'This is a massive day for Offaly football' - Roger Ryan
By Kevin Egan
When Crystal Palace earned promotion to the Premier League in 2004 through the playoffs, having sat at 20th place in the league table when the former Norther Ireland striker Iain Dowie took over as manager in November, Dowie felt that the lexicon of words already in existence didn’t offer him anything suited to describing what his players had just achieved.
So in his bid to accurately reflect what had happened, he coined the word ‘bouncebackability’, and such was its popularity that in 2005, it was added to the Oxford English dictionary.
No doubt part of why it captured the zeitgeist was because even if you knew nothing about how Crystal Palace had fared that season or the journey they had travelled, the meaning of the word spoke for itself.
To those that live somewhere the far side of Shinrone, Shannonbridge or Clonbullogue, it might be a bit harder to understand what the word ‘Offalyness’ means, so it’s hard to say for certain whether Roger Ryan’s new addition to the local vernacular will follow the same path.
The emotional connection between Ryan and his players, the faith that he has in them, the respect and appreciation he showed for everyone who played a part in making this Leinster title possible, his understanding of the context and history of Offaly football, all of it was on full view.
Most evident of all was Ryan’s passion for the Faithful County cause, exuding from him as he sucked in the Newbridge air
“It’s unbelievable. I said before the game that if we took this to ten minutes to go with the game still on the line, we’d win. And I knew, even after Louth got the penalty, I knew that these boys have character and Offalyness than you can’t buy,” he told TG4’s Micheál Ó Domhnaill.
“I’m so proud of every one of them, I’m so proud of their parents, their clubs, this is a massive day for Offaly football. 1989, two players out on the field there tonight (Eamon and Tomás Carroll), their dads (Cathal and Paul) played the last time we won this.
“I’m ecstatic for every football person in our county, we soldiered a long time without winning a whole lot.
“The last time we won something was at U-20 during Covid, there wasn’t the excitement because of the restricted crowds.
“I get the credit this evening along with the management team that’s there now, but a lot of the credit has to go back down the academy system. There are people busting themselves for Offaly football, for them out there tonight, it’s just unbelievable,” Ryan continued.
Sensing the fact that something special was happening in an interview, Ó Domhnaill asked the Shannonbridge man to explain the genesis of the term, realizing that it wasn’t just something that had been first said there and then.
“Offalyness is a word, and it’s something that’s in our dressing room. It was written down on paper at the start of the year when we met as a management team, I wrote it down and the boys looked at me and they knew what it meant. That’s what we’ve tried to instil in these young men and I think we’ve done all right at that this evening,” said Ryan.