Smyth's aim: 'Keep doing what we're doing'

Interview

Damien Donohoe

At just 22 years of age, Philip Smyth carries the metaphorical captain’s armband for Cuchulainns into the biggest game in the club’s history, an Ulster Intermediate final that has electrified the community and sent white and blue bunting fluttering down every approach road to Mullagh.

Smyth, though, is steady, grounded and unfazed. The young skipper has lived enough big-day football with school, club and county, to know how frenzied environments can swirl around a team without entering the dressing room.

But the scenes after Cuchulainns’ Ulster semi-final win will live long in the memory.

“It was brilliant,” Smyth recalls.

“I actually went in fairly quickly myself, so I was in the dressing room fairly early.

But there was a serious crowd. I saw back a bit of the game and at the end there was an awful outpour onto the field.

There was a great buzz in the group after it. It was good.”

That victory over Clonoe felt like a statement.

The Tyrone champions arrived unbeaten in 18 games and were widely tipped by neutrals to march to the Ulster title – and more.

Yet Cuchulainns, calm and clinical, absorbed their pressure and then punched back with a ruthless confidence that has become the story of their season.

Smyth insists none of it came as a shock inside the group.

“We definitely believed within ourselves that we were well fit to take them out in the semi-final,” he says.

“Without being arrogant about it, they were clearly a very good team and were flying, but we knew from coming through the Cavan Championship that things had started to come really right for us in the knock-out stages.”

Their preparation, he says, was simple and they had trust that the work was already done.

“It was a matter of keeping doing what we had been doing up to that point and not changing anything or going mad about it.”

One of the early key moments in the semi-final was a thunderous, perfectly-timed shoulder from Smyth on midfielder McClure early one to set the tone.

It was the moment that ignited the Cuchulainns crowd and signalled that they weren’t overawed by the occasion.

Did he plan it?

“No, nothing like that,” he laughs.

“I find if you’re going out to do something like that, you’re more likely to get sent off or pick up an early yellow.”

Then, with typical honesty, he adds, “it’s not too often I manage to land those hits, so I was happy enough with it!”

But the hit, he insists, happened in the moment and not from pre-game intent.

“It was totally opportunistic. I was chasing after him and he kind of turned, he was blindsided turning into it. It definitely wasn’t something I had set out to do.”

If that shoulder set the tone, the finish sealed belief. With the game on a knife-edge, Cuchulainns, leading by a single point, stitched together the three most important scores of their season, all from their only three shots in injury-time.

Smyth says the sequence came from months of disciplined habits.

“Yeah, it might look like whatever we decide we want to do, we can do,” he says, “but it doesn’t feel like that at time.”

They wobbled in the second half, he admits.

“We came under pressure, there was a 10 or 15-minute period where we took a few shots that could go either way.”

But nobody panicked.

“We have a bank of work done and nobody’s straying too far from what we’ve done all year,” Smyth explains.

“So in those moments, we just did the right thing.”

He uses Niall Magee’s brilliant point as the perfect example.

“He gets the ball in the corner, he’s sort of on his own, and he takes on the man so he’s directly in front of the goals by the time he’s taking the shot.

That’s probably it, we know we’ll get scores when we take shots from the right areas. It’s part of the confidence.”

For many, Smyth becoming captain at just 22 hints at something innate, attitude, standards, leadership, resilience.

But his last few years haven’t been smooth. Persistent injuries have disrupted preparation for big games, even when they didn’t rule him out of playing.

Smyth doesn’t dramatise any of it.

“I probably had ongoing injuries more than anything,” he says.

“I got to grips with managing them.

But I still got to play football.

I never found myself missing major games.”

It was the lead-in periods that suffered.

“It was more that injury was keeping me off the field coming up to the games, no more than the last few weeks.

I was lucky that I still got to play a lot of football,” he says.

“I’ve played most of the championships I’ve been involved in with Cuchulainns. It never really worked out on the wrong end.”

Unlike many of his teammates, Smyth didn’t see Glenullin’s dramatic extra-time win in their semi-final.

“I actually didn’t watch it,” he says.

“I’m sure a few of the boys did, but I didn’t get to see it.”

He knows enough, however.

“I heard it went to extra time and they did very well to pull it back.

They have a lot of experience in this competition, so we’ll definitely be treating them with full respect.”

If Niall Lynch speaks of “one more performance”, Smyth echoes the same calm logic, trust the system, trust the work, trust each other.

He doesn’t talk about destiny or hype or pressure.

Like the shoulder he delivered in Armagh, his leadership comes from instinct, timing and clarity. Everything beyond them, the flags, the crowds, the crackling atmosphere, is noise. Inside the group, the message is simple.

“Just keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Philip says simply.

And if they do, Cuchulainns may yet produce the biggest moment of all.