Wave of emotion won’t knock Pete off stride
‘The prospect of meeting Down was always there’ ‘It is going to be much tougher than last year’
IT IS the kind of homecoming that Pete McGrath for an age could not even countenance. The veteran Fermanagh manager pulls into Newry tomorrow to take on his own in a routine McKenna Cup fixture, and while managers facing their native counties is old hat these days, McGrath’s values and sense of place is from another time.
After spending 14 seasons in charge of his native Down, he went through the bones of a decade out in the inter-county cold partly because he could not take on roles that might lead him into conflict with his own.
That is a rare principle to cling to in times where the traffic of manager flows freely and the main reason he will sleep well tonight is in the knowledge that in the greater scheme of things, tomorrow does not really matter.
‘I probably would not be looking forward to it as much if it was a National League or Championship game but it is McKenna Cup, which is a competition that people take seriously but no one loses any sleep over it at the same time,’ concedes McGrath.
‘For a long time I was turning down opportunities to manage other county teams because I was still teaching and because the thought of managing a team against Down did not appeal to me much. But when the Fermanagh job became available I said to myself this could be my last chance to manage at this level so I am going to take it.
‘The prospect of meeting Down was always there, but this is McKenna Cup and it is not going to worry me.
‘As far as I am concerned on Sunday they are the opposition and I am managing Fermanagh and I will be unemotional in that sense.’
All of that is true, but there is little doubt that Down football still tugs at the heart-strings of the Rostrevor native.
It could not be any other way, given how he shaped the county’s history, leading them to an All-Ireland minor title in 1987 — a team that would yield James McCartan and Conor Deegan, who would go on to become pivotal figures in the 1991 and ’94 teams that McGrath would lead to Sam Maguire glory.
The legacy of that success has manifested itself by providing the county team with a production line of managers — Paddy O’Rourke, Ross Carr, James McCartan and, now, Eamonn Burns have all been entrusted with taking the team back to where McGrath had led them.
Thus far, it has been beyond them with Burns citing recently that the expectations generated by the team he played on were out of line with the reality of their standing now.
While Down are a Division 1 team, the fact that they have not brought home an Ulster title since 1994 and were dumped emphatically out of the Championship by a Wexford team who will spend this spring in Division 4 is a reminder that they are hardly a top-eight one.
McGrath is convinced, though, that Down’s history is not the burden that some make it out to be.
‘Down managers from 1960s on were faced with that weight of expectation,’ he said.
‘Managers right through the ’70s and ’80s faced that because the expectations were that the glory days of the ’60s could be relived and should be relived.
‘Then it happened in the ’90s and what you have had since then is a repeat of that mentality.
‘People are looking for that golden age to return, be it by accident or design, be it through years of planning or it could just happen with a click of a finger.
‘That expectation is always there and part of your job as Down manager is dealing with that level of expectation.
‘That means that even when you are going through a lean time the feeling in Down is that on a given year it could still happen.
‘So that sense of expectation, adventure and optimism is still there even if the team might not appear to be as good as they should be.’
While that strain of self-belief in Down has been long diluted by failure, their sense of themselves is such that they can still make a dart from the pack to contend, as they managed in 2010 when reaching the final.
In that sense, it is a different world to the county where McGrath finds himself now where belief has to be nourished with the kind of care given to a flowering plant on a rock face.
Last year saw promotion to Division 1 followed up by a giddy run through the qualifiers to the All-Ireland quarter-finals, which has gifted them the kind of momentum to sustain belief.
The difference though is that while a couple of lost decades will not erode Down’s belief system, Fermanagh’s is in such a fragile state that just one bad spring could do the trick.
‘There is more self-confidence about Fermanagh; there is more belief there than there was 12 months ago,’ suggests McGrath.
‘Obviously the football public have got raised expectations for the team in 2016 but they do realise that we are playing in Division 2 and it is going to be much tougher and demanding than Division 3 was last year.
‘I think a solid League campaign where you win more than you lose would be important for our mindset, for our confidence and selfbelief going forward in the Championship.’
This represents his third and, as it stands, final year with Fermanagh, and after the last 12 months his currency as a manager enjoys strong credibility in the market.
There is unlikely to be any vacancy in Down for a while, but then that also appeared to be the case when Jim McCorry was appointed last year, when gaining promotion to Division 1 could not even secure him the united support of the county board’s executive.
McGrath’s passion for Down needs little stoking — he expressed an interest in 2009 prior to McCartan taking over — and while it remains a long-shot, he will not rule out the prospect of a different homecoming down the line.
‘At the end of it all, I was always going to come back and manage Fermanagh for a third year, I was more or less committed to that so I did not give the Down job any consideration but who knows what the future will hold.’