With grace we will suffer

With grace we shall recover

There by the grace of God

There by the grace of God, Manic Street Preachers, 2002.

Sunday 10 September was an emotional evening at the home of Tyrone GAA at Garvaghey.

The launch of Dr Dónal McAnallen’s book ‘The Pursuit of Perfection’ – a detailed and inspirational account of his brother Cormac’s life and legacy – was attended by, among many others, Derry’s All-Star full back, Kevin McCloy.

While the large crowd packed the auditorium, to the Lavey man’s right at the head of the room sat Tyrone senior football manager, Mickey Harte. To his left sat the book’s brilliant author. Each had a unique and emotional, yet intertwined, story to tell.

The whole evening was knitted together with class and wit by one of Ulster’s great Gaels, Mark Conway.

Some of the insights were absolutely fascinating for any followers of Gaelic games.

Like the story of how Cormac loved to keep records. How as a player, as the book’s title suggests, he had constantly strove for perfection both on and off the pitch.

How there were drawers full of his own self-performance analysis, long before performance analysis was even ‘a thing’. How he had kept those records from his earliest playing days until his last.

One of his drawings from his formative years showed a detailed schematic plan of Croke Park. Each stand was sketched and labelled. And then, like on match days such 28 September 2003, it began to fill with 82,000 people. Except it wasn’t finished. Circles had been drawn to represent each person in the crowd. The Nally stand was filled first. Then the Hogan. The young would-be All-Ireland winner had drawn the representation of each person by hand, boxing the circles into groups after each 100 in order to keep count.

“He always kept himself honest,” said Dónal McAnallen.

By the time he had reached a few sections along the Hogan Stand, Cormac had drawn a staggering 10,000 circles on the page.

His devotion to detail was demonstrated again years later on perhaps his finest hour. After devising their game plan to beat Armagh at a training weekend on the previous Saturday in Dublin, the wallchart fixed on the dressing room wall underneath the Hogan Stand predicted both the half time and full time scores to within a few points.

The game had followed the script more or less to the letter and as the Red Hand players celebrated their maiden Sam Maguire win, few noticed as the young Eglish full back removed the document from the wall, carefully folded it, and placed it in his kitbag for safe keeping and posterity.

It was an act only revealed to his manager, as well as the attentive crowd, on that damp Sunday evening in September 2017.

It was jaw-droppingly poignant.

Just like McCloy’s account of his own experience.

No-one needs reminded of the events of 13 August 2014 at Owenbeg when 11 minutes into the first half of the senior championship match between Lavey and Magherafelt, McCloy collapsed.

The husband and father of two (now four) had been struck down by a serious heart problem, the details of which are beyond the analysis of this discussion. Thanks to the presence of defibrillators – the awareness around which had been the gift of the Cormac Trust following the heroic response of the McAnallen family to the circumstances in which they found themselves ten years previous – McCloy’s life had been saved.

It was a connection he would never forget again and one which accounted for his presence at the book launch, as well as his unstinting ongoing work with the McAnallen family and the Cormac Trust.

From the time of Cormac’s death, the McAnallen family was keen to direct public attention to these cardiac conditions that cause such sudden deaths. Their work based on the promotion, education, awareness and provision of defibrillators has changed many lives, including one of our county’s finest footballers.

They were two All-Stars and two full-backs, suffering two similar incidents with tragically different outcomes.

We owe them both our diligence and attention to detail within all our own clubs and communities to ensure that proper training and education is in place for the use of CPR and automated external defibrillators (AEDs).

There by the grace of God, go I.