RAISE A GLASS

With Derry's season on the line today, their man in the middle will be crucial to any chance of sending the Dubs packing

- Roy CURTIS

INSCRIBED on Seamus Heaney's headstone, a poetic call to rise above the ordinary, are words forged in the furnace of his own lyrical imagination, "Walk on air against your better judgement.

The beloved Derry bard reposes in a quiet field in Bellaghy, scarcely a six-pack of miles from Glen, one of the GAA's most decorated clubs and the setting for the initial, thrilling unfurling of Conor Glass's generational talent.

Explaining that memorable line, one he deployed in his Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance speech in 1995, Heaney said: "I think it has to do with the sense that the marvellous is as permissible as the matter-of-fact."

A resistance-to-gravity philosophy that has governed Glass and his football life less ordinary. The calling card of an athlete capable of ascending like an undulating monster wave — what Heaney might call "walking on air"

And a principle to which Derry are compelled to adhere to if they are to crowbar their way into the All-Ireland conversation by soaring above and barrelling over Dublin.

Their chances of reprising the epic 2024 League final script on today's Newry stage are, as they have been since his return from Aussie Rules exile, inextricably linked to one of the more striking landmarks of an Irish Championship summer.

It says something of Glass and his range of his talents that, although Derry have not won a game in precisely a year a team perilously close to becoming football's great wasted opportunity — he is one of three Player of the Month nominees.

Glass recently bolstered his status as an author of improbable deeds by scoring a combined 2-6 against Armagh and Galway, the teams who contested last year's All-Ireland final.

In the latter, his supreme ball-winning set up Conor Doherty for a late equaliser that added to a growing body of evidence that Derry are at last shaking themselves from an inexplicably lengthy hibernation.