IT WOULDN’T MATTER WHAT anyone says about Derry and their summer slump, Emmett Bradley won’t be hearing it.
That’s what life can throw at you, when wife Laura and you become parents to your first-born, little Annie, just turned four months now.
Throw in a new job working for Microsoft in Belfast, and then no, he won’t be reading or listening or scrolling.
Rows at the training camp in Portugal? Unrest among the squad? Dissatisfaction with manager Mickey Harte? He doesn’t hear it, doesn’t see it.
“I’m lucky enough personally, it’s easy to say that, but I do. I’m that busy with the wee girl and a new job and whatnot. So outside of the set-up I don’t focus too much energy on what’s going on in terms of the media with regards to how Derry are going or GAA in general,” answers Bradley.
“I think it’s important to manage your energy in that regard because as a player group it doesn’t serve you particularly well in some ways.”
It’s been an odd time for Derry football.
Back on the last day of March, their National League final win over Dublin confirmed them as genuine big summer mammoths. Contenders. On the pitch, all was in harmony.
By then, plans had already gone past the idle chat stage of hosting the All-Ireland series launch in the county. The home of the All-Ireland club champions, Watty Graham’s Glen, seemed a perfect location.
Glen’s dignity in defeat to Kilmacud was reflected in the widespread goodwill when they eventually won the Andy Merrigan Cup against St Brigid’s of Roscommon a year later. It seemed fitting then that such a club should host this event.
The night before, the players gathered on the shores of Lough Beg for some atmospheric Summer Solstice-type pictures with the Sam Maguire Cup.
There are layers and layers of resonance here. Coming home from the 1976 All-Ireland semi-final defeat of Derry against Kerry, Colm McCartney was murdered by the Loyalist Glenanne gang after they set up a bogus check-point.
McCartney’s cousin, Seamus Heaney, penned a poem in his honour; The Strand at Lough Beg, which invokes;
‘The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.’
Bradley was one of the men who came down from the Glen and went into Derry duty. By virtue of Annie’s arrival, he got a little more latitude than his midfield partner Conor Glass. But before long he was in.
The accusation is that Derry are a tired team. Bradley would cite players in other counties playing Sigerson, or engaged in heavy pre-season training while the Glen players were doing top-of-the-ground work preparing for big games.
He – who scored a goal against Westmeath last weekend – isn’t buying it, in other words.
“It’s a topic that everyone is discussing across the GAA as a whole and I think it’s always going to be a topic of conversation in terms of breaks and off-season and things like that,” he says.
“I don’t know what the perfect solution for it is. At the end of the day if you were to ask me would you give up the club All-Ireland for a break, then absolutely not.”
Whatever about physical fatigue, he’s more willing to concede that focus and concentration is more likely to waver. It simply has to. The trick is not to let it happen at the wrong time.
The concession of four goals against Donegal has brought significant scarring, gouged even deeper with losses to Galway and Armagh.
“The dip in performance would suggest that. I know from my own experience that there’s certain games where it might look that way based on the momentum of the game,” he says.
“You take the Donegal game for example, the nature of the goals that went in, and just the way the game plays out it can make it look like a team is very off the boil in some way.
“That’s very common and it’s very difficult to see that if you’re observing the game as opposed to actually being in the middle of it. A big thing for us obviously was the concession of goals. That’s a huge area of the game and it swings the momentum in favour of the opposition and that’s a very difficult tide to swim against in many ways.
“We’ll never know what would have happened if we had been tighter at the back and closed up shop and kept them goals out, it might have been a very different story. But, again, we’ll never know that.”
He continues, “If any team experiences a defeat like that they’re going to be hurt by it, of course. We would hope to have responded to that a bit better in more recent games.
“I suppose the Armagh game, we were caught with a few goals as well which again, they are sucker blows, but in the moment we need to find a better way to respond to it as a group of players. That’s something we need to face up to and be better at moving forward.”
On Saturday night, it’s back to do or die football when Derry travel to Mayo. Might have taken us 58 games in the All-Ireland series, but here we are.
A lively Castlebar crowd learning to love Mayo again, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many making a case for a Derry victory. The fall has been hard and fast.
But Bradley believes. He’s been in these situations before.
“The lads know that they’re capable of reaching a really high level. A lot of lads in the dressing-room have played at an unbelievably high level for a long period of time so there’s evidence it’s there, of course,” he says.
“The important thing is to add to that evidence moving forward and no better opportunity than to do it against one of the top teams in the country in Mayo.”
