PETE McGRATH

‘If the opportunity ever did come again, I would be very keen’

IN a surreal world, Pete McGrath is still doing his best to maintain a handle on realism. In one sense, he has manfully kept Covid-19’s perverse tentacles from tampering with the life he knows and loves.

He has managed right through the lockdown to do his daily runs up Kilbroney’s forested mountain and go for dips in Carlingford Lough, a reminder that on his Rostrevor doorstep is an adventure park that has no closing time.

But when reality is this persistent, it can’t but come crashing through the door, no matter how well bolted it is.

As it did a couple of weeks ago, when he lost his long-time friend John Murphy.

He got to know him first when they played together on the Down team in the early 1970s, only a short time after John had been wing-forward on the 1968 team that beat Kerry in the All-Ireland final, and when McGrath started out as county manager in 1989, he knew instantly who he wanted by his side.

Pete and John spent 13 years together on the Down sideline, winning two All-Irelands, and when it finished in 2002, the friendship endured. Until now. While Covid did not take his friend’s life, it still managed to leave its deadly calling card.

‘John was only 72 and he was a fit fellow,’ explains McGrath.

‘He contracted cancer seven or eight months ago and the most unfortunate thing of all is that he was unable to get his chemotherapy because the pandemic kicked in and all those services were more or less put on hold.

‘John never really got the opportunity to fight it in a way that he should have,’ reveals McGrath.

Sadly, these times offer so little space for saying goodbye and for the rituals of grief and respect.

They made the best of it. The Down teams from 1991 and ’94 formed a guard of honour when John was removed from his Newry home and when the cortege passed Páirc Esler, the numbers that had congregated was a tribute to a man who had served the county well.

‘He was a very good man in terms of talking individually to players and he was a very shrewd judge of a footballer. He was very diplomatic and he could remain cool under the most severe circumstances,’ says McGrath.

‘He was a person that all the players respected highly, they really did and on top of all that, he was just great company to be in.

‘He brought his personality, his own experience of football, that diplomacy, ability to communicate; he brought all those skills into the management team. His contribution was vital. I stated that publicly before, because he played such a key role.

‘I spoke to him the day before he went into the hospice by phone and I visited him at home before that. The end came pretty quick.

‘He is a massive loss and the fact that there was no wake, there was not that opportunity to sympathise with the family. It was very, very sad and he will be missed severely by myself as a dear personal friend but, most obviously, by his family.

‘Thankfully, he didn’t linger and did not suffer. But it was just sad and he will be severely missed, because he was a unique man. He was a good man.’

The other reminder of these hard times inevitably comes in the void in McGrath’s life that used to be filled with football.

It has been a life-long obsession and age — he celebrated his 67th birthday on Wednesday — has not weaned him off his addiction.

After a chastening stint with Louth in 2018, he pulled the plug on his tenure after 12 months, he seized the opportunity to take charge of his home club Rostrevor and is loving it.

The local field gone quiet for the last few months has, he says, darkened the sky under which the community lives.

‘The ground has been effectively cut under their feet. It is a shock to the system. And that energy that surrounds a club team, which is also reflected on its community, is just not there now. It has just made it such a different landscape in so many ways, for so many people,’ says McGrath.

With the opening of club pitches at the end of this month and the GAA set to unveil its pathway for a resumption of activities this week, the sun is breaking through.

It is not in his nature to be pessimistic, but McGrath struggles to see how that pathway will lead to a full resumption of club — even though county boards around the country have drawn up provisional championship plans — or county games.

‘Someone said to me recently, it is like starting a new job without any job description and I think that is spot on.

‘I read that it costs Premiership clubs £10,000 to have their players tested twice each week. If that is what is required for them, then the safety of Gaelic footballers is every bit as important as that of Premiership players but the financial means to do that amount of testing and to put all the other measures in place, I just can’t see a way that can happen.

‘Even at county level if they come with some truncated season that will last for eight weeks, you will have 30 county players and you have to test them twice a week, then you can start counting the cost of testing those players.

‘You are also going to be looking at matches played behind closed doors, you have to have referees, linesman tested, managers, selectors, backroom teams and in the Premiership they are actually disinfecting the fields they are playing on and dressing rooms.