It’s breakthrough time. Isn’t that how it works? It seems we come to this point every few years in Fermanagh football. We start to build momentum, we have a run in the championship and then we wait patiently for the deliverance of the Anglo Celt that we all cravenly desire. We are our own worst enemy.
I often wonder if we had managed to snipe an Ulster title way back in the distant past would that have made our history any different? Would having a 1 in the win column instead of a big fat 0 made us less obsessed? It seems to me that we have allowed our lack of championship success in Ulster to define us. This is of course a nonsense approach to take, but collectively we seem almost embarrassed by being “one of two counties never to have won their provincial title”. It is a line trotted out by the national media when talking about Fermanagh but it makes no sense. All that really matters is the here and now and not the perceived history or tradition of ones county. Yet I have always thought that our fixation with winning an Ulster title has inhibited us from doing so.
There is a fine line between focusing on a goal in a healthy way that allows you to produce your best and drifting into an area where that goal becomes something of a straightjacket to shackle and suppress your best performance. We have floated in this latter region too much.
This Fermanagh team are going in the right direction and have been for a number of years. They have had the deep run into the qualifiers and they have enjoyed promotion followed by a stable league campaign in division two. They should be aiming to win an Ulster title. But it should not be the be all and end all. Failure to win it must not put us back a few years and back to square one. Pete McGrath seems to be able to strike the right balance. Listening to the Down man he does not seem to be a prisoner to history in terms of having to ‘deliver’ an Ulster title to Fermanagh. Instead he talks about Championship football as being the biggest test of a team and one gets the impression he treats every championship match, whether it be Ulster Championship or back door in the same manner. I hope his team is a reflection of his thinking. To date it has been.
Fermanagh are on the right track and what is important is that any defeat that may occur in the future is merely seen as a blip rather than a derailment.
The game on Sunday against Antrim sees us as heavy favourites. Normally such a circumstance would bring with it a degree of trepidation but not so on this occasion. What has most impressed me about this Fermanagh team over the past year or so has been their calmness. They rarely get ruffled. This seems to be born from a complete comfort in the system and the game plan that they are playing. There is never a sense that the team is spiralling out of control, even during times when other teams have been scoring heavily or doing well. There is a stubborn adherence to their roles among the players and an acceptance that poor spells in games come as a result of mistakes rather than any fault in the system. In short this Fermanagh team has tremendous faith in themselves and in the management and that is a precious commodity, especially the way the game has evolved over the past five years.
Antrim will come with an inevitable swagger but if Fermanagh produce their best then we will win. It is that simple and from there we can move on to Donegal. Will we win Ulster? I don’t know and I don’t care. What is more important is that we continue to improve and learn and get better. Then some day, we will.