Derry City’s absurd season comes to a giddy end with FAI Cup triumph

When it was all over, Patrick McClean fell and starfished on the ground, thumping the turf with his fists before sitting back on his heels to soak in the world around him. Behind him, goalkeeper Brian Maher burst into tears. Match-winner Darragh Burns stood before the Derry City crowd at the other end of the pitch, watching flares ignite as the grin cracked across his face.

This was Derry’s giddy end to an absurd season. It began with a splurge by billionaire owner Philip O’Doherty and forthright talk of winning the league for the next two seasons and went immediately off the rails, careening toward brief anxieties about relegation until Mark Connolly temporarily wrestled the steering wheel from Tiernan Lynch to point the club to mid-table mediocrity and this delirious coda at the Aviva Stadium.

Nobody better encapsulates Derry’s ability to succeed in a berserk context than McClean, who has played the best football of his career while his employers and his brother James got tangled up in a bitter public feud.

“We have been through a lot of shit this year and it stood to us,” said Maher. “We have played better than that and lost this year. But you take your 1-0 and get up the road with a trophy and probably never watch that game again.”

Maher admitted the first half was like watching paint dry but cup final dramas are usually spun from the stakes rather than the spectacle. It was one of those perfect days on winter’s threshold, where a butter sun hung low in a powder-blue sky with a faint, pervasive chill in the air to stiffen everyone’s nerves.

The FAI Cup final remains an assault on the senses, however, and this quintessential November scene receded to the background for the usual sounds and lack of sight when the players emerged from the tunnel. The flares lit by fans at either end of the ground swallowed the pitch in an acrid fog, while supporters also unveiled their showpiece tifos.

The Derry City fans held a banner that ran the width of the pitch and bore the lyrics of a song in praise of the INLA, while the Waterford fans prompted for signs reading “Are you in Love with a Notion,” the title of a song by the cardiganed, skinny-jeaned indie English band The Courteneers. Call it a clash of styles.

Under Graham Coughlan, however, Waterford have the fewest notions of any club in the league. They are aggressive and physical and truly made in the brusque, straight-talking image of their manager. Here is a guy, after all, who was presented on TV with a £300 bottle of red wine by Man United manager Erik ten Hag and replied that he drank Budweiser instead.

Coughlan took over in May and sparked a remarkable turnaround in Waterford’s season by stripping their game plan back to first principles. Living in Tramore, Coughlan has found ample sand to pour in opposition gears.

The first hour of this cup final was sinewy and drab and, in other words, played totally on Waterford’s terms. Their three centre backs, Hayden Cann, Kevin Long, and John Mahon, looked less selected for this cup final than they were quarried, and they took turns to bulldoze through Derry’s lithe and nimble set of forwards.

Waterford flew into challenges and larruped the ball forward at the earliest opportunity, hoping a chance would break for either Tommy Lonergan or Pádraig Amond. Nothing truly did, partly through bad luck and partly through the good judgment of the Derry defence. Maher, having unconvincingly flicked an early Waterford free kick on to the crossbar, was henceforth dependable beneath Waterford’s many high, dropping balls.

Derry lacked an outlet up front and so, perhaps in keeping with their bewildering year, they struggled to find any stable footing, appearing at times to be swept up and merely surviving amid Waterford’s authored tumult. The individual quality in their forward line occasionally glinted with threat, with Michael Duffy unfortunate to see the first-half goal he created wrongly whistled for offside before the ball crossed the line.

Around the hour mark there was a sense that Waterford had to pause to draw breath. The game’s decisive moment nonetheless arrived with a jolt, as Darragh Burns cut in from the wing and looped back out of the penalty area to crowbar open a tight angle through which he could slam the ball into Stephen McMullan’s bottom corner.

It felt cruel on Waterford, but not unfair. They continued their hectic siege right to the very end, but Maher, McClean, and the rest of the Derry defence stood tall, defending with the focus and zeal of men who had spent long enough weathering their own dramas.

This was an opportunity to finally club together as one. They didn’t waste it.