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

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‘Aye that’s how they wanted it.’ He’s gutted, ‘Saying nothing but letting all be said.’ This is a side I’ve never seen to him – bewildered and betrayed. His squat fingers splay in emphasis, the scar on his lip snarling into his cheek.

‘If they’d sacked me because I’d failed then, I’m a big boy, I could take it. But winning forty games from forty-seven, a National League and the All-Ireland, they couldn’t come out and say that; they left a cloud of suspicion hanging over me.’

He challenged them in the press, to their faces and through the GAA. The National League kicked off and still his boys refused to play. Then he blew the final whistle on it. He knew when he’d been beat. ‘If it was me, I’d go back’, he told them, ‘there’s no one person bigger than Derry.’ The officials won their battle but Derry lost the war, it’s twenty-five years later and they’ve never come close again.

A decade after his sacking and the phone rings on my office desk. My older sister Bernadette asks, ‘Can you come and sit with Eamonn?’