A league match in late February, St Mary’s Park in Ardee the venue. Louth were warming up to play Tyrone under the kind of grey/white/blue (ish) sky that didn’t know what it wanted to do with itself. Gavin Devlin had faced his native county before as coach of Derry alongside Mickey Harte but this was the first time doing it with bainisteoir written on his top. His name over the door now. Same, but different.
Like most goalkeepers, Niall Morgan is early out of the Tyrone dressingroom before a game. Fourteen seasons into his intercounty career, his routine is pretty set. He jogs on to the pitch and then slows to a walk as he heads down to the goals. It’s a deliberate thing, consciously trying to take in the pitch, the stadium, the conditions, the sounds.
On this day in Ardee, he passed the Louth panel doing their warm-up and smiled to himself as he heard one voice above all others. Devlin was right in there in the thick of it all, pinballing from one player to the next, a good vibes graffiti artist spray-canning praise on everyone around him.
“It was only a simple handpassing drill, or just a simple kick-passing and catching kind of thing,” Morgan says. “But he was going around the players going, ‘That’s unbelievable.’ ‘Your hands are on it today.’ You’re going to this and you’re going to do that. I remember passing them and thinking, ‘That’s Horse to a tee.’
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“Full of enthusiasm, full of positivity. Some players don’t like that but he would know who he needs to engage with and who he needs to leave alone. But that’s him – he bounces around from player to player and would be making them believe they’re the best player he’s ever seen.
“We had a club game a few years ago against Pomeroy when he was over them. I wasn’t playing but I was there watching it. And as the teams were coming off, he physically had his hands on one of the players’ hips and was going, ‘See whenever you get your hips moving, there’s not a player in Ireland can cope with you. Not a player in Ireland.’ And I was laughing because all I could think of was, ‘A couple of years ago, that man was telling me the same thing!’”
When word went around last autumn that Ger Brennan would be heading to Dublin, nobody in Louth doubted who his successor would be. Devlin was in his second year as head of the Louth underage academy at the time, ostensibly a role that involved schools, development squads, being a selector on the county minor team and coaching coaches around the county. But it was also, generally unspoken but quietly understood, a way of keeping him in the county.
Even though his initial spell alongside Harte had ended with the pair of them high-tailing it to Derry, Devlin had remained popular with the officer class in the Louth panel. Their sense of the situation was that he had never particularly wanted to go in the first place – taking club teams in Derry was one thing but an Ardboe man crossing the border to wear an Oak Leaf badge? Pass the hemlock.
But by that stage, he’d been Harte’s right-hand man for a decade. He has talked endlessly about how he feels he owes Harte his whole career. A player under him at minor, under-21 and senior, a coach with Tyrone and later Louth. Harte has been his manager, his mentor, his sounding board, his sensei. If he was going to Derry, Devlin was going to Derry.
Consequently, the Louth players never held any sourness towards Devlin for leaving, particularly not the senior ones. The likes of Sam Mulroy, Ciaran Downey, Conor Grimes and Tommy Durnin have been around long enough to know that football is a ruthless business and that Derry looked to have Sam Maguire potential at the time.
It didn’t stop them loving Devlin’s coaching, however. They would see him around Darver a fair bit once he took up the underage role and relations were always warm between them. Though he had no role in Brennan’s set-up last year, it was always clear that if the position came up, he’d be the players’ choice to take over.
Harte calls Devlin the best coach he’s ever come across. As well as the infectious enthusiasm Morgan referenced, he has a reputation as having a high football IQ. Admittedly, this was mostly forged in the blanket defence days of the old game, during which Tyrone’s success was always based first and foremost on locking down the opposition and protecting the goal. But even if coaching defence is easier than dreaming up ways to attack, Devlin’s ability to simplify and communicate ideas was always a calling card.
“I suppose even whenever he was playing, he wouldn’t have been the fastest player or the strongest player but just knew where to be at all times,” says Morgan. “And his coaching had a very similar idea to that. He was 100 per cent, in my opinion, behind a lot of our defensive structure in the late teens.
“He would have talked about all the players in the defence being part of a rope and the rope being the same length attached to each player. The idea was that if the middle man moves, the men on the outside need to move too and that everyone should be making sure they’re still connected. He basically did everything but take a rope out and tie it to the boys.
“There’s still elements of that talked about in what we do now, in terms of being connected as a defence. I’m sure there’s other coaches around the country talking about the same kind of idea. But it was the belief that he had in it that made us believe that this was going to work. And it definitely took us further than we were getting at that stage.”
It’s six years since he and Harte finished up with Tyrone. When Harte called to his house a week later to see would he come to Louth with him, Devlin had to ask what league division they played. Their first game was against Antrim in Division Four in Haggardstown, home of the Geraldines in Blackrock. Covid restrictions were still just about in play so there was no crowd in the ground, which was maybe for the best since they lost by a point.
That was May 2021. Before leaving Darver for their quarter-final against Monaghan two weeks ago, Devlin reminded his team of that game. Mulroy, Durnin and Downey played in it. Donal McKenny, Ciaran Byrne, Anthony Williams and a few others too. It would have been a mad notion to peddle to them that afternoon that there was a Leinster title in their future or that within five years they’d be 70 minutes away from an All-Ireland final.
Probably madder still would have been the idea that Devlin would be the one leading them there. He was always seen as a coach, a number two. Specifically, as Harte’s number two. Though he had taken club teams in Tyrone and Derry as manager, managing at intercounty level didn’t seem to be in the books for him as long as Harte was still on the scene. But here he is, leading Louth out in an All-Ireland semi-final in the week Harte has stepped away from Offaly.
“Being an intercounty manager is a whole different ball game to being a coach,” says Morgan. “Everybody knew how good of a coach he was. But having the backing of the Louth players to take over from Ger Brennan is the ultimate praise. They would have seen him in the Louth academy role as maybe getting himself ready to take over if and when Ger went.
“But, if he was going in there and the players weren’t sure about him, he could have been in trouble. They obviously liked what they had seen from the time he was with them before. That’s the ideal scenario.”
It has taken them this far. Nobody backed them to be still kicking in July, long after most of the country have headed for the beach. Yet here they are, one Saturday teatime away from a day no Louth person under 70 has ever witnessed and none under 80 can possibly recall. If he gets them to the final, Devlin will be immortal.
Not bad for a chap who didn’t know what division they were in when it all started.
