Derry ace Rogers digging in for fight
Rogers refuses to give up fight after panel exits hit Derry hard
THE toll that Slaughtneil’s run to the All-Ireland club final exacted on Derry this spring is easily counted. The price for losing half their defence in the McKaigue brothers, Chrissy and Karl, and Brendan Rogers, was to be found in the 11 goals they conceded in their opening five League games.
The dividend paid out on their return is also there to see; they shut-out Cork and Fermanagh in their last two games but even that last-round win over the latter was not enough to save them from relegation to Division 3.
It might, however, be enough to get them to believe that they have a fighting chance on Sunday when they take on Tyrone; a game in which Derry are assumed to be little other than 4/1 makeweights.
If those odds appear dismissive, they are also not without justification. Outside of relegation, in the close season 10 players opted out, for a variety of reasons, of the panel that lost to Tyrone by 11 points last summer, including pivotal figures such as Danny Heavron and Sean Leo McGoldrick.
While inter-county panels are transitional by nature, that is the kind of blood-letting that can drain the life out of a group and leave those behind wondering what is the point.
It can only have made it all the harder for Rogers, who spent the entire winter and spring chasing All-Ireland club glory on the double with the footballers and hurlers only to return to a chronically weakened county panel.
He is fatalistic about it, but is not without regrets.
‘You can have your reasons to play and not to play,’ he explains.
‘I wouldn’t be one to force somebody into doing something they don’t want to do. With family commitments and jobs and all those other things maybe it doesn’t suit some people.
‘It is a lot of commitment to make it to training three or four nights a week and maybe get your gym sessions done in between and recover and be fresh for the next week. If you don’t have the time to do that then maybe you’re best not wasting your own and other people’s time.
‘But it would be nice to see some of the guys who stepped away coming back because you’ll only become the best when you play with the best and against the best.
‘You can see both sides of the argument. But it’ll not dishearten me. I can only see it as an opportunity to step up and try and fill a void that has been left there,’ insists Rogers.
It could, of course, serve as a motivation for those left behind to show that they are getting on just fine, or even better than that, without their former colleagues.
But Rogers argues that it is best if this group just tries to do it for themselves. ‘There’s no point saying “we’ll do this or that” over the head of players who are missing. It’s more about pride in our own performances.
‘You can only make do with what you have. It’d be nice to do ourselves justice, because there is a performance in us that can beat most teams in Ireland. Hopefully we can make it count.’
They didn’t last year, beaten out the gate in front of their own inside 25 minutes, at which stage they had already conceded three goals and the memory of it is still raw for Rodgers.
‘We made two errors in five minutes and conceded two goals,’ Rogers recalls. ‘I was responsible for one of them. I gave away a ball and two kick-passes later it was in
the back of the net. ‘Hopefully we can minimize mistakes the next day and show we’re better than that.’ While Sunday’s fixture is still being peddled on the strength of a historically even-handed rivalry, the reality suggests otherwise.
Derry’s last significant win over Tyrone is 11 years and counting, and Rogers concedes that even their own supporters have accepted that this is now a rivalry in name only, but the players see it differently.
‘Probably for supporters it’s not as big but for players it’s every bit as competitive as it’s ever going to be,’ he says. ‘If you can’t get yourself prepared for a Derry-Tyrone game you’d nearly be better calling it a day.’