Lawrence Walls played senior football for Newbridge across four decades. His nephew Declan McKeever is the oldest player on the current squad. Both men are buzzing. Michael McMullan went to meet them.

A WAIT of 33 years is down to just nine days. If at all possible, football talk is even more dominant around Newbridge. Green and white flags flutter off every pole along the Blackpark Road.

After two years of semi-final emptiness, this is the week they’ve been waiting for.

In the clubrooms, it’s impossible to tell who is buzzing more. Double intermediate winner Declan McKeever will step off the bus at Celtic Park on Sunday.

Born 90 days after the last of the club’s 10 titles in 1989, McKeever is the oldest player in the current crop. The way his eyes dance radiates a joy words will struggle to paint. It’s a football version of Christmas Eve.

Seated opposite, his uncle Lawerence Walls is the holder of the three senior medals in view. Between them, they’ve 50 years – and counting – of senior football experience but the relationship is more than between an uncle and nephew.

Declan’s mother Nuala took ill in the early nineties before losing her battle with cancer when he was 10 years of age, the youngest of three.

Living in Castledawson and with more of an interest in tractors and motorbikes, his grá for football began when his father Paddy would drop him in with Lawrence’s family in Newbridge to help with the busy schedule of the school runs and visiting Nuala in hospital.  Declan was in safe hands.

With a well-trodden pathway to the nearby pitch, he was a Newbridge convert. They’d zoom up and down from football on bikes. And, in the days before mobile phones, if it was a school night, he’d get 10p from Paul Martin’s shop for the phone box to call for a lift home.

He was surrounded by cousins. When Newbridge won the 2007 intermediate title, he was flanked by cousins Malachi Fullerton, son of manager Thomas. Add in the Burke and Walls brothers. Another cousin, Patsy Bateson, won titles as a player and manager with nearby Ballymaguigan.

“I never would have found football,” McKeever admits of the difference his time in Newbridge made.

“I was never out of my cousins’ houses. We were either playing football or going to watch matches, that’s where the association had come from. Football was everywhere.”

*****

Newbridge had the bare 15 at Collegeland’s tournament in 1966. When someone picked up an injury, Lawrence Walls was handed a pair of boots and in he went for his senior debut – just wearing his own clothes. He was 16.

Before that, he remembers watching on. There was the early memory of Ballymaguigan and Castledawson in the 1962 final. He recalls how Newbridge should never have lost to Bellaghy 12 months later and how nine points from Sean O’Connell helped Ballerin oust the ‘Bridge from the ’65 championship.

It was 1967 when Liam Gribbin suggested he join the senior panel. The early taste at Collegeland had highlighted his worth. There was a win over Crossmaglen in the final of the Lavey tournament.

Newbridge went on to retain their title with a teenage Walls on the bench. He broke onto the team the following year, playing every game until not getting the nod for the final, a defeat to eventual Ulster champions Bellaghy.

When the following season came around, Walls opted not to play. Getting dropped didn’t rest well but he was back in 1970 to win his second championship medal.

They weren’t able to finish their run with the Ulster title, losing to Bryansford in a low-scoring decider. And with the Connacht champions not playing in the All-Ireland semi-final, it was a chance missed to be the first Derry club to appear in an All-Ireland final.

ULSTER RUN…The Newbridge team of 1970 were beaten in the Ulster final by Byransford with Lawrence Walls picture second from right in the back row

“That’s the biggest regret we have,” Walls admits of St Stephen’s Day at a frozen Casement Park.

“We played St Joseph’s of Donegal in the first round and they were favourites. We then beat Tempo and Eglish but it was a regret we didn’t get to win Ulster.”

It was Newbridge and Bellaghy in the final the following season with former ‘Bridge forward Hughie Donnelly scoring the winning point.

“It was actually a foot wide,” Walls said with a smile, admitting while he felt they wouldn’t have gone all the way, they were happy to see Bellaghy break ground at All-Ireland level.

There was respect between the neighbouring clubs who, at that time, shared 20 Derry titles.

It would take Newbridge a further 19 years to get back to the top. Other clubs had their time and, picking from a small area, the ‘Bridge’s successful group tapered away.

When twins Liam and Francie Hinfey, sons of founder member Francis, came on board at the start of the eighties, they brought a regime that was unheard of. The Newbridge players were lifting weights before it was in vogue.

“When they arrived, it was the first of what I would call ‘serious training’ that we had done,” Walls recalls. Before that, it was a bit of kicking in and out before a game.

“We went to play Dungiven up in Glenullin,” Walls outlines of their 1982 championship game.

“There was a wee house down at the bottom of the field where you changed. There was a match on before but we got togged out anyway.

“About 20 minutes before the match, they said there was a training pitch we were going to warm up on.”

This was new ground and the ‘Bridge players thought they’d be laughed at but hindsight tells how the Hinfey twins were “ahead of their time” in the preparation of teams.

Dungiven held on for a draw before winning the replay on the way to the final. The game with Ballinderry was abandoned and declared void before the Shamrocks were awarded the title in later years.

It left Newbridge pondering what might have been but league success the following year was a sign of progress. The Barton and McErlain brothers came into bolster a blossoming team.

“Most of them were teenagers at the time but it took us six years to win a championship,” Walls said of 1989. “That’s how hard a championship was to win.”

Newbridge and Ballinderry were thrown out after a tempestuous semi-final saga in 1987. A year on and Newbridge were back in a final but an emerging Lavey left Glen as champions.

Damian Barton was in his prime and nothing was going to stop Newbridge in 1989. Sam Bateson and Thomas Fullerton were in charge. Fullerton’s job with McElhone’s took him all over Ulster. Chatting with the Burren men, he acquired their All-Ireland training plan to add to the Hinfeys’ foundations.

Bellaghy were so often the Newbridge nemesis. Walls remembers vividly how the Tones had beaten them three times in under a fortnight at one point of his career. Two were as a result of late goals. There was the perceived comfort of a four-point lead in the third game only for Bellaghy to bang in two goals.

The sides met in the first game of 1989 with Bellaghy hitting the net three times but it was a 40-year-old Walls who grabbed Newbridge’s only goal of the game to put them back in the lead after half-time.

Newbridge beat Glenullin and Banagher to make it to a final against neighbours Castledawson.

They were dealt the blow of Brian McErlain’s sending off. Damian Barton then reverted to centre back to put on a show before Liam Devlin sealed victory with a late goal.

MEN OF 89…Newbridge’s last championship winning team of 1989 with Lawrence Walls on the extreme right of the back row

“It was a great feeling,” Walls said before honing in on the excitement ahead of Sunday’s final with Glen.

“There’s a great buzz around here at the minute. It’s far more than it was in our day. Far more of a buzz. It’s great for the cubs.”

The following season, Walls came off the bench to score goals against both Swatragh and Sleacht Néill as they set out to retain the John McLaughlin Cup.

“I started the semi-final against ‘Screen and I probably shouldn’t have started,” Walls said of his final senior game.

He took up the whistle and played away with the reserves before hanging up the boots in 1994, at the age of 45.

“I enjoyed the football, I really enjoyed it,” he summed up. “When I started, I thought it was going to be like this every year, winning championships and getting to finals and all that jazz but we went through a very barren spell.”

For the last decade and a half, he has been the club groundsman. Along with Sam Bateson and Seamus Doherty, they don’t miss many training sessions.

The club’s championship preparations and the need for floodlights has saw training moved from pillar to post. But Walls and his two wing men don’t miss.

Having played in two of the club’s most successful eras, Walls makes a bold statement. The current team is their best yet.

When joint manager Gary Hetherington rocked up at the start of the season to take training, Walls told him as much. Hetherington responded that Newbridge had won 10 championships.

“I don’t care,” Walls told him. “We’re never had as much talent as we have today, so it’s up to you boys to take them over the line.”

The teams of the past were big and strong. In the eyes of Walls, the current group are total footballers. It’s a statement he makes with one of those proud facial expressions.

Hetherington and Brady committed to doing their best. It has taken them to the final step. To Celtic Park and a joust with All-Ireland champions Glen.

*****

Declan McKeever’s first game in the green and white was much like his uncle Lawrence’s. As an unsuspecting eight-year-old, he was on the way to watch an u-10 and u-12 double header across the Bann to Moneyglass.

No kit bag, just away with his cousins for a day’s craic. No gear. No boots. Nothing.

“John Mulholland was the manger and asked me if I was playing football today,” McKeever remembers.

A negative answer wasn’t an option. He was needed. Shorts, socks and boots were cobbled together from somewhere. He was reached a jersey and his Newbridge career was up and running.

“I think I ended up playing for the u-10s,” he laughs. “That was my very first game, it was against Moneyglass on a wee training pitch.

“That was my introduction to football, it was around 1997 or ’98 and I’ve never looked back.”

Aware of the stories coming from the team of 1989, fast-forward to 2002 and Newbridge’s intermediate success lit the fire that he wanted to be a senior footballer.

The Ulster campaign took Newbridge to Clontibret and two games with Drumgoon with the Cavan men prevailing after a replay. But McKeever was hooked.

“That was my first fond memory of winning a championship and thinking this is something I want to be a part of,” he points out, with the excitement in his eyes adding to every word.

“From that day, I wanted to be a part of this. I was in the bus, on my way up with the team and home again.

“I was a young fella at the time. That was my first recollection of wanting to play for Newbridge, to be a senior player.”

Lawrence’s son Gary is Declan’s Godfather and he would be trucking him to training and to games. To a teenager, fanatical about football, this was everything. He’d be there kicking balls out from behind the goals.

By 2006, he was in his first year of minor and up training with the seniors. Togged out on the bench brought another insight in what it took to play football in the big, grown-up world.

The call came the following season when they faced Coleraine in the semi-final, a team who had won Ulster the previous season and were meandering towards the 2010 senior title.

There were a few red cards brandished and McKeever was hastily handed a sub slip. It was his time. His brief, following Ciaran McGoldrick, the fastest of the clan. A finisher.

“I was known as the next fastest defender we had at that time and, there I was, marking him in my first game,” he said.

It was the same in the final against Foreglen. Nigel Bradley was their ace and McKeever came on at half-time to do a job on him, helping Newbridge to glory.

When Stephen Lynch broke his leg ahead of the Ulster campaign, he was the next man up for a start against Whitecross.

He became a mainstay, playing in every championship game until the start of this season.

After a shaking off a heel injury, his comeback was thwarted with a hamstring problem. He only returned to play a full reserve game by the middle of the group stages, the same day the seniors beat Magherafelt at the end of August. With a settled team, he hasn’t been able to force his way back in.

“I’m just fighting for a place after getting injured at a bad time. All the hard work has been done for the championship prep and I missed a bit of it so I’m just catching up now.”

There is disappointment. That’s natural but there is a ‘team first’ attitude to it all. In years gone by, players would’ve been patched up and pushed back out. Now, Newbridge have a panel of players Lawrence Walls could only have dreamt of being part of.

They now believe they should be in the chasing pack every year. McKeever puts it down to the 2009 season when Gavin Devlin was part of their management.

Ice baths were brought in. Eating plans. Recovery drinks. Training was taken up a notch. There was a team bonding day to Todd’s Leap and a motivational speaker telling them they really needed to believe.

Going down narrowly to Loup who went on to win the championship that autumn is something McKeever goes back to. It’s about believing.

There was a spell back down in intermediate before Paddy Bradley came on board to lead them back to senior. And they’ve remained there.

Every year, two or three new players emerged from underage. It’s a contrast to Lawrence Walls only ever remembering one minor team in his youth. The maths didn’t add up. One of the years, someone collected him to play for Moneymore. He doesn’t know why. It was a game of football and away he went.

McKeever’s underage was the same. There were the amalgamations of St Peter’s and Ardtrea North. Needs must.

The Newbridge of today is a world apart. They easily paddle their own canoe. McKeever can still picture a group of young players, including current senior Oisin Doherty, watching senior training last year.

The fanatical outlook of men like Walls, Sam Bateson and Seamus Doherty has been replicated by the young players who’ll flock to Celtic Park on Sunday.

There is a genuine belief that the John McLaughlin Cup will return to Newbridge sooner rather than later.

NEXT GENERATION…Declan McKeever oversees a Newbridge underage game

That’s why last season hurt so much. They’d been burned by Glen in 2022. With Glen and Sleacht Néill in one semi-final, a 2023 final spot was up for grabs.

There was a feeling they would improve from the group stages and how the vast spaces of Owenbeg suited them. It was a false dawn. And the hope made it even harder to swallow. Newbridge failed to score in the first half and managed just two scores in a tame performance.

“It was probably one of the worst matches I’ve ever been involved in as a player,” McKeever said.

The questions were floating everywhere around them. What is going wrong? What happened? What are we doing? Are we good enough?

There was a clean slate followed by honesty and hard work. Newbridge now expect to be competing for championships. The age profile suggests there is more progression to follow.

The children around Newbridge will have experience of the championship to inspire them. Heroes on their own doorstep.

“They’ll have memories for a long time,” says McKeever.

His evenings and weekends in Newbridge was time well spent.  He is now involved in coaching the youth. It has turned full circle. Uncles Thomas Fullerton and Lawrence Walls taught him well. That    impression has moved down. His own three kids are football crazy.

Newbridge will be dreaming what a successful Sunday could look like. A win would top everything off. If they don’t get over the line, it won’t define them either.

There will another few men stepping up from minor next year. The show goes on. It’s the bridging of generations.