Chrissy McKaigue was sitting eating his breakfast, still stewing over Slaughtneil’s county final defeat, when his phone started to hop this morning.
As a nominee, plans were already afoot to attend Friday's PwC All Star banquet in Dublin but McKaigue just assumed that the winners were being revealed on the night and thought no more about it as he processed his disappointment from last Sunday.
Instead, the alerts on his phone brought the pleasant surprise that he and Conor Glass, a member of the Glen team that vanquished Slaughtneil, were indeed Derry’s first All Stars in 15 years.
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“I could ramble out the old cliche about nothing trumps the collective award in comparison to the individual and obviously that does hold merit but, the reality is, it’s a hugely prestigious award and one that I’m very respectful of and very honoured to have received,” says McKaigue.
“It would be quite remiss of me if I didn’t give huge credit to Rory Gallagher because the way our games are structured, if you’re not one of the best teams in the country in any given year you don’t get these type of accolades.
“He has been the main driver of creating the environment for Derry, for bringing them back from the brink to being a top four side in the country.
“All them things would be on my mind and I think it’s important to display a type of gratitude to the others that have allowed me to get to this point.”
Glass is eight years McKaigue’s junior and hasn’t endured the hardship of dropping all the way to Division Four and numerous swift exits from the Ulster Championship, and so probably has a different perspective on the success that they have enjoyed together this year.
Indeed, at 33, McKaigue is among the oldest first-time recipients of an All Star award.
“I’ve always took a huge amount of prestige from playing for my county but also playing against the best teams and the best players and yes, you can’t always win and more often than not Derry got beaten in them games but I would have always been happy in some regard to be playing at that level because that’s what I ultimately wanted to be as a child growing up.
