By John Harrington

Leitrim’s 1994 Connacht Championship success is often described as a tale of the unexpected, but it wasn't for the Leitrim players or management.

At a pre-championship weekend together in Castleblayney, the Leitrim players pooled their money into a pot and went down to the local bookies and laid a generous wedge on winning the ’94 Connacht title at odds of 16-1.

Leitrim manager John O’Mahony was so confident that his team would defeat Mayo in the Connacht Final that he pre-arranged for an open-top bus to bring the team through Carrick-on-Shannon on the evening of the Connacht Final.

Their shared confidence was built on solid foundations.

O’Mahony had taken charge of Leitrim in the year previously and quickly set about raising the team's standards and expectations.

Leitrim defeated Galway in Tuam in the ’93 Connacht Championship, their first time to do so in the spiritual home of Galway football since 1949. They subsequently lost the ’93 Connacht semi-final to Roscommon, but coming into the ’94 campaign they were convinced they were primed to avenge that defeat.

O’Mahony was a master-planner, and had the inside track on every team that Leitrim played in the ’94 Connacht Championship.

He was helped in this by Brendan Harvey, a Leitrim native who was living in Dublin, and who basically acted as O’Mahony’s chief espionage agent.

He rarely got to watch Leitrim play because every weekend he was tasked to instead watch an opposition county and compile an extensive report on their performance with the strengths and weaknesses listed of all their players.

Getting his hands on recent videos of Leitrim’s opposition was a particular speciality of Harvey’s.

A favoured tactic was to ring the County Board secretary pretending to be a supporter and spin a yarn about an Uncle in Australia who would love to get his hands on a video or two of the county team in action.

He might go so far as to suggest this ‘Uncle’ was in poor health, and that this was one of his dying wishes.

Harvey regularly watched Roscommon training sessions before Leitrim played them in the ’94 Connacht Quarter-Final, and even got away with chatting to their goalkeeper, Brian Morkin, while he stood in goal, casually pumping him for information.

Coming into the ’94 Quarter-Final, John O’Mahony knew exactly how Roscommon would set up, what players were in good form, and what players were struggling slightly.

In a match of very fine margins, all that information was arguably decisive because Leitrim won by a single-point courtesy of a late Declan Darcy long-range free.

Darcy was the hero again in the Connnacht semi-final against Galway when he kicked another late free that set up a Connacht Final showdown with Mayo.

Such was the anticipation in Leitrim that they vastly outnumbered Mayo supporters in Hyde Park. Of the 25,000 supporters who paid through the gates, it looked like close to 20,000 of them were from Leitrim.

The banner that that hung from the bridge in Carrick-on-Shannon instructing the last person to leave to turn out the lights was almost as practical as it was humorous.

It’s a testament to how well prepared mentally the Leitrim players were for the challenge that they were in no way upset by the concession of a soft goal after just 18 seconds of the match.

Incredibly, Mayo wouldn’t score again for the entirety of the first-half as Leitrim kicked six unanswered points to move three points ahead by the break.

It looked like they were going to coast to victory when they outscored Mayo by 0-6 to 0-1 in the first 20 minutes of the second-half, but a late surge from Mayo meant the end of the match was more nervy than it should have been.

The final whistle eventually blew and all hell broke loose as joyous Leitrim supporters surged onto the pitch.

And when the JJ Nestor Cup was presented to team-captain Declan Darcy, he was joined by the last Leitrim captain to lift it, 95-year-old Tom Gannon, which remains one of the most iconic moments in the history of championship football.

Carrick-On-Shannon partied that night like it never had before or has since, and the open-top bus John O’Mahony had arranged was put to good use.

“When we got to Carrick we boarded the open top bus,” wrote O’Mahony in his autobiography, ‘Keeping the Faith.’

“That was a nice surprise for the players, and it proved to be a masterstroke because Carrick was crammed with thousands of people and it was a great way for the players to interact with the supporters.

“One moment that really resonated with me was when I caught eyes with an elderly man in the crowd.

“He looked like he was from rural Leitrim and had put an awful lot of preparation into going to the match because he was kitted out in his Sunday best and was waving a little Leitrim flag.

“He wasn’t in company. He was on his own. But he couldn’t have looked happier. He was holding that little flageen like it was a badge of honour and you could see his admiration for the team shining from his face like a beacon.

“I waved down to him and I’d have loved at that moment to have gotten off the bus and spoken to him because there was just something unique about him.

“It really hit home to me at that moment just how much this all meant to the people of Leitrim.”

What’s seldom is wonderful. For every Leitrim supporter who was there to witness it, the 1994 Connacht Final victory will remain a day of days until their dying one.