And he goes on to tell you that look, 13 goals in seven games isn't anywhere near good enough and he and his selectors studied the videos to see if the errors were systematic ones or individual ones and what they found was pretty much what they already knew. Footballers in the county were barely playing the same sport as those they were coming up against, even at as low a level as Division 2B. They'd held this truth to be self-evident anyway . . . all the stream of goals did was colour in the drawing.

"You have to realise how far back we're coming from, " he says. "Last year, Antrim footballers struggled with things like getting places to train, even getting jersies to play matches in. In that scenario, you can't expect players to be ready for a league campaign. So things were happening like a player would get caught in possession because he was used to playing low-grade club football where he could take that extra second on the ball. Or another man would be coming out with the ball and get shouldered fair and square and because we'd be so far behind in our conditioning work, his body just wouldn't be able to take the hit and the ball would fly loose and the opposition would pounce on it and stick it in the net.

"It was these kind of basic errors and they came about because this was the stage of development our players were at, simple as that. And you can't just go to them and tell them not to do it again. It's about understanding that a fella needs to be put on a certain regime of weights and workouts so he can take the hit, or that a lad might have come to the panel from playing Division Three football in the Antrim league, where he has all the time he likes on the ball. It takes time and work to get to where these things are cut out."

For what it's worth, Antrim kept Tipperary to white flags and wides in their final league game and have done the same to London and Louth in their two challenge matches since the end of April. Gormley's not saying they'll do the same this afternoon in Casement; all he's saying is there's been progress. It's been the stuff of pennies rather than pounds, though.

When he arrived to take over from Mickey Culbert in October, he felt he could set the bar no higher than getting in "people who were interested". He laughs when he uses the phrase because where he comes from it would be the kind of thing you'd say out of the side of your mouth, a description of folk at the eccentric end of the scale. He grew up playing for Trillick in west Tyrone, son to a father who'd won a vocational schools All Ireland with Fermanagh and a mother whose brother had played for Tyrone in the 70s. He had a grandfather and uncles who'd founded their own club and all he'd ever wanted to do himself was play ball and make his way in it through the ranks.

And he did. He was centre half-back on the Tyrone under-21 team that beat Galway to take their second All Ireland in a row back in 1992 and three years later he was the matchstick-thin midfielder who scored the only Tyrone point Peter Canavan didn't as Dublin pipped them to their first senior All Ireland. He was always an angular presence around the middle of field, fanatically and relentlessly fit at a time just before absolutely everybody was. If quiz buffs remember his name for the point in the final that year, Tyrone people cling to the memory of his winning score in Clones at the end of a coruscating Ulster semi-final against Derry in which his side went in at half-time three points down and with two men sent off.

He played for the county a while more after '95 and was one of the band of Tyrone players who woke up the morning after the following year's All Ireland semi-final with Meath-shaped holes punched through his body like it was a bus ticket. But times changed and faces changed and his circumstances changed too. He got engaged and his fiancee was offered a job as a physio in London so he went with her and they settled for a while.

Like he says himself, you're never lonely when you're in the GAA and it wasn't long before he found a new club to play with in Tir Chonaill Gaels and even a new county to play with, even if it was only the once.

"I played for London against Galway in the Connacht championship in 1999 when they were All Ireland champions. We should have beaten them too. I don't think they took the weekend overly seriously but we gave them a bit of a fright anyway."

It was with Tir Chonaill Gaels where he first started to use some of what he'd picked up in the course of the sport and leisure degree he'd done in Jordanstown. Most of the players going through their hands were just there for the laugh and the kickabout but Gormley had played in an All Ireland final and had a degree hanging out of his back pocket. It made sense for them to get him to at least take charge of training. It didn't take long for it to make sense to him too.

"I would have always been involved with Trillick but not in any official capacity but when I got playing in London, I started getting a bit more hands on. When you play for a few teams, you see things being done . . . or sometimes not being done . . . and you know in your heart that if you had your chance, you could improve on it. And rather than being the fella sitting in the bar or the corner of the dressing room grumbling about how things are done, I think you have to see if you can give it a shot. If it works out, it works out. If it turns out you're wrong, then at least you've had a go. That was the first taste of it I got."

He and Deirdre came home after two years and although he made shapes at the Tyrone panel again . . . even playing in a couple of league games in the spring of 2002 . . . he wasn't the future of the county and he knew it. He has the frame of a cross-country runner and the arms of a lumberjack, though, and it marked out an obvious career for him as a trainer. As it happens, this isn't his first time with the Antrim players, having spent two years training them during PJ O'Hare's second stint as manager between 2002 and 2004. Paddy O'Rourke took him on as trainer to the Down team and at one stage last year, not only was he training an inter-county panel, he was also managing Abbey CBS in Newry to McRory and Hogan Cup success, as well as playing for and training Down club side Bredagh. When the chance came to swap Down for the top job in Antrim, he jumped at it.

Like he says, all he was looking for were people who were interested. Not everybody was mad keen to show him that, though, and it led to his first and most high-profile piece of brouhaha when Kevin McGourty . . . the clever, accurate forward who has carried a large portion of the scoring burden for Antrim these past few years . . . found other things to do when the three trial games were being held. Gormley isn't bursting to talk about it but it's fair to say that if he feels regret at having a panel on his hands without McGourty's name on it, he's hiding it well.

"The situation is this.

There were trials and players were made aware that they were taking place. Players attended, some didn't. Some made excuses for not being able to make it, some didn't.

And in the end, we picked a panel of 30 and that's just the way we left it. If some people don't want to conform, that's fine . . . they won't be in the squad. I think it's important the people see you have a strong belief in your decisions and there are no compromises when it comes to something as important as that respect I was talking about. Because, where do you stop? Players have to know if they behave in a certain way, they'll be part of what we're doing and if they behave in another way, they won't."

It'll be interesting to see where Gormley's straight talking has brought his side, even if it comes to nothing this afternoon. He has three years to get them to listen and to buy into him and if he manages to make any sort of splash, it's not hard to see a future with him standing in a dressing room somewhere handing out a more high-profile set of jersies.

Maybe even the ones he grew up watching and wearing.

DERRY TO MOVE ON TO THE BIGGER FISH DESPITE BRADLEY'S ABSENCE ULSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL ANTRIM v DERRY
Casement Park, 4.15

Referee Cormac Reilly (Meath) This shouldn't be a whole lot more than an afternoon's housekeeping for Derry. Antrim will bring a measure of Jody Gormley's sense and stickability to Casement with them and won't throw their hat at it or go gently into the Tommy Murphy night as a matter of course. But keeping it to within a few kicks of the ball late on will feel like some sort of success. Maybe not in the direct aftermath but in the coming days.

Derry have heartier fish on the hotplate just now. Along with Monaghan and Down, they can pick out an Ulster final a couple of clear days away and in a province where you have to go back fully nine years to a time when the Anglo Celt Cup didn't belong to either Tyrone or Armagh, the prospect has pumped a lot of air into a lot of tyres. That they've chosen not to jeopardise Paddy Bradley's involvement in the latter stages of Ulster by playing him today despite the DRA giving him the all-clear is a fair indication both of how much store they'd place in a title and how far within their capacity they see a win here.

And, actually, it'll do them no harm to have to wobble along without Bradley's stabilising help for once. Mark Lynch (right) has been the next big noise for a couple of years now without ever having had to turn it up to 11 so it won't hurt either him or Enda Muldoon to be the ones charged with ending the day with 1-5 or so apiece against their names.

This is where the road forks for these two sides. Derry to roll on comfortably enough to the Ulster semi-final; Antrim to make a decent name for themselves in the Tommy Murphy Cup.

Verdict Derry ANTRIM S McGreevey; T Scullion, P Doherty, K O'Boyle; S McVeigh, G Bell, J Crozier; J Quinn, M McCann; A Gallagher, K Niblock, J Loughrey; CJ McGourty, K Brady, P Cunningham DERRY B Gillis; M McGoldrick, K McCloy, G O'Kane; P Cartin, SM Lockhart, C McKeever;

F Doherty, J Conway; B McGoldrick, C Gilligan, J Diver; R Wilkinson, E Muldoon, M Lynch