On Gaelic Games:Despite Ulster football having fallen back in the last decade, the northern influence will still be felt before this year's All-Ireland is decided

SEVEN YEARS ago, as Armagh and Tyrone were getting ready for the All-Ireland final a sidebar story surfaced. The Queen’s University football club was drawing attention to the fact 13 of the players involved on the big day on either side were all graduates. Given the status of the university within the GAA it was probably unsurprising the only all-Ulster final to date would feature so many Queen’s alumni. Sunday however is a little different.

Down and Kildare have never met in the championship but this weekend they will contest the right to face Cork in next month’s final. This time the Queen’s influence will be just as strong with both the managers, as well as one of the Kildare selectors, having strong connections with the Belfast college.

As fate would have it James McCartan and Kieran McGeeney, both engineering students, played on the same teams at the start of the 1990s, losing and then winning Sigerson finals in 1992 and ’93. Contemporaries viewed them in much the same light as their public personas would suggest: Wee James, a cavalier corner forward and Geezer the focused, driven defender; an extrovert undergraduate and a single-minded habitué of the gymnasium.

But as with all received character sketches this omits the important aspects of their football personalities. Dessie Ryan, the vastly influential coach who worked for years with Queen’s and had charge of both of Sunday’s managers, makes no secret of the fact both had qualities that he saw as equipping them for management once their playing careers had ended. The extraordinary thing about those football careers is that although McCartan is just a year or so older than his opposite number this weekend, they seem to belong to different eras.

It’s 20 years since James McCartan won his first All Star and was a stand-out performer for Ireland in that year’s international rules series in Australia, the last before the series went into abeyance for eight years. McGeeney captained Ireland as recently as four years ago. McCartan sniped scores off the Aussies and one-liners off his room-mate, the not exactly-subdued Kerry icon Jack O’Shea – “What’s it like sharing with a legend, James?”, enquired one Australian television presenter. “Jacko doesn’t mind,” was the reply.

McGeeney brooked no such levity a decade later, flattening opponents with legitimate ferocity, most memorably when Pearse Stadium in Galway shook like Pompeii, as he planted Campbell Brown in the first Test in 2006. Twelve months after his rookie season McCartan was shooting three points from play as Down beat Meath in the All-Ireland final. Three years later he had a second medal and another All Star, playing slightly deeper for the county but still popping up for the only goal of the final against Dublin.

McGeeney’s career was more of a slow burn but their paths crossed at its start. His championship debut came on the day Down launched the first defence of their All-Ireland, in June 1992. It was a nightmare for the Armagh man, who started at corner back and finished with a broken leg 13 minutes into the match. I remember talking to McCartan after the match and being impressed by the presence of mind of someone who was a young, flamboyant attacker. Having got the only goal of the game he took it upon himself in the closing stages to drop back, reckoning that Armagh would need a goal to make inroads into what was a comfortable lead.

Dessie Ryan remembers an awful rain-swept afternoon in Limerick in the early 1990s when Queen’s were eking out a low-scoring, one-point win. With nearly everyone back defending into the teeth of a gale, McCartan soloed (literally, as the only attacker) at the home defence, toe-to-hand, toe-to-hand, drawing defenders. When he had almost an audience of them gathered he dropped the ball, kicked it along the ground and raced away before being submerged. “He did it three times,” according to Ryan, “which saved us vital minutes when we were really under pressure.”

For the most part though, the Queen’s coach forbade his prodigious forward to drop back too deep, fearing the sight of him in centrefield traffic would prove irresistible to some of the opposition’s heftier belligerents.

At times, taking matters into his hands didn’t work so well. Having endured a frustrating afternoon in the company of John Kilraine, as UCG upstaged a star-studded Queen’s in the 1992 Sigerson final, McCartan decided to seek retribution when time was nearly up and the team losing by three. Referee Séamus Prior duly showed him the line but in the last seconds awarded the Belfast side a penalty. “You take it,” said a distracted Dessie Ryan to wee James, now standing beside him. “I can’t. I’ve just been sent off.” The penalty was saved.

McGeeney wasn’t yet a national star like his Down team-mate but he was someone who never had to be told what to do, whose preparation for matches was even then thorough and whose performances were tactically perceptive.

If Dessie Ryan helped shape both of his protégés’ footballing sensibilities, another Queen’s old boy provides an equally strong link. Aidan O’Rourke played beside McGeeney in Armagh’s All-Ireland winning half-back line. He was McCartan’s assistant when Queen’s won the 2007 Sigerson Cup, finally achieving the goal after three successive, fruitless finals. This was the culmination of patient effort and team building. According to Seán O’Neill, the great Down footballer of the 1960s and godfather of the Queen’s club to whom he introduced Ryan once the latter returned from years as a fireman in New York, James “always improves teams”.

O’Rourke will however be assisting his old captain on the Kildare sideline on Sunday but remains close to McCartan.

The northern Sigerson influence is also strong on the Down backroom team. Paddy Tally, who was Mickey Harte’s trainer when Tyrone won the county’s first All-Ireland in 2003 and who played for St Mary’s against both McGeeney and McCartan in the 1994 final, is there. Also involved is former Ballinderry All-Ireland club and Donegal NFL winning manager Brian McIver, with whom Tally recently worked in managing St Mary’s.

McGeeney was more of a leadership figure in his playing days than his rival and played a key role in creating a tradition in Armagh whereas McCartan was born into it, his father Jim senior having been footballer of the year in both of Down’s All-Ireland winning years in 1960 and ’61.

With Ulster football having fallen back from the heydays of Armagh and Tyrone in the last decade, the northern influence will still nonetheless be felt before this year’s All-Ireland is decided.