Life at the back: Matt Gallagher on being the loneliest man on the busiest day

There are few lonelier and pressurising jobs in football than a full-back on All-Ireland final day.

No matter how well your summer has gone, you know that Sunday in Croke Park isn’t about you. It’s about stopping someone else’s headline.

In 1992, Matt Gallagher was handed a job nobody wants but someone always has to do. Vinny Murphy was the Dublin battering ram, the one with steam in the boots and goals in the eyes. Gallagher was the man to stand in his way.

“For me it was about getting into a position to get in front and stop Murphy from running into space,” he recalls. “Then we usually had Brian Murray or Anthony Molloy falling back to patrol that space in front, so that was key for us in that final.”

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He practised for it like a madman. Ball after ball with Tony Boyle and Brian Murray, launching missiles into the square, testing reactions and timing and nerve.

“It was hard work,” Gallagher says now, “but it had to be done.”

If there is a job in Gaelic football more selfless or more exposing than full-back in an All-Ireland final, it doesn’t immediately spring to mind. The spotlight always lands at the other end. The applause, the adulation, the viral clips. Full-back is the role you survive. And even that’s not guaranteed.

But when it works for you, it’s magic! But the opposition man this weekend is none other than David Clifford - no challenge harder for a defender in all of gaelic sport.

“To be honest I don’t think I would get great enjoyment in marking Clifford,” Gallagher says, and you’d forgive the Donegal legend for being honest – he is, after all, long since retired and happily over 60, he joked.

“But if you’re in an All-Ireland final, there are going to be men that are going to get the short end of the straw in marking the opposition's top players. You just have to deal with it.”

Brendan McCole knows the deal. Two Sundays ago, he walked off the pitch at Croke Park with Jordan Morris still somewhere in his back pocket.

The Hogan Stand in front of him, arms to the sky, head tilted to the heavens. He let go. Not of Morris – not yet – but of the pressure, the tension, the mental weld that had kept him bolted to his man for 70 unforgiving minutes.

His reward? You guessed it: David Clifford. There are assignments in football and then there are sentences. McCole’s isn’t so much a job as a crusade, and like any crusade, it comes with faith, pain and a touch of madness.

It is a funny sort of fraternity, this. The men who wear the number three jersey with pride and a grimace. Gallagher knows it well, even if it was 33 years ago.

“I think the fact that we had five weeks to prepare, even though these boys probably put in as many training sessions in two weeks as we did in five, but in 1992 we had Dublin’s gameplan well prepared,” the Naomh Bríd man said.

“We knew it involved Keith Barr winning the ball and banging it in on top of Vinny Murphy, so for me it was about getting into a possession to get in front.”

That hunger and desire to leave everything on the field, all for an unknown, is as prevalent today as it was in ‘92. For Gallagher and his teammates that broke the mold, it was about knowing that no script was ever going to be written for them - they wrote it themselves, with the grit to own their moment. That's what sport demands: the courage to be authors of your own fate.

“I can only speak from my own experience but it really came down to confidence,” Gallagher said. “Like we played Dublin in the previous four meetings and we beat them three times, so we knew we weren’t far away.

“The two teams this weekend, there’s nothing separating them just like we believed there was nothing separating us from Dublin in ‘92.

“We knew from the disappointments in 1990 and ‘91 that we weren’t far away. It was just about getting our act together - that was working harder, focusing more, and definitely training harder and smarter. It was about being the masters of your own destiny.”

Back then, the job was different. The rules made it easier to funnel bodies back, to mass and contain.

He has been that master all summer on the best players in the country. If there's a danger man on the field, McCole doesn’t just get him. He goes and finds him.

“Brendan’s role in every game is picking up the danger man,” Gallagher says. “In the past he’s done it against the likes of Rian O’Neill and Micheál Bannigan, and others.”

But this – this is David Clifford. This is the nightmare with the bounce in his step and the compass in both feet.

“David doesn’t have many weaknesses,” Gallagher notes. “He’s strong, he’s quick, he can kick off both feet, he’s the full package which is no surprise.”

And yet – here McCole is. Again. Unflinching. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes the Donegal full-back so effective. He has no booming shoulder like McGee, no obvious growl in his demeanour. But what he has – what he is – is unwavering.

He simply does not blink. When Jordan Morris danced and twitched at Croke Park, McCole matched him step for step, breath for breath. When Clifford comes, he will do the same. Whether it works or not is another matter entirely.

But then, what separates McCole from most isn’t just ability – it’s resilience.

“There’s no question that every player in their time gets criticism,” Gallagher says. “It’s probably more prevalent now because of social media. I think it’s just dung, the lot of it.”

McCole knows all about that. His inter-county debut was a bruising, short-lived affair. Fourteen minutes against Meath. A day that ended with Neil McGee coming on and the jersey slipping off. He didn’t start the Ulster final that year. He didn’t sulk either.

“Like there’s no question that when Brendan came in a number of years ago he got harsh criticism,” Gallagher remembers. “I remember he had a tough day in the Division 2 final against Meath a few years back, but he’s deflected that and got over that.”

At DCU, they made him captain of their Sigerson Cup team. They don’t hand that to shrinking violets.

“For a top player, the biggest critic should be yourself and your teammates,” Gallagher says. “They’re the people that matter.”

By that measure, McCole is adored. Patrick McBrearty, sitting beside Jim McGuinness after the semi-final, nodded silently when the full-back’s name was raised. A gesture of earned respect. The nod of someone who’s had to get by him on Tuesday nights when nobody’s watching.

Now, on the biggest stage of all, Donegal will trust him to do it again. But Gallagher is clear: this is no solo gig.

“It can be a lonely task marking the inside forward,” he says. “But you have to expect that there are going to be times when he’ll be left one-on-one with Clifford. You just have to deal with it.

You can’t go into this match and solely focus on David Clifford because there’s so much talent on that Kerry team.”

In a way, that’s the paradox of the full-back’s job. You do everything in your power to prepare – and still have to accept that you might be on your own. It’s the role’s cruel truth, the sacrificial nature of it on the biggest day of your footballing life.

If there is a battle to define this All-Ireland final, it will take place somewhere near the square, somewhere between inevitability and resistance. One man running free, the other holding the line. The game will spill around them, surge and ripple with all the wild emotion of a Croke Park Sunday. But in the eye of the storm, it will be quiet.