In another life Enda Smith would be a soccer player now. His early teens were spent blackening the road up and down from Boyle in Roscommon to play and train for Belvedere in Dublin. He’d get picked up from school on a Wednesday afternoon to be on the astro in Coolock for 6.30pm. Then back up again on a Friday night to stay with his host family the Hylands, ready for a game in Fairview Park on Saturday morning.
He did it for two years, through sixth class and first year. Played in good teams too. Darragh Lenihan has gone on to be a regular in the Ireland squad and captained Blackburn this season. Pierce Sweeney was an ever-present in the Exeter City side that just got promoted to League one. Plenty went on to good League of Ireland careers too, all just from one batch of under-12s.
Smith was a striker on those teams. “Hanging on the shoulder of the last man, ball over the top, get in and finish,” as he puts it. “Soccer was my first love, I’d say. And even at that age it was a whole different level. Like, we’d spend half an hour on kick-outs at under-12 – we’re only doing that at intercounty football in the last few years! They make it real for you too – nutrition plans and all that, and even a little signing ceremony when you join up.
“It was an eye-opener, it was great. It meant that in later life you were never really shocked by anything new. Even travelling up and down to Dublin, when I had to do it in DCU and even these days, it’s something that I’ve had a flavour of since I was 11 or 12. `This is going to be a two-hour trek down the road, get used to it’.”
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In the end Gaelic football managed to fit a lasso around him and make good on its haul. He pulled the plug on the Belvo years when he was 13 and kept the soccer on locally for Boyle Celtic. But with his older brothers Cian and Donie tasting GAA success at underage level with Roscommon, once the county minors came calling at 15, soccer became a winter thing. He’ll still indulge from time to time when the chance arises but intercounty swallows everything whole.
Smith was still just 18 when he made his senior debut in 2013, coming off the bench in a league game against Monaghan in Division Three. This is his tenth season and his sixth Connacht final, including one replay. If the Rossies beat Galway he and a handful of his compadres will be winning their third Connacht medals. You have to go back 40 years for the last group of Roscommon footballers to do that.
You could say they were destined for it but that would make it sound inevitable when it was anything but. They won back-to-back minor titles in the province 2011 and 2012 and parlayed them into under-21 wins in 2012, 2014 and 2015. The core of the senior team now is in and around 26 to 28. Seems like an obvious case of the conveyer belt doing its job.
Doesn’t work like that, of course. Like all counties outside the top three or four, Roscommon commonly lose around eight players every winter. They’re constantly starting again – Smith says they’re down 10 of last year’s panel. They’ve been able to hang on to just enough through the years to stay competitive but right up until the middle of the 2010s, the county was tapping its watch and wondering when they were going to properly arrive. Nothing was guaranteed.
“The end of 2016 was awful,” Smith says. “We lost to Galway in a replay in the Connacht final; we got a clipping off them down in Castlebar. And then Clare beat us in the qualifiers six days later in Salthill. That was a low, low point. I remember after that thinking, ‘what is this about?’ I was 21, going on 22 – still young enough, like, but I was just going, ‘this can’t be what it’s about’.”
In the Roscommon camp Smith is popular with everyone. Quiet, easy-going, smart, determined. Probably the best kick-passer in the squad, definitely the best finisher. But back then he had one fairly glaring weakness – he had played four season of senior intercounty football but you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.
It wasn’t that he felt he was above doing gym sessions, it was more that he was never able to set aside enough time. Between the ages of 18 and 22 he played for Roscommon, for Boyle and for DCU. He played senior club and county, under-21 club and county, freshers, Sigerson, the whole lot. Every team he was on had a season that overlapped with another, and between all the coming and going there was always a game to play or a field session to do. His football was getting him through games but his ceiling was obvious.
Eventually a few things changed. He got too old for under-21 football so that took two teams out of the equation. Kevin McStay took sole charge of the Roscommon team and put it up to him about his physique, making it clear they needed more of him in every sense. And then, by a quirk of the calendar, they ended up with 11 weeks between the end of the 2017 league and the start of the championship.
“We built ourselves up quietly. Nobody was really talking about us. And I just gave myself more time to prepare properly for games. That might not even be gym, it might be mental preparation, rest, lots of things. I was living with Niall Murphy from Sligo that year and he was so professional in everything he did and that rubbed off on me too. Nothing was expected from us but we trained away loads. When it came around we were ready and it took off.”
And how. They stormed to a Connacht title and pushed peak Mayo to a replay in the All-Ireland quarter-final. Smith ended the year with an All Star nomination, the only one of his career so far. Even now it’s still the summer that means most to him.
“Two weeks out from that Connacht final we were full sure we’d win. That never happens. I would be the complete opposite of that normally. I would be one of those players who is far more in fear of losing. But we were really confident. The satisfaction and joy we got out of that eclipsed winning it two years later. Even though I was captain in 2019, that 2017 win is the one you’d get most pleasure out of.”
Ever since Roscommon have hung in there and hung around. In the league they’re the ultimate yo-yo team, bouncing up and down between the top two divisions. Smith has four Division Two medals. “It has to be a record of some sort,” he laughs.
“In fairness we never get too down about being relegated because I think we kind of know that we’re always going to be in the mix to go back up. When there’s a turnover of players every winter it affects a league campaign, especially in Division One. But you get over it quickly, you absorb it, and you go again. There’s no point dwelling on relegation. We know we can usually beat the teams we need to to get back up.”
It’s an odd kind of twilight that Roscommon exist in. They’re always perfectly capable of beating either Mayo or Galway – and sometimes both – in Connacht. But there’s rarely a lot of juice in them beyond that.
The last Roscommon player to win an All Star was Frankie Grehan in 2001. In the two decades since 20 different counties have had their players honoured but the Rossies aren’t among them despite three Connacht titles in that time. They get neither the default respect accorded to the teams above them nor the river of fairytale kudos that sploshes around when a team below them gets on a run. They are who they are – thereabouts without ever really being there.
“We are typically cyclical,” Smith says. “Traditionally Roscommon tend to have a good team once a decade or so. The team of the early ‘80s was the exception. So three Connacht medals would be a nice nugget to have. It doesn’t happen often.”
Only occasionally. And only to the best of them.
