6 days ago
Derry's annus horribilis: Failure to beat Galway would give Oak Leaf county a thoroughly unwanted distinction
Things will get better for
Derry
, just maybe not yet. They have won three of the last six
All-Ireland
minor titles. Between St Pat's Maghera and St Mary's Magherafelt, Derry schools have taken five of the last nine MacRory Cups, plus this year's Hogan Cup.
Their under-20s have been to two of the past three Ulster finals, only losing to last season's crack
Tyrone
side on penalties, as well as running this season's ever better one to two points. When people throw around phrases like 'a lot of good work being done at underage', Derry are what it looks like in real life.
But if they don't beat
Galway
in Celtic Park on Sunday, they will be earning themselves a thoroughly unwanted distinction. It will mean that by the time Derry play Armagh in their final Group Four game in two weeks, they will have gone a full calendar year since their senior team last won a match. All the fine fixtures below deck don't mean much if you can't get the sail up to catch the wind.
Now. As with everything, there are nuances and caveats at play here. To say Derry haven't won a match in a year ignores the fact that they did get past Mayo in Castlebar in last year's All-Ireland preliminary quarter-final, after a penalty shoot-out. You didn't imagine it – they were the team who faced Kerry in the last eight. As one former Derry player half-joking-half-not-joking-at-all put it to The Irish Times this week, 'Since when does a win not count as a win?'
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But even so, it's at the very least a bewildering downturn in fortunes that Derry, who started last year's championship as the league champions, as the back-to-back Ulster champions, as the undisputed third leg of a stool that included Dublin and Kerry when it came to everyone's expectations for Sam Maguire, haven't won a game in 70 minutes since beating Westmeath in Newry in June 15th 2024.
Derry celebrate a goal against Westmeath in Newry last June, the last time they won a game in 70 minutes. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho
In the meantime, they have played 11 matches, losing nine and drawing two. Four of them have been in the championship – the draw with Mayo that went to penalties, the subsequent All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Kerry and this year's sound beatings from Donegal and Armagh. In between, they had one draw and six defeats in the 2025 league. Their points difference at the end of the spring campaign was -44 – only Leitrim and Waterford finished the league with worse numbers against their name.
If this was a Division Four team, you'd shrug your shoulders and move on. In the past decade, 11 teams have gone a full calendar year without a win – six of them have been in the basement division. It's not unusual down in the lower reaches for a bad league to turn into a lost championship and a big player churn before the ship is eventually steadied.
It doesn't tend to happen to Division One teams. Roscommon were the last one – they didn't win a game between October 2020 and January 2022. But that was during Covid and they only played five matches altogether in those 15 months. Had it been a normal year, it's unlikely they wouldn't have picked up a win somewhere along the way.
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Derry faced with a dilemma against Galway, do they stick or twist?#
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And if it doesn't generally happen to Division One teams, it's no time at all since Derry were among the least likely candidates. Before this all went down the Swanee, no county had made a greater virtue of keeping defeats off their card. So much so that when they lost against Galway in the first round of the All-Ireland group stage last year, it was the first time in 62 league and championship matches that they had suffered two defeats in a row.
For six full seasons, Derry were Gaelic football's leading experts at coming out on the right side of the result – or making amends next time out when they hadn't. That streak of 62 matches without back-to-back defeats was a huge outlier in the game – Armagh are currently on a run of 36 games in a row with out losing two on the spin. Galway, Kerry and Donegal all lost two in a row in this year's league alone.
Paul Cassidy dejected after Derry lost to Armagh on May 24th despite a late Derry comeback. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
But between 2018 and 2024, it was just something that Derry never allowed to happen. And now it happens all the time. They lost three in a row after last year's league final. This year, they lost their first two games in the league, stopped the rot with a draw against Galway (which should have been a win) and have lost their last six on the bounce.
So what has gone wrong? Some of it is the bleedin' obvious. Between retirements and injuries, they've lost three All Stars in Chrissy McKaigue, Conor McCluskey and Gareth McKinless since last year. Eoin McEvoy was shortlisted for Young Footballer of the Year in 2023 but missed chunks of last summer with a hamstring problem. Pádraig McGrogan did his cruciate and missed 10 months of football. That's five of Derry's starting back six when they won the 2023 Ulster final.
The seventh member of that defence has been missing too. Odhran Lynch was the hero that day in the penalty shoot-out, saving three of Armagh's five. But although he's been injured too this year – he pulled a quad against Mayo, blamed it on the increase load brought by long kick-outs – Lynch was undoubtedly also messed around by the Derry management during the league.
Derry's Odhran Lynch saves a penalty from Ryan O'Donoghue of Mayo in last year's All-Ireland preliminary quarter-final in Castlebar. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
When the new rules allowed the goalies to come up the pitch unmarked to create a 12 v 11 scenario in the opposition half, Derry brought in outfield club player Neil McNicholas to fill the number one jersey. He had never done goals previously and other teams filled their boots against him, particularly Dublin in Croke Park in February. Lynch got injured two games later and is only getting back now – Ben McKinless filled the role against Armagh.
So they have had injuries and they've made some bad decisions too. But Derry have had no luck with their opposition either. In this championship alone, they could have done without (a) being in the Ulster preliminary round, (b) meeting Donegal there and (c) having to do so a fortnight after Armagh beat them by 15 points in the last game of the league.
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Derry hurler Cormac O'Doherty out to buck the trend in Christy Ring Cup Final
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And then, when the draw for the group stage came out, they pulled by far the most difficult assignments – both of last year's All-Ireland finalists and the champions from the year before. Had the ball bounced their way, they could have had Louth, Clare and Roscommon. Instead, they have Armagh, Galway and the Dubs. Go back to last year's championship and the three teams that beat them ended up being three of the four All-Ireland semi-finalists.
Add it all up and Derry have had no breather game. As Chrissy McKaigue pointed out on the
Smaller Fish podcast
during the week, Derry have played 11 Division One teams in a row in league and championship since the Westmeath game last June. Nobody else has faced that kind of schedule – every other Division One team has played lower league opposition at some point.
In that timespan, Donegal have played Louth, Down and Monaghan, Dublin have played Wicklow and Meath, Kerry have faced Cork and Clare. Even Tyrone, who were also relegated from Division One, got to start their Ulster campaign at home to Cavan, to whom they haven't lost since 1983. Derry have had no such leeway.
Still, the record book says what it says. Derry bring Galway to Celtic Park on Sunday with no option but to start getting better, any way they can. Conor Glass's form has at least held up throughout the slump, Brendan Rodgers has been his doughty, indomitable self too. But their kick-outs have been routed too often and their concession levels have been far too high.
The optimistic view in Derry is that Lynch is close to a return, which would go some way to addressing both issues. If Lachlan Murray is available again after missing out against Armagh, that will add some pep to an attack that has started to look leaden-footed. Shane McGuigan's output from play has fallen off a cliff but he's surely too good for that to be a permanent state of affairs. The last 10 minutes against Armagh showed that they haven't written the year off at all.
One way or another, this run will end. Derry will win again, sooner or later. They will close the book on a wretched run of the calendar and get on with the task of bringing through the various crops of talented kids at their disposal.
It will happen. Just maybe not for a while.
