you. And it made perfect sense. I knew exactly what he wanted.
“And this was unheard of for a 15 year old to be saying this to you, even in the professional game. For most of us, it took years of being coached before you’d even think you had an understanding of what was needed. Well, Ruaidhrí had that knowledge at 15.”
Gill noticed it even more when Higgins was in his 30s. “During games, he was superb,” says Gill, “so sharp at identifying a tactical opportunity. He’d remind me of Trevor Croly, Noel White in that regard.
"Often, when we’d be playing a team with a low block, he’d get to Michael (Duffy) and suggest a positional adjustment. ‘Try getting it deeper; try coming five yards infield,’ he’d say.
“Minutes later we’d score on the back of that change. Ah, he is good, very good.”
And now?
““The sky is the limit for him,” says Gill. “If he wins a league, prying eyes will come but I’d say it’d take a very good club, Championship or League One in England, to get him away. I think he'll stay at Derry for a good while.”
Save the last word for Hegarty: “He reminds me in a way of Stephen (Kenny).”
In League of Ireland terms, that’s the ultimate seal of approval.
READ NEXT:
Cheltenham Festival 2023 tips: Four horses we like the look of including a 33/1 shot
GAA legend's son dies tragically just a year after his own son's death
Sean O'Brien: Andy Farrell will be ruthless with World Cup picks as young stars can break through
Tony Mullins 'astounded' at Princess Zoe's price for Cheltenham
Get the latest sports headlines straight to your inbox by signing up for free email alerts
