IN the cocktail of emotions settling into Dromintee natives in the club’s An Speilg bar, they aren’t sure which flavour comes through strongest.
IN the cocktail of emotions settling into Dromintee natives in the club’s An Speilg bar, they aren’t sure which flavour comes through strongest.
They needed the last two points to draw with the county champions and had chances to win it but having started the night 6/1 underdogs and been seven down early in the second half, it feels a lot more good than bad.
If you look at it one way, it was a bigger picture kind of a game.
A scraggy, misty evening, hosting the county champions on the tightest pitch in Armagh, you want to see what these lads that don’t yet fill the sleeves of the jersey are made of.
A greasy tight pitch, a hard-hitting Madden side and an excellent referee in Padraig Hughes who let both teams thump away was the perfect recipe for Dromintee to go hiding if they wanted it. They didn’t.
Instead they matched the physicality. Gareth Kilgallon and Aaron McKay smashed everything in the air and the goal Cathal McKenna punched home just after the restart imbued them with confidence.
Dromintee had four starting championship debutants, all off the team that last year won the club’s first ever Armagh minor A title. The Ulster came behind it. They had won everything all the way up, including the All-Ireland Féile na nÓg at U15.
Dromintee have had good crops before. The oldest club in Armagh only came briefly into senior football at the very start of the 1990s before dropping out and returning with the team that reached four senior finals in five years (and a fifth in 2010) but couldn’t get over Crossmaglen.
But traditionally, it has been sporadic and fitful, a life of more troughs than peaks.
Tonight felt like a beginning.
Where it ends, there are never any guarantees. Life is already set to take Fergus Toale to Greece soon to begin training for life as a pilot. That’s the way it goes.
What there is for them now as a club is a framework.
Their minor boys go to Clan na Gael on Monday night for a quarter-final at the same time the minor girls are playing their final at Pearse Óg. Some families have players on both, a crazy scheduling situation.
The boys started the year as favourites to retain the minor title, though they haven’t caught fire yet this year.
Over the last few years, the girls teams have won every trophy bar one from U14 league to minor championship, the latter being the sole exception.
A lot of the team that won last year’s remain. They’re eligible for senior duty and capable of it but have been left to finish their underage in peace.
It all started with last year’s minors a decade ago, when they came into Go Games.
They built a foundation around several principles, of which the two key ones were aggressive competition for the ball and skills at speed.
Streaming underage teams by ability is an argument that there’s no right side of. Dromintee employ it because, for them, it gives players the best opportunity to adhere to the second principle of doing everything in training as fast as they possibly can.
A big part of it is two-sidedness and being able to play themselves out of tight spots under pressure by using the non-dominant hand or foot.
Every age group, boys and girls, does three sessions a week.
They aim to simply outwork the opposition.
A few years ago they sent a team to an U11 tournament at Na Fianna without a handful of their strongest players. They filled it up with players who were willing to scrap and dog and die to win.
Salthill beat them after extra-time in the final. In the end they lost, but what they learned about the value of those characteristics informed so much of what they’ve done since.
It’s not rocket science. The emphasis is purely on maintaining the standard as best as they can in every training session.
That every age group’s lead coach played inter-county football until at least U21, and most of them senior, has a two-fold effect.
One is that they have the capacity to carry out the quality of coaching that they’ve tried to instil as the norm.
The other is that their sons are all on the way. Diarmaid O’Rourke is the first to break through but most of them are still in the youth system, working their way up.
When they went to Crossmaglen for an U16 league game a few years ago, it dawned on them that it was the first time they hadn’t been daunted by that fixture. That team had never lost to Cross and finished their underage careers that way.
And in a funny way, the young boys on the pitch on Sunday evening were the ones with the experience. So many have played in massive games between an All-Ireland minor final with Armagh, a MacRory final they won with Abbey CBS, and those big games with the club.
Dromintee will not win every underage title. They’re pretty small in number, penned in at the foot of Slieve Gullion, Killeavy to one side, county Louth just over the hill.
Before hosting the county champions this weekend, they had 600 girls on their pitches taking part in one of the province’s most highly regarded blitzes. Next weekend is the turn of the boys.
They might never win a senior championship. None of us know what the future holds.
But in what they’re doing as a club to give themselves the best chance, there are very distinct and obvious parallels with what happened in Glen. And look where they ended up.
That required extreme patience. It took them a decade from their first Ulster minor to their first Derry senior.
It can be a very long and winding road. Madden know its hills well. Having added the league title to their trophy cabinet, they’ll have Darragh McMullen home on Wednesday and will only strengthen.
Dromintee held firm. It’s just a start – but a start it is.
