STAYING ON RIGHT PATH
O’Hagan ignoring criticisms
‘Any day you are winning in Ulster is a good day’
DARREN O’HAGAN laughs now at the innocence of it all. It was 2010 when he was thrown in at the deep end, still only in his first season as a county Under 21 player when he was called up by James McCartan.
He made his bow off the bench in a quarter-final win over Donegal in Ballybofey and would feature in five of the eight games in a summer that ended with Down coming up one-point shy of Cork in that year’s All-Ireland final.
Two years later, he was a regular; togging out in an Ulster final while day-dreaming of the great days which lay ahead.
‘I was thinking “jeez, this inter-county lark is going to be great, I am going to be playing in Ulster and All-Ireland finals every year” but the script does not be long changing.
‘There were good times. The journey was great. Even in 2012 when we got to an Ulster final, we had a great run because any day you are winning games in Ulster is a good day,’ he reminisces.
Down haven’t had a good day in four years since beating Derry in the 2013 quarter-final and the last two years have been positively dire.
The barrel was scraped back in February when they lost in Ennis to Clare, their 14th consecutive defeat in a barren period that covered the bones of two years.
‘We sat down after that, we talked among ourselves about what we needed to do and the bottom line was that we knew that we had to start winning a few matches.
‘Later that week we just met up because there was a twoweek break to the next League game so there was plenty of time and there was no panic.
‘Everyone just sat down calmly and we had a wee talk in wee groups and the focus was just on trying to get ourselves doing the right thing. It was about simple things really and at the end of the day it paid off.
‘We went out and gave a performance against Meath and then we followed that up by giving Derry a wee bit of a hammering and that probably set us going,’ suggests O’Hagan.
It did to the degree that they whittled down a three-point deficit to force a draw in injury time against Cork, which saw them avoid back-to-back relegations.
All’s well then that ends well, then?
It is far too early to suggest that. They have been strengthened to a point by the return of some key players; it was the Johnston brothers, Ryan and Jerome who were unavailable last year because of injury and who kicked the last three points against Cork.
The pressure is still on; not least on their manager Eamonn Burns, who, up until this March, had lost his first 11 games in charge.He was, along with the board which appointed him, the focus of heat in mid-spring, when former players John Clarke and Danny Hughes found their critical voice.
‘I try to ignore all that,’ insists Hagan.
‘I did not think that past players would talk like that but I suppose they are involved in the media now and they have to and that’s their job.
‘You just ignore it. I would not say that I feel sorry for Eamonn, he knew what he was coming into and, in fairness, thank God he has got us back on the right road.’
Staying on it, though, may prove to be problematic.
History is against them tomorrow; it is a quarter of a century since they last beat Armagh in the Championship, losing all of the half dozen games which they have played in the interim.
Yet, the market can barely separate them this time — Armagh the marginal favourites — although that should not be confused for flattery.
The challenge is evaluating which one — Armagh with a suspended manager and rooted in Division 3 have their own tale of woe to spin — has fallen on the harder times.
‘People will be saying that we are going in positive and Armagh are not.
‘We got a last minute free to stay up and they conceded a last minute goal to stay down.
‘It is heads or tails at the minute; you flip a coin and see who will win,’ reasons O’Hagan.
Given where they’ve come from, they’ll take those odds.