Читать книгу The Boys of '93. Derry’s All-Ireland Kings онлайн

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When the Championship of 1994 arrives, the All-Ireland champions are drawn to face Down. ‘One of the best games of football ever played’, he declares after Derry have lost their crown. For the first time in my life at a football match, I’d sank to my hunkers and cried. ‘You never celebrate enough when you win the way you grieve when you lose’: words of his I’d taken little notice of until that sunny day in May. He is more philosophical, although strangely cowed. ‘We were spent; we’d got what we wanted. Down beat us in a brilliant game. It wasn’t as sore as when we’d lost before for we knew we’d be back again.’

‘I always get the dirty jobs’, the county chairman whined as he sacked him. Just three months after that stunning game and Coleman was out the door. Men who he thought were his brothers-in-arms were still in and he was out. He had learned a bitter lesson. ‘I’d have trusted them with my life.’

The coup was followed by a mutiny when his boys refused to play, wouldn’t pull on the red and white or wear the Oak Leaf on their chests. Rumours spread throughout the country, speculation galore: ‘He must have done something’, ‘Ye know Coleman’, ‘No smoke without fire’.