Neighbours, brothers and Conor Glass: How Glen went from soft townies to All-Ireland favourites

For so much of Glen’s history, a weekend like this was unimaginable. And not in the pipe-dream, far-off-in-the-mists, keep-going-and-you-never-know kind of way. Just literally inconceivable, even to the wildest of minds. In 2021, the club was 73 years old and had never won a Derry championship. Now look at them, heading to Croke Park as unbackable favourites in an All-Ireland final.

In Maghera, football is the native language. For decades, it made it all the harder to take that the locals were so thick-tongued when they spoke it. The town’s secondary school, St Patrick’s College, sits second on the MacRory Cup roll of honour and third on the Hogan Cup, churning out Derry footballers by the pallet-load since the 1960s. It readied any amount of Derry senior champions too, for clubs other than the one around the road.

When you sit in the Watty Grahams clubhouse, you’re about three-and-a-half miles away from Slaughtneil GAC in one direction and maybe a click less to Lavey in the other. Bellaghy is a brisk five-mile jog. Dungiven is positively foreign, a marathon 10 miles up the Glenshane Road.

Between those four clubs alone, you can account for more than half of the county championships since Glen’s foundation in 1948. On a national scale, Derry clubs have won three All-Ireland titles in the competition’s history. Lavey and Bellaghy have one apiece and the other belongs to Ballinderry, all of 16 miles away.

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Can you imagine? The scour of it. The grim, psychotropic grind. The ominous sense above all that there was no escape, that the cheek-by-jowl squish of south Derry football never allowed that option. Whether the deciders were held in Celtic Park or Ballinascreen or, worse, occasionally hosted by Glen themselves, the celebrations always came home through Maghera on county final night. Take that and party.

“The competition was always huge,” says Paddy Heaney, the former Irish News sportswriter and Glen clubman. “We did underachieve to a certain extent, definitely. But Malachy O’Rourke often uses the Nelson Mandela philosophy of ubuntu – ‘I am because you are’. He has quoted it in speeches over the years. It’s the power of the pack, the idea that you look around you and the people you see raise you up.

“In that respect, we owe everything to Slaughtneil. They were our country cousins. They were always lower down than us in the pecking order. When I was playing underage for Glen, I never played one game against Slaughtneil because they would always have been in the B division. Even though they were only up the road, we just would never have come across them.

“But then, out of nowhere, they brought through a good minor team and they won a senior county title in 2004. And that was a real slap in the face to Glen. Because if Bellaghy or Lavey or Dungiven or Ballinderry won a county title, you were just, ‘Okay, that’s what they do.’ But for the likes of Slaughtneil to come out of absolutely nowhere, that was something else.”

Coveting thy neighbour’s ox is only the first step along the road, all the same. In the 20 years since, so many other pieces needed to be cut out and planed and shaped before they could fall into place. The first, the most crucial, was the people.

Maghera is a town. It is not overly big – the official population was recorded in the 2021 census as 4,235, making it the sixth biggest in Derry – but it is a town nonetheless. And a townie town at that. With all the good and all the bad that implies.

“It was definitely a hurdle,” says Heaney. “Definitely a huge obstacle. Connor Carville referred to it when we won Ulster – he said that Glen were viewed as the soft townies. That’s an age-old thing in Derry football.

“The country fellas were viewed as tougher, stronger, tighter. The advantage of the town was that you had the bigger population, the drawback was that the bonds weren’t as tight. Even something as simple as a country team would have three or four sets of brothers and cousins. Tighter bonds, tighter communities.”

How do you find your way around something as bone deep as that? A little by accident, a little by design, a lot by life just happening as it does. There is an estate on the Glen Road out of town called Beaver Crescent that will provide about half of tomorrow’s team. The two Mulhollands, the three Dohertys and Ryan Dougan all grew up there, all within about 300 metres of each other. The Bradleys lived around the corner in Crescent Drive.

Nobody planned it like that. Nobody could have. But over the years, as the families holidayed together in Donegal and the boys got thicker with each other, the raw materials for a brotherhood landed down to Watty Grahams half-meshed together already. It was up to the club to do the rest.

Enter Enda Gormley. You remember Enda Gormley. Double All Star winner, corner forward on the immortal 1993 team that won Derry’s only All-Ireland, that glorious left foot, that right knee forever bandaged. Gormley played for Glen until he was 40 but had long since moved to Belfast and could not do the miles any more, eventually getting a transfer so he could play out his final few years of junior football with Bredagh in Co Down.

He got back involved with Glen in 2008, taking their under-14 team. “Back involved” is underselling it though. He was intense, unrelenting, demanding. He was a spiritual guide, an ethical touchstone, driving back from Belfast four nights a week to make men of them.

Gormley told them from early on that they would be the first players from Glen to win a senior Derry title. The club had one minor championship to its name; Gormley’s team went through 2011 unbeaten and added a second. Between then and 2014, Glen put together a historic four-in-a-row of minor titles. That had never been done before in Derry. Twelve of that original under-14 team are still in the senior squad.

So they had the raw materials. The townie thing gradually became less of a thing. They rattled up sustained success at underage. They filtered into the senior team and got as far as the Derry semi-final stage in 2017 and 2018 but did not land a glove either time. They made the final in 2019, the first in their history, but lost by a point to Magherafelt. They were close. They were getting closer. But they weren’t there.

And then, in October 2020, Conor Glass came home from Australia.

“The thing with Conor is that he has always known the responsibility that goes with how good he is,” says Heaney, who was involved with Glass’s age group as they went up. “Even when he was 16, he knew. I didn’t coach him, even though I coached him. He was fully committed, he knew what a game needed and what he needed to do to get better.

“There was a game one time where he caught a kick-out and broke through into space and tried to kick the ball over the bar with his left foot. It dropped short and I gave out to him as he came back out to the middle and told him he had time to take it on to his right,” Heaney recalls.

“A couple of minutes later, he caught another kick-out and broke through again but this time he kept running and buried into the net, again with his left foot. And there was no looking over at me as if to say, ‘See?’ Nothing like that. He just wanted to get better.”

In an Irish News piece before the Kilmacud semi-final, Cahair O’Kane presented a jaw-dropping stat on Glass. Since he arrived back into the country in October 2020, Glen and Derry have had 71 games. Glass has played 68. (Actually, make that 69 out of 72 since the semi-final).

Glen had no Derry title when he came home. Now they have three. They had no Ulster title. Now they have two. Derry hadn’t won Ulster since 1998. Now they’ve won two in a row. They’ve won as many All Stars in the past two seasons as they had in the previous 25. Conor Glass didn’t do all of that but it’s difficult to imagine any of it happening without him.

Glass is their Eiffel, their Taj. He has a coffee shop in the middle of Maghera, which he opened around the time of last year’s county final. He has combined Glen’s run through Ulster and beyond with his accountancy exams. He is the last off the pitch after every game, the focus of the biggest selfie scramble, the one who always gets cattle-prodded in front of the media.

Last summer, when the Rory Gallagher allegations threatened to turn the Ulster final into one of the worst weeks Derry football had experienced for a while, Glass was the 25-year-old captain keeping everything on the straight and narrow. When it was over and Derry had won the penalty shoot-out – Glass scored his, by the by – he was the one who had to go up and make a speech from the steps in Clones.

The RTÉ broadcast cut away, possibly fearful that he would say something about Gallagher who was still, at least for a few more days, officially the Derry manager. If they were worried, they needn’t have been. Glass thanked everybody who had helped them and left it at that. Down by the dressingroom afterwards, he was asked if it was a hard speech to give. He shrugged and said: “You just say what you feel.”

In Glen, Glass is the heartbeat of everything. The egg that binds the whole recipe together. He has been immense through this campaign, outside of Derry especially. He could have won last year’s final but his shot at the death was saved. Most players don’t get the chance to make it right – and almost never this quickly.

[ Glass left shattered after last year’s All-Ireland defeat but Glens determined to put that right ]

But that has been the way of it for the Watty Grahams across these past few years. Defeat in the Derry final in 2019, amends made in 2021 (and every year since). Ulster semi-final defeat to Kilcoo in 2021, Ulster final win over Kilcoo in 2022. All-Ireland final defeat to Kilmacud in 2022, All-Ireland semi-final win over Kilmacud in 2023. One more piece left to click into place.

Nobody in Maghera could have imagined what it would be like if Glen could only do it, if they could only get a sniff of the big time. Whatever happens, this team has freed them from ever again having to wonder.

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