There’s simply no place like home in GAA
Switching counties leads to mixed fortunes, but it’s impossible to recreate the passion
ONLY on Tuesday was the paperwork filed and the application processed. Davy Glennon of Mullagh and Galway officially became a Westmeath hurler.
It’s become a rare thing, the inter-county transfer. There are recent examples where it has paid off in spectacular style, such as Conor Cox using the parentage rule to leave behind a life of peeking into the Kerry team from the fringes to ignite a Roscommon attack and win the Connacht title in 2019.
The increasing demands of club action, and the widespread acceptance of a mid-career year off a panel, has left players more reluctant to take their talents to another county. Or it could be the EU money that has the motorways in fine shape.
Among the chief beneficiaries are major urban centres of population. Prior to the cultural phenomenon of Heffo’s Army in the 1970s, Dublin teams were always stiffened up by the presence of a few hardy country Garda or those that sought their fortune in the capital.
A county like Antrim has always done fairly well out of the arrangement. They can look to the likes of Aidan Short and Mark Mccrory from Armagh and Stephen Mulvenna of Derry.
No transfer worked out quite as well for them as that of Aidan Morris,however.
The Tyrone man had been playing for his native county since 1990. He had captained the county at minor and Under-21 level and was wing-back when they lost the 1994 Ulster senior final to Down.
Even in 1997 he was still a viable option for Danny Ball, but travelling up and down from his teaching job in Edmond Rice College in Glengormley to play for his club Newtownstewart became a drag.
He transferred to St John’s for the 1999 season and, before long, he was called into the county squad by Brian White.
“Moving to Antrim, it was a difficult enough call to make,” he explained.
“But I sat down and thought about it. I had loved playing county football, loved playing with my club, but county football was a fantastic thing to do. Any player who has a chance to play county football, you take it, grab it and go as far as you can with it.
“I came to the conclusion that it was too good to be missing out on and it turned out I enjoyed it.”
Morris went to Antrim a 30-year-old veteran, miles away from the young tearaway that made his way into the adult world through the Tyrone dressing room. His experiences also granted him an instant status.
“I think you are probably a bit more dispassionate about stuff when you are playing with a ‘second’ county,” he said.
“With Tyrone, I played very much with my heart. But with Antrim, you were able to take a wee step back and look at things. Brian and some of the senior players would have had conversations about the team and where we were going and you would have been able to look at it dispassionately.
“But I loved the Antrim set-up: the players, the management, everything.”
He joined a team that hadn’t won an Ulster Championship game in 18 years — and on his Championship debut they beat Down, Ulster finalists the previous year. On a day of thunder, lightning and a penalty save by Sean Mcgreevey, it stands as one of the finest days ever in Antrim football, almost capped off before letting Derry wriggle off the hook in the Ulster semi-final a few weeks later.
He continued for another couple of seasons but, when White left, the team broke up. In 2009, his adopted county met his native county in the Ulster final. He was in the crowd in Clones with the most bizarre emotions churning inside him.
“It was a very strange, peculiar feeling to be sitting there,” he said. “I ended up cheering for Antrim and applauding Tyrone because that’s your county and you cannot help yourself — shouting for both of them!”
While Morris’ experiences were all positive, that wasn’t the case with another son of Tyrone.
Aidan Mccarron had been part of Art Mccrory and Eugene Mckenna’s panel in 2002 and a star of the team that won the Ulster Under-21 Championship in 2003.
But consider those in the forward ranks ahead of him: Owen Mulligan, Enda Mcginley, Peter Canavan, Brian Mcguigan, Stephen O’neill and Brian Dooher.
In 2004, he was part of the winter panel but then cut for the league.
Two years later it was his own choice, setting out for America. When playing for New York in the Connacht Championship, he won the man of the match award — a rare thing indeed for an exile.
He picked up an Ulster medal in 2007 as a panellist but, come 2008, he couldn’t hack not playing and so signed with Dungannon Swifts to play Irish League soccer.
When Tyrone won the All-ireland later that year, he couldn’t cope with that either.
“At the time, I resented Mickey (Harte) and Tyrone for a long time. What happened with Kevin Cassidy and how he was able to park Donegal winning the All-ireland in 2012, when Tyrone won the All-ireland in 2008 I was a sick man,” he said.
“At the time I blamed Mickey Harte, but I wasn’t good enough to take the jersey off Owen Mulligan, Enda Mcginley, Brian Mcguigan or Brian Dooher.”
Such was his disenchantment, he stopped playing Gaelic football entirely and never went back to his club, Fintona Pearses.
Instead, work took him to Enniskillen. The local Gaels club secured his registration and he be
gan to show a bit of form, enough for Malachy O’rourke to call him into the Fermanagh panel.
“But that whole year with Fermanagh, all seven league games, Cavan in the Championship and Monaghan in the semi-final, Armagh in the backdoor, over the 10 games I was only available for selection for three because of injuries,” he explained.
“Hips, hamstrings, my body was just breaking down. From an early age I had been playing in Sigerson Cup or a Ryan Cup game on a Saturday morning before driving down the road to play for Omagh Town in the Irish League, and the next day playing with your club or county training.
“It was a combination of years of overload at a young age.
“And then I fell out of love with the game by the time I came to Enniskillen. More the reason why I signed, I knew I was going to be living in the area and maybe one day having a family in the area. I felt that the GAA was the best way to get to know people.
“From a life point of view, it was good. I am married to Annette,
I have a son, Oisín, now. But I was running from the fact I didn’t make it with Tyrone. I didn’t reach my potential.”
As a schoolboy, he had a friendship with Mickey Harte’s son Michael, and would regularly visit their house. On one occasion when Mickey was managing him as part of the Under-21s in 2002, he forgot to lift the handbrake on his car and it rolled down a hill, taking a fence with it. He laughs at the black humour of it now, feeling his card was marked that early.
The experience of Shay Fahy and Larry Tompkins, two exiles from Kildare who won All-irelands with Cork, is a rarity. For Seanie Johnston, leaving Cavan to hook up with Kildare under Kieran Mcgeeney made him the butt of a thousand jokes and led to a bizarre moment in 2012 when Mcgeeney put him on for the last few moments of a Round 2 qualifier, even though the game was long won.
The GAA is still about the sense of place. Recreating the magic is almost impossible.