Cavan’s adopted Royal still going strong

Inside Story

Did you hear the one about the footballer who was retired at 22, playing Junior B at 23 and senior inter-county football at 25? PAUL FITZPATRICK spoke to Micky Brennan about the Navan native’s links with Cavan...

It started in a pub in Cavan, over a friendly drink with one of his clubmates and heroes, Hank Traynor. Life had sent Micky Brennan on a particular path but that chance meeting changed things in a way he could never have imagined.

Brennan was 22, a talented underage Gaelic footballer who had drifted away from the game and found himself working in Cavan, a young lad with no ties and mad for the craic.

Within less than two years, he was starting in the National League for Cavan. How it came about is a hell of a tale.

“I never had any connection with Cavan growing up. I went to boarding school in Mullingar and there was one lad from Cavan, from just outside Oldcastle, and that was about as much of a connection as I had. I have since found out that my great-great-grandfather was a Cavanman, my mother was a Reilly funnily enough, he was from down around Butlersbridge somewhere and he moved to Ladyrath in County Meath,” Brennan told The Anglo-Celt this week.

“I was working for The Loft restaurant in Navan and we opened a sister restaurant in Cavan called the Side Door. I came down to get the place off the ground and I ended up staying, I absolutely loved Cavan from the moment I came to it. I just found it a very warm county and especially the town, I just loved it straight away, it was a home away from home.”

Born and raised in Simonstown (“The first day I was able to walk, my mother gave me a football and brought me to the pitch”) , he had been part of a successful underage side, which was one of the dominant juvenile teams in Meath but county honours eluded him. In his late teens, like many young sportsmen, he reached a crossroads.

“I was playing third tier football for Simonstown when I was 17 and when I was 20 I was still playing third tier football. I played one match for the second team in the championship and one challenge match for the seniors when they were stuck for a goalkeeper against Ballymun Kickhams so that was as much adult football as I had played.

“I moved to Cavan then for work and I had kind of stopped playing football then. I was still playing a bit of soccer. I wasn’t driving at the time so I used to get the bus or a mate would come and collect me and that was about it, even though I loved football, I had consigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t good enough.

“I probably hadn’t played properly in two years. I was 22 at this stage. I was out in a pub in Cavan and met Hank Traynor, a Simonstown man and a hero of mine. His brother Clive played full-back on all the underage teams that I played for so Hank had a good knowledge of that team.

“He asked me was I playing any football and I said no, my footballing days are over. But he convinced me that I was a good footballer and should get back at it. He wanted me to give it a whack with Simonstown but I told him I didn’t drive.

“He said ‘do me a favour, join a team in Cavan’. So I made a promise to him that I would and woke up the next morning and he sent me a text with Joe O’Connor’s number. He said ‘ring this man, tell him I put you on to him, he’ll get you back into football’.”

Then came the call to O’Connor, the manager of senior champions Cavan Gaels and a popular and well-known figure on the local football scene.

“I made the call that evening and got talking to Joe. He said ‘yeah, Hank said there would be some fella ringing me. We train on a Wednesday and a Friday, you’re welcome to come up.’

“I said the only days I had off were Mondays and Tuesdays and that was kind of as far as it went. And that was why I never ended up playing for Cavan Gaels!” Brennan laughs.

“I’m very good friends with Joe now and I always rib him about that one, it’s a good story to tell.

“The following Saturday night I was in work and it was about a quarter to nine, the busiest time of the night. I was working behind the bar and these two guys arrived in, very smartly dressed, and asked for Michael Brennan.

“At that stage, my heart started to race a wee bit because the only people who call me Michael are my mother and the guards!

“It turned out it was Martin Sexton and Peter Donohoe. They had heard there was a guy who had moved into the area and was interested in playing football. They were so friendly and I said I’d love to go and train with Drumalee.

“They had explained to me they’d be training in Breffni Park and I thought that was great. I went home on Monday to Navan to get my football gear and I came back down and on Tuesday. I got a taxi from Flood’s to Breffni and there was nobody there.

“The taxi man who brought me up said ‘for some reason, I think Drumalee are training out in the Vocational School’. I said ‘sure look, we’ll go out and if they’re not there, I’ll go home’.

“We went out and I met John Denning first and he said hello and sent me out on the field, Peter and Martin had gone looking for me, they only remembered they had told me to go to Breffni.”

In his first year, Brennan played midfield for Drumalee’s second string, who were beaten in the Junior B final by Crosserlough. The next year, he made the Drumalee seniors.

“That year (2005), Gerry O’Rourke took us over. I have to say, he was the man who made me believe in myself and got me to a level of fitness and playing I was never at before.

“The training was really, really tough but it made a man out of you. I remember he took me aside and asked me would I consider being captain and I said I wasn’t sure I was cut out for it.

“He said to me ‘Jesus, Brennan, if you could stand at the side of the pitch and watch yourself playing football, you’d realise how good of a footballer you are’. I felt 10 feet tall, but I’ve since found out that Gerry uses that line a lot! I thought he only kept that for me (laughs) but it worked!

“We got to the intermediate final and lost to Cuchulainns but on the back of that I got a call in by Eamonn Coleman for a challenge match against Monaghan for Cavan.

“It was only a challenge match in November but the funny thing about it was, it turned out to be played in my very own Simonstown. It had come full circle.”

In 2006, Drumalee won the Intermediate Championship and Brennan nailed down a place with the county side.

“I played all the league games for Cavan. I didn’t get any championship time and the same in ‘07, I played a lot of McKenna Cup and league but I wasn’t getting a look-in for the championship. There was a strong backbone on that team, Trevor Crowe was gone off the 2004 team unfortunately, which was a pity, I’d love to have played with him because he was the toughest competitor I ever came up against in club football.

“It was the best of times, without a shadow of a doubt, I absolutely loved my time playing with Cavan.

“At the end of 08, I wanted to go back to Simonstown and I ended up getting on to the Meath panel but I got injured and drifted off it. I wanted to go back for my mother really, she’s a proud Simonstown woman and she has always stuck by me through thick and thin down through the years...

“I did an interview with the Celt around then, it was sort of a ‘come and get me’. And I ended up going back to Drumalee and playing with Cavan, we won the intermediate again then in 2010.”

By that stage, he was back on board with the county and that season produced the stand-out memory of his time in the blue and white when they came back from the dead to defeat Wicklow in a qualifier at Kingspan Breffni Park.

“I was playing in the full-forward line with Cian Mackey. We had a man sent off in the first half and another man sent off at the start of the second half. We were 11 points down at one point I think and I remember shouting at Tommy Carr ‘I’m going out to the middle’.

“We started to get on top at midfield, Seanie Johnston had come on and kicked points from everywhere and we ended up winning. Just to get that win was so huge. I thought that would be the catalyst for that team maybe to kick on but it didn’t go much further after that unfortunately.”

He came off the bench to score a goal against Donegal in the 2012 Ulster Championship – the only goal Jim McGuinness’s side conceded in their run to the All-Ireland that year – before he eventually stepped away at the end of that season. True to form, though, there was still time for a couple more twists and turns.

“At the end of 2014, I was 35 and I said I’d finish my career in Simonstown, I was back living in Navan and the restaurants had closed. In 2016, we didn’t get out of the group, then the following year, I was 36 obviously, we went on an amazing run. We had one draw and two losses in our first three group games but we won our last two, beat Dunboyne in the quarter-final after extra time, beat Kells in the semi-final and then Ashbourne in the final to win the first senior title for the club. It was brilliant.

“The following year, we won every game and retained it. It was amazing.”

And he wasn’t done yet…

“Last year, I was covering games on the radio for Northern Sound. I was training with Simonstown before Covid hit and, with no crowds at games when they started back up, we were told every game had to be covered. I wasn’t going to be able to get to Simonstown games, I covered a couple of games in Drumalee and met a few of the lads and that’s when the idea came to come back and play with Drumalee again.

“Damien [Donohoe] said to me ‘why don’t you, you could combine commentary down here but not in Navan’. So I rang Simonstown and they told me to go on with the best will in the world. They were probably glad to get rid of me!

“I’m still involved with Simonstown, my kids play with the U8s and I coach on Saturday mornings and they probably think I’m more use to them coaching instead of playing at this stage!

I’m playing again this year, I’m rearing to go. I’m 41 now, I didn’t think I’d still be playing football at my age but I still have that love for it and the hunger for it. I love training and the craic with the lads as much as I did when I started.”

Two decades on and still going strong – and by now, an honorary Cavanman if ever there was one.