Avid profile offline editor11/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Tony McGrath, who pulled the 1990 drawn Antrim hurling final out of the fire, was capable but gave it up fairly young. Nigel Elliott senior, father of Nigel junior and Seaan, was perhaps the pick of them. ![]() Of the household names that brought the green and gold to Croke Park three times between 19 for All-Ireland finals, very few have offspring that have yet passed into senior. There are a few sons of fathers in either code, but only a few. Don is Nigel Elliott’s father-in-law, so his grandchildren are Seean and Nigel junior.Īnd yet the lineage is not what has brought Dunloy footballers to the point of a very winnable senior football championship quarter-final against Lámh Dhearg on Friday night. You’d Adrian Dooey there too, and Don Maguire, men like those. His sons Anthony and Kevin are the current manager and captain respectively. Paddy McQuillan (known around the place as Paddy Murphy) was at the head of it. When it had come his time to hand the baton on, it was a small queue waiting for it. He made people laugh, made them feel the warmth of his quirks, and that made people want to play football. The late Christy Fleming, who brought football back to life in Dunloy in the early 1990s with his development of the parish U12 league.Īnd he’d sing Right Said Fred’s most famous hit, personalising the lyrics in great innocence.Ĭhristy was loved deeply in the community. But for Christy, I don’t know how many young boys in Dunloy wouldn’t have been involved in Gaelic games.” “He was great craic, a great personality and a great man. This night he punched the windscreen and sure didn’t he crack the whole screen, taking a crowd of U12s to Cargin or somewhere. “One time we were going to a match, and he had this phrase he always said: ‘This is gonna be the mother of all battles’. He used to come and lift boys to take to matches,” says former dual player Mickey McClements. “He had this white van with blue stripes up the side of it. Fleming was obsessed with the former Kildare, Cork, Sarsfields and Nemo Rangers star, to the point where that’s all they called him in Dunloy – ‘Fahy’. There was never one that the great Shea Fahy didn’t play in. His party piece was to walk around effortlessly soloing a 50p piece from hand to toe.ĭays he’d stand at the front of Brigid Dooey’s shop and entertain an audience with imaginary commentaries from All-Ireland finals in Croke Park. If there were a pair of the old Mikasa gloves on show, chances are they were a gift from Christy. They’d be split into four teams – Antrim, Cavan, Donegal and Down.Īnd they just kicked ball for hours. It became the Saturday morning ritual for every young boy in Dunloy, and a few sleeper agents from Loughgiel and Cloughmills that might have been ex-communicated if they’d been found out, to go down to the pitch. Then Christy set up a parish league at U12. Originally formed as a football club, they’d won seven Antrim championships and losing seven more finals between 1924 and ’41, but hurling had taken over as first choice in the early ‘40s.įootball was always there but not the centerpiece, like an extra with a couple of lines. In the bosom of hurling country, the very heart of north Antrim, he carved out a love of football by infusing its joy and his own personality with Dunloy’s youthful soul. CHRISTY Fleming’s sense of humour was unique. ![]()
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