CONNACHT SFC SEMI-FINAL: Keith Duggan on the Sligo enigma, summed up, according to Michael McNamara, by their status tomorrow as champions as well as underdogs
SOME TRADITIONS are not for breaking. In the busy dining room of a Sligo hotel, an elderly lady who has lunched at a particular table for so long that it is customarily reserved in her honour gets straight to the point and politely shoos its occupants, pointing a long, queenly finger at the reserved sign half hidden by salt and pepper cellars.
It does not matter to her that one of the interlopers last summer kicked the point that landed the county its first Connacht senior football championship in 33 years. Nor does she appear to know or care that he is an ex-Sligo Rovers man. Lunch etiquette is sacred. Mumbling apologies, we scurry to another table and sigh in relief. It felt like a close escape.
Michael McNamara grins when asked if, after all of last year's heroics, he has no pull in this town. "It would seem not," he confesses.
But then, it is back to square one for Sligo.
Tomorrow, they must enter the expectant cauldron of McHale Park in order to defend the title they won in such dramatic circumstances last July.
They face what may well prove to be a resurgent Mayo team, a vocal green-and-red support and, of course, that huge wall of tradition that so many Sligo teams have failed to scale when faced with the two superpowers of West of Ireland football.
And if Sligo do lose tomorrow, then it's sayonara to the All-Ireland. Because of their demotion to Division Four of the NFL, they are among the counties who face the apartheid of not getting a second chance in the All-Ireland qualifiers. And, as usual, they are regarded as outsiders against Mayo.
"Underdogs and Connacht champions," acknowledges McNamara. "That has to be a first."
It is certainly unusual and it captures the essence of Sligo football, which has been a baffling story of triumph and inconsistency throughout this decade. In 2002, one year after disappearing against Galway in Markievicz Park, when they trailed by 0-14 to 0-0 at half-time, they embarked on a dazzling summer run that led to an All-Ireland quarter-final replay against Armagh, the eventual champions that September. No team pushed Armagh as close as Sligo.
And tomorrow, a year after again making it to the last eight of the All-Ireland series, their entire summer is riding on this match. It should not have to be so utterly do-or-die, but the Sligo default mechanism seems to tilt from one extreme to the other.
Things happen either dramatically or not at all.
McNamara has been around the Sligo panel for six years now and has already seen plenty of evidence of that.
Last year's Connacht final brought the best out of Sligo - they were bold and brave and, in the best sense, desperate to bring about an end to the chasm that has developed since the gang led by Mickey Kerins and Barnes Murphy won a surprise provincial title in 1975, several years before McNamara was even born.
Somewhat modestly, he describes his own role in that deliverance as almost accidental but agrees that the victory, when it happened, was hard to take in.
"It was surreal at the end. In terms of the point, I remember that Charlie Harrison had gone up and I just decided to do the same. Afterwards, Philip Greene said, 'What the hell were you doing up there anyhow?' And I'm not sure, to be honest.
"The boys were working the ball into a corner and they went to shoot, but there was good Galway cover. Mark Brehony gave it to me - a poor pass, actually, it was low at my feet. He reckons he had to pass it that way or he would have been blocked. And I just swung at it. I didn't even look at the posts because I knew where I was on the field.
"And I didn't realise that there was just a point in it then either. Running up the field, I got hit and I felt a spasm so I was off the pitch at the end. And it was surreal when the whistle went. I think I just sat there. Stunned probably."
Sligo's victory created the sense of a genuinely transcendent occasion that happens every so often in Gaelic games.
Inevitably, the journey back from Hyde Park was vivid and raucous and McNamara was taken aback by the fervour of the people waiting to greet then on the roadside, by the bonfires on the hills and the spontaneous outpouring of energy.
Through Gaelic football and his alternative sporting life as a centre back with Rovers, McNamara knows better than most the complexities of Sligo, whose teams have perhaps not been as confident as they might have been down the years. Soccer is probably the chief game within the town and football is the preserve of the country.
That night, however, the cultures collided - in a good way.
"You saw guys in town that night that wouldn't go up the road to see a game. It was a great night. Sligo is probably talked about as a soccer town. Now, plenty of people follow both, but there is a hardcore Rovers crowd and probably the same with the GAA.
"People have their loyalties - they would talk to you politely about the other without having any real interest. That night, I think the Rovers crew were probably happy for Sligo. Mind you, a few might have begrudged it a bit as well."
McNamara was with Rovers from the age of 19. An opportunity to visit Celtic for a summer trial ended when he tore a cruciate ligaments playing for Carraroe against Tubbercurry in a league match, a touch of bad luck that will always leave him slightly wistful for a lost opportunity.
In the following years, he managed to balance both sports, and even though he is frequently asked about the differences between playing for Rovers and playing for Sligo, he feels he can never fully articulate just how far apart those worlds are.
The Rovers dressingroom had guys from Hawaii, Bosnia and Bolivia; it was different. But the bottom line was a pay cheque.
The demands on GAA players have been well documented, but playing premier league had its pains as well. McNamara works in finance and often had to take holiday days for Friday night games in Cork or Waterford: "We would travel Thursday night and arrive back in Sligo at three or four the following morning after the game. Tough going."
He enjoyed his Rovers years, particularly the 2004 season, when the team gained promotion from Division One.
That had followed a particularly miserable experience with Sligo, who were eliminated in the first round of the qualifiers by Clare that year, a match that McNamara picks as an absolute low point in a black-and-white shirt.
"I was playing corner forward. I didn't like playing there, to put it mildly. But I was stuck in there and I was standing about and no ball was coming in at all. And I was wondering what it was all about.
"You train for eight months to build up a level of fitness that you don't even get to use. I got very disheartened at that time and, yeah, it was good to get back into the Rovers set-up."
He was forced to choose when, during the brief tenure of Rob McDonald, he had to elect to become a full-time professional or not play at all. There was no way he was abandoning his career for the uncertainty of the League of Ireland soccer and so he left in circumstances that still annoy him.
But it simplified his sporting life and, since then, he has become a central figure in the Sligo defence and attained a kind of sporting immortality by clipping that point. Winning that title meant more to the Sligo players than many can imagine.
Sometimes McNamara looks at the whole structure and tradition in Gaelic football and comes up with a fairly pessimistic, but accurate, conclusion.
"It's not that you feel you are on a hiding to nothing. But you ultimately are. That is true for most counties. Not many people are going to win an All-Ireland title. The reason you play is because of the unity of the squad and the craic that goes along with committing to something.
"I do admire these guys who go for 10 or 14 years. I won't be. I don't know how they do it. They are in every squad. Look at Darragh Ó Sé. The only difference is that he's winning things, building up a collection. And Sligo winning this year and having a chance this year, that keeps us going.
"If there was an open draw, it would probably all come down to the same top five or six teams. And then most players would be playing for absolutely nothing."
But tomorrow, Sligo take the field as champions in the West. They have earned that right. And maybe they are learning to shake off the old coat of inhibition that has dogged Sligo's football teams for too long.
In a way, Rovers and the Sligo Gaelic football team are not so different. Both have endured long, grim periods only to suddenly and flamboyantly fill the sky, as with the FAI cup victory of 1983 or the championship summer of 1975.
Michael McNamara has no memory of those distant celebrations, but he is at the heart of the latest chapter.
"I suppose after 35 years you get used to not expecting to win. And we have to try and change that. We did it last year, but we need to do it this year as well."
