Former United footballer finds a life of Solitude can reap its own rewards

Damian McCarney

Saturday, April 26, and Solitude is packed for the final day of the season. ‘Cliftonville 2 Crusaders 1’ reads the scoreboard after 63 minutes, and the ref has just awarded the home team a penalty for a handball. Typically, the crowd would be that giddy blend of excitement and nerves but since the league title was wrapped up the week before fewer prayers than normal hum around the terraces of the antiquated North Belfast stadium.
Christopher Curran contemplates the ball on the spot. He’d be forgiven for blasting the size-five hard enough for it to reach his hometown of Swanlinbar but that’s not his style.
Amongst the Reds’ fans, the former Manchester United graduate is cherished as an intelligent footballer, who’ll outwit, rather than out-sprint defenders. They know, he’s going to place it.
Ten months have passed since Christopher made his debut against Glasgow Celtic in a Champions League qualifier, and yet this is his first penalty for the North Belfast club. Penalty pecking order sees Cliftonville’s captain George McMullan at the top, ahead of their answer to Messi and Neymar, Joe Gormley (37 goals) and Liam Boyce (24 goals), but then again Curran had already scored two in this season finale, so his teammates are feeling generous.
“The lads said ‘Go ahead and take it, you haven’t got a hat-trick yet’,” recalls Christopher, chatting over a pot of tea at Belturbet’s Seven Horseshoes. For his first, target man Diarmuid O’Carroll had threaded a ball inside from the left and Curran cooly slipped it under the advancing ‘keeper. A side-foot finish, again from inside the box, gave Curran his second and put Cliftonville back in front.
Now Crusaders’ ‘keeper, Sean O’Neill, stands between Curran and goal number three.
“I just thought - pick a spot and don’t change your mind. That’s what everyone tells you to do.”

‘Delight’
Emboldened by the first two, he’s opened up his stance, intending to aim a side-footer to the right. It’s a trickier option for a right footed player.
“When you are putting it to the right you are sort of telling the keeper where you are going,” accepts Christopher. “But I just hit it and he went to the other side, thank God. I was happy enough to see him go and so I hit it to where I’d decided to hit it in the first place.
“That game was to lift the cup and everything... it was a great feeling. First penalty, first hat-trick, so I was delighted.”
Further fuelling the party atmosphere was great in itself but the crucial work in securing the league had already been done days earlier with a two-nil win over Portadown. Christopher had, again, opened the scoring, pouncing on a ball loosened by a slide tackle at the edge of the box. Two touches into space, head down, he drilled the ball low and hard into the corner beyond the reach of the diving ‘keeper. Cue manic celebrations with Curran wheeling away from his teammates to rush to the raucous travelling support.
The league had looked beyond them at one stage as South Belfast Goliaths Linfield had entered the home stretch with a significant lead, but then both Clitonville and Christopher went on an impressive late run.
“I think the last ten games - I couldn’t believe how well they went for me.”
Their visit to Windsor Park in late March would prove a defining point in the campaign, as Linfield’s lead had been cut to just two points.
“They are the ones you look forward to; you are going to have a big crowd. I suppose some people get nervous, but I get excited about them - there’s a big build up coming up to them, then they finally arrive and the atmosphere is brilliant.”
Linfield failed to contain Cliftonville’s firepower and the Reds won 3-1, edging into a one-point lead.
“That was the turning point. I think we knew after that - ‘it’s in our hands now, we can go on and win it’. It was a massive game, probably one of the biggest games of the season. Both teams going into know how big it was going to be.”
Given Linfield’s financial clout - they receive a whopping £200,000 annually from the Irish Football Association in Windsor Park rent - for any of the other northern clubs to win the Irish Premier League is an amazing achievement. For Cliftonville to go one further and retain the title, and win the double, it’s akin to Borussia Dortmund’s success in overcoming Bayern Munich over 2010-2012.
“It was a great feeling to think of all the work you’ve put in all season,” he says, “and it came through for us in the end.”

http://youtu.be/f47UDu-H-_o

Coming home
It was a memorable way for Christopher to end his first season at Solitude. It’s another peak along the upward trajectory of rebuilding his football career after being let go by Manchester United four years ago, and finding no suitors to offer him a full-time contract.
Coming home was tough but he has fond recollections of those times with the most famous team in football, where he trained daily with England World Cup player Danny Welbeck, Irish international and now Hull winger Robbie Brady, Cory Evans, brother of United centre-half Johnny and now playing for Blackburn Rovers; Federico Macheda, now of Cardiff, and Matthew James who plays for Premiership newcomers Leicester City.
“It was unbelievable,” says Christopher. “Every day, two [training] sessions a day for two years - it was unforgettable really.”
What separates the great from the very good?
“They know what to do with the ball before it comes to them. You spend a second more on deciding what to do with the ball when it comes to you, and then it’s too late, whereas the top players, they have a picture in their head of what’s around them. They are far more aware of everything that’s around them, so they know what to do with the ball whenever it comes - I think that’s what sets them apart.”
Aged 19, Christopher had to undergo an operation on his knee cartilage, due to wear and tear from daily training.
“They [the club medics] said it was always going to happen and there wasn’t anything you can do about it. I’ve been grand since.
“I had an operation and I must have been out for six-to-eight weeks. Coming back, there were a few complications and it didn’t heal as well as I thought it was going to.”
He doesn’t attribute United’s decision to release him to his injury.
“I don’t think I was ever going to play in the first team. I’d never use it as an excuse as to why things didn’t work out but I probably could have done without it, too.”
Did he have any regrets over his time at United?
“You do think about it a lot, especially in the couple of years that you are back home after it. I can’t think what I would have done differently, I still would have gone to United, because even if you have two or three different options, you are always going to go to United. I worked as hard as I could. When I was there I told myself I was going to work harder than anyone else and I did that, so I don’t really have any regrets.”
He had trials at different clubs in England, but “they just didn’t work out” so he returned home and signed for Ballinamallard, where in the 2012/2013 season he was the club’s player of the year. His success in the Fermanagh-based team, piqued the interest of a Linfield, although no discussions were held.
“I was happy then that Cliftonville got in touch at the end of the season because I knew Liam [Boyce, striker] and I knew Conor [Devlin, from their United days] at Cliftonville, so that’s where I wanted to go, if I was going to leave Ballinamallard.”
In his first season in North Belfast he still managed to score eight goals from midfield, and be the team’s joint-third top-scorer - despite missing a huge chunk of the season through a broken collar bone sustained in an “innocuous enough” collision with a Dungannon Swifts defender last November.

http://youtu.be/PkiKONlgZ30

Injury troubles
“In the last ten minutes I went past the left back and he tripped me up and I fell over on it and he came down on top of me. I didn’t realise how bad it was so I played on to the end of the game - then I realised there’s something wrong here,” he says with a laugh. “I had to go over to the hospital and found out it was broken badly. That must have kept me out for two months anyway.
“The injury was frustrating. I thought: ‘This isn’t going the way I thought it was going to go after moving from Ballinamallard’. I was a wee bit worried about how things had developed.”
On the plus side, the injury did free up more time to study for his first semester exams, in his final year of a Business Management degree at Queens University. Having completed his A-Levels at United, Christopher reluctantly decided to pursue his studies upon his return home.
“I wanted to stay in football, that’s all I wanted to do, so having to go to university just felt foreign to me. I didn’t like it at all. It took me a few years to get over it - this is the way it is now, there’s no point complaining about it. So I just got on with it and it worked out well.”
With his degree course completed in May, he was free to use the soccer close season to line out for Swanlinbar for a few times in the Breffni League.

European pre-season
“It helps my fitness ticking over because I don’t like to be doing it on my own. I enjoy playing because I’ve been playing for Swad since I was four or five years-old.”
He doesn’t mind being in picked at wing half back for St Mary’s - from where, according to others, he was able to dictate play.
“I’ll play wherever they play me - I don’t mind. I like getting back and training with them and playing games, I just enjoy it.”
However, Cliftonville have a domestic league Champions League qualification to prepare for, so GAA has had to take a back seat as Christopher resumes pre-season training.
“It felt early, on Saturday, going back,” he says with a laugh of disbelief. “It felt like we were away only a couple of weeks.”
Monday’s draw has seen them pitted against Hungarian side Debrecen in the second qualifying round in mid-July, but he doesn’t see Europe as a priority over league and cup.
“I think you just take Europe as a bonus - it mightn’t be everybody’s attitude towards it, but I just look at it as, you are still sort of in pre-season, you are working towards getting your fitness back. Obviously, you want to do well because you are representing the club. You want to get a result, but at the same time you have to look towards retaining the league and cup.”

A ‘Swadfast’ accent
Detecting a strong city influence on his west Cavan accent, he’s possibly the only person in Ireland to have a ‘Swadfast’ accent, he certainly seems at home in Belfast. The Celt wonders if he’s happy at Cliftonville, and can he see himself staying there?
“Coming back from United, it was a very difficult time coming back home, and being away from full-time football, and obviously if a chance came up to go back across the water I’d jump at it, but at the moment I am happy - there’s nowhere else in Ireland I’d rather be at the moment.
“I’ve another year on my contract so I’ve no complaints. It’s a brilliant club, it is a lovely family club and everyone really takes care of each other, and the fans are brilliant as well. So I can’t have any complaints, especially after how the last season has just went.”
Christopher is like most Irish League players in that he doesn’t have an agent, but he believes that if he keeps working hard “something might come up” with regards to securing full-time football. That his teammate Liam Boyce has just signed for Scottish Premier League team Ross County, and former Reds striker Rory Donnelly signed for Premiership side Swansea the previous year, offers Christopher a glimmer of hope.
“You have to hope you are doing well enough to be making headlines and doing well enough to put your name in the frame for things like that, but as it is, it is very difficult to go from the Irish League to a higher level of football. But Liam’s done it and a few other footballers have done it, too, so I’ll just keep my head down.”

Forward thinking
Boyce’s departure leaves an opening in the forward line but Christopher, despite his scoring record, doesn’t expect to fill that gap.
“That’s going to be the big talking point - how do you replace him? I think Liam scored 36 league goals last season, and then 24 this season. I wouldn’t be a goal-scorer really, it wouldn’t be my game. I think they will get someone to replace him - an out-and-out striker.”
Initially, Christopher was mostly deployed very high up the pitch and glued to the right wing to feed the strikers with crosses.
“As the season’s gone on I developed a bit more, and played on the left coming inside and striking it. A lot of my goals came in the second half of the season, and were scored by cutting in from the left and coming in with my right foot. It has been a bit of a transition year in that respect because I would have been playing very wide in the first part if the season and now the manager sees me as a player who can come in from the left or play behind the strikers. I’m enjoying that sort of game where you can come inside and play passes or shoot. I’d like to see that continue this season.”
One thing that is certain is that despite Cliftonville chasing a hat-trick of league titles, the bookies will have Linfield as favourites once again.
“It seems to be that way, at the end of every season we’re second favourites, even though we’ve won the league. But I think we like that, too - it puts a few players ‘on’ - they get angry about it. I don’t mind.
“I think if we work hard enough we have every chance of retaining it again - you’d like to think so anyway.”