TWO hours in the van down to Dublin and the building site was closed. Bad weather.
Two hours back to Ballymartin where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.
It’s one of those days for Peter Fitzpatrick but at least it means he has time to reminisce about his football career. Regrets? He has a few. His time with Down was too short but it was action-packed and he came within a kick of the ball of a clean sweep of All-Ireland medals.
He won the minor title in 2005 but then lost U21 and senior finals, both by a point and both against Cork, in the space of 16 hectic months (which also included a Division Two final) between May 2009 and September 2010.
“I try not to think about the big one at all to be honest,” he says.
Before we get to that ‘big one’, there’s the 2009 U21 final to discuss. Fitzpatrick had missed out on Down’s Ulster U21 Championship in 2008 because of shoulder surgery but the two-footed attacking midfielder, already in the Mourne county senior squad, was fully fit for the 2009 campaign.
Down got past Fermanagh in the quarter-final and then played three games in the space of a week. First an Ulster semi-final against Tyrone and then, on the following Wednesday night, the Ulster final against Armagh which the Mourne youngsters won thanks to Conor Poland’s late goal.
Attempts were made to get their All-Ireland semi-final – scheduled for just three days later – postponed but they fell on deaf ears and so the Down lads boarded the bus for Longford to face a heavily-fancied Mayo side that included future household names like Rob Hennelly, Donal Vaughan, Lee Keegan, Kevin McLoughlin, Tom Parsons, Aidan O’Shea…
Fitzpatrick and Ardglass clubman Mick Magee played Parsons and O’Shea off the pitch in midfield and despite going down to 14 men, Down won by three points.
Cork in the final? Bring them on…
“We weren’t expected to do too much,” says Fitzpatrick.
“There were a few close calls but, looking back, all those games in Ulster helped us. We were sore but when you’re 21 it doesn’t affect you as much as when you’re 31.”
The Rebels had the better of the first half of the final in Portlaoise but goals from Eamon Toner and skipper Timmy Hanna got Down’s nose in front and Fitzpatrick’s second point sent the Mournemen into a two-point lead with two minutes left.
Then disaster struck as a high ball broke to Colm O’Driscoll in the square. He stabbed it into the net in injury-time.
“We thought we had it in the bag,” says Fitzpatrick.
“I think, subconsciously, we thought we had it to be honest. But it was just luck, the ball landed at your boy’s foot and he had a tap-in. It’s the worst way to lose but the best way to win.
“I had the head down after it, the head down for a while. Everybody loses games and after it you’re devastated but it took me a couple of days to really devastate myself with the thought of it. It takes a while for losing to sink in – it takes a while for winning to sink in too.
“It was hard to get your head around what happened because it all happened so quick and you have to sit back and think: ‘What the hell went wrong there?’ There was nothing between the teams, we were ahead but at the end the ball landed where they needed it to land and that was it. It’s over before you know it.”
FITZPATRICK had been called into the Down senior squad in 2008 but surgery on a long-standing shoulder injury restricted his impact. After the U21 disappointment he marked his Ulster Championship debut with a point across Fermanagh but there wasn’t much else to shout about for the Mournemen who lost by three points in Enniskillen.
Carr stepped down at the end of the season and was replaced by his former team-mate James McCartan who ushered in an unexpected renaissance in the fortunes of the Ulster aristocrats.
“James brought a lease of life to it,” says Fitzpatrick.
“I couldn’t even tell you how he did it but the atmosphere changed, there was new blood in and the likes of Brian McIvor coming in with Paddy Tally and Jerome Johnston and James meant there was a lot of wisdom in the set up.
“The League went well and the boys got a taste for the good stuff and there was a lot more competitiveness for positions. We hit the ground running and it never stopped.”
Down sealed promotion with six wins and a draw in Division Two and even losing the final to Armagh and an Ulster semi-final against Tyrone couldn’t halt their momentum.
There was purpose and pace about them and their eager forwards thrived on the quick ball that was hammered long and hard towards them at every opportunity.
McCartan’s Mournemen built to a crescendo through the Qualifiers.
Throughout the season Fitzpatrick, Kalum King and Ambrose Rodgers had been vying for the two midfield spots but King and Rodgers were the pairing as Down reeled back the years and outplayed Kerry in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
“I had a slow start to the season to be honest,” says Fitzpatrick.
“Big Kalum and Ambrose… Sure they didn’t do a thing wrong all year so no matter what I was doing I knew I wasn’t going to get in. I was coming on in every game and I was scoring a few points when I came on but I didn’t think I would get a chance.”
It was bad luck for his friend and near neighbour that opened the door for Fitzpatrick. After a superb display against Kerry, Rodgers hurt his knee playing for Longstone and was ruled out of the All-Ireland semi-final against Kildare.
“I would have taken anybody’s position before his,” says Fitzpatrick.
“It’s not the way I wanted to get in the team but it’s just the way it happened. Me and Ambrose were big mates and even at that stage we were golfing together every weekend.”
He pulled on his friend’s number eight jersey with a heavy heart but he did it proud in the two games still to come that season. The first was against a Kieran McGeeney-managed Kildare side that would throw the experience and physicality of Dermot Early against rookie Fitzpatrick.
“I was lucky that I had some experience in big games,” he says.
“If I hadn’t played in the minor and U21 finals, walking into that game against Kildare I think I would have been a bag of nerves.
“But it was a big game. My da wouldn’t be a very emotional person but he took me out for a spin in the car around the mountains that morning. He wanted to get me out of the house to clear my head and get me a bit of space. He told me just to do what I could do in the game.
“Things like that make you realise it’s big for everybody, not just yourself.
“And then Paddy Tally took me to one side before the start and told me to take everything in when I was doing the parade around the field. He said: ‘Take a look round you’ and it worked well for me because, the sort of player I was, I would have had the head down going: ‘Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate…’”
Rising above Earley to grab a Brendan McVeigh kickout settled any remaining butterflies in his stomach. He’d had a piledriver that was heading for the top corner of the Kildare net blocked before he raced onto a Marty Clarke pass and tapped the ball over the bar to send Down seven-points up with 15 minutes left.
“The first clean catch was a big one because there was bigger men on the pitch than me,” he says.
“Brendy McVeigh was the best kicker I ever came across. We had a drill for kickouts in that game. Kalum was a man mountain, nobody could get round him so he would go for a ball and then stop and I would run across the front of him and jump and catch it. “Brendy would land it exactly where it had to be and we got three or four out of it in that game, all down to his kicking really.
“I enjoyed the whole game and I look back on it more fondly than the final, probably because we won it.”
IT was Cork again in the final. Down led at the break and they produced some electric football in a brilliant, open game. It could be an advertisement for the lost art of the kicking game which is what the new Football Review Committee’s rules are designed to bring back.
Good game/bad game, it’s all the same to Peter Fitzpatrick. Down lost and all he has are regrets.
“I didn’t win enough ball,” he says.
“If you look at the statistics I did alright, but as a team we didn’t do enough. In midfield we got cleaned out and not just me and Kalum, we didn’t win enough break ball. We were winning by four points with six or seven minutes to go and that makes it even worse because if we had done a bit more we would have won it.
“Everybody always has regrets and I had more in me but it just didn’t come out on the day unfortunately.
“Even the point I scored near the end, that’s another regret that I didn’t go for a goal. It wasn’t a clear-cut goal chance but it was probably the best one we did have in the dying minutes.
“I should have went for it… But I didn’t.”
He’s being far too hard himself there. It would have taken an extraordinary strike to beat the Cork ‘keeper from that range and his point got Down back within two. But time ran out on the Mournemen and the Rebels went home with the Sam Maguire.
IT’S well documented now how that season proved to be a fleeting glimpse of glory for Down. Armagh beat them in Ulster and Cork (again) ended their season in round four of the Qualifiers in 2011.
Not long afterwards, Fitzpatrick left for Australia. After two years Down Under he returned to the county fold but time had moved on and he couldn’t recapture his old magic.
“I was going to go to Australia the year after the All-Ireland final but I didn’t think it was right to just walk away,” he says.
“I stayed until we got beat by Cork again and then I went for two years and, to be honest, that was the best of me done. Maybe I partied a bit too much in Australia but when I came back I did a wee stint of two years – the first one under James and the second one under Jim McCorry – but I couldn’t get back into the way of it. Maybe I didn’t put enough effort in when I did come back?
“When you’re playing in Australia it’s a lot easier and you think you can walk back into it but you can’t. There was a big difference in the game when I came back even. I remember James going through the tactics for one of my first games back and I came out saying: ‘What the hell was that?’ Conor Maginn says: ‘That’s the way it is now’. A completely different game in two years!
“I wouldn’t rate my performances too high when I came back from Australia. I was young and I had a lot going on. I started building a house and mentally I wasn’t fully committed, I was there and no more, which isn’t a good thing to say
“I could have done a lot more if I had put my head down and I regret it, big time, big time I do. At the end of the day, there’s always tomorrow for the rest of the stuff. If the house had been put back six months well, in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t have mattered. But at the time I felt I had to get it done. Hindsight is a great thing and I do regret not giving it another go when I had it in me but it is what it is.”
IF he knew then what he knows now things would have been different with the county but he can’t have regrets about his service to his club.
After literally running himself into the ground for Ballymartin he called it quits at the end of last season at the age of 36.
“The oul back got it tight,” he says.
“If the ball came in below my knees I was in trouble. I was playing away and going well at half-forward or full-forward until a couple of years ago but the body was struggling. I’m a bricklayer by trade and it was costing me too much at work.
“There was mornings I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the van for a couple of hours. I was sore all the time and I made the decision to quit.”
It didn’t last long though and he returned in 2024 with the club short on numbers.
“I went on holidays and put on a bit of weight and I thought I’d go back to training and have a kickabout,” he says.
“I hadn’t run in about four months and I went to training one Thursday night. They told me they hadn’t enough to field on the Friday night so I had to play. I was there but that was about it and the whole second half of the season was like that. I couldn’t get going at all.
“That’s it, it’s all memories now.”
His county, managed by former teammate Conor Laverty of course, go up against their old enemy Cork again when the Rebels arrive in Newry on Sunday. Down lost their opener in Roscommon last weekend and need a result to get points on the table in the second tier.
“I don’t think you could name a man who could work with the boys he has better,” says Fitzpatrick of Laverty.
“One thing I can tell you, it’ll not be for the lack of effort that man puts in – he’ll give it everything. This year is a big year from them but there’s good players in the panel and if they get a bit of consistency you could be surprised where they’ll go.
“We came from nowhere in 2010, our form in Division Two carried us and hopefully they can do the same.”
