A crowd of two turned up to the Antrim press night ahead of their clash with Donegal. The event was a reflection of just how the side had sunk out of sight and sound but Liam Bradley was still a little hurt. As he and the five players he'd invited along on a non-training night spoke to an empty clubhouse, he wondered how they felt about it all. In the end it turned out only his feelings had been damaged. For years, the players said, they'd been used to this sort of thing.

"I was embarrassed," says Bradley. "I felt for them, having brought them there on a night when they could have been doing something else. I have been trying to drum into these fellas that they are no worse than any side in Ulster. There are Sigerson Cup medals there and guys who play for Queen's, Jordanstown and St Mary's all the time beside fellas from Tyrone and Armagh and Derry and hold their own. This didn't help with what I'd been trying to tell them all along."

Nor did it stop him. "That game didn't exist for most people out there, a warm-up for Donegal," says captain Paddy Cunningham of the Ballybofey clash. "But we knew we had a right chance, we just couldn't come out and say it. We knew we had to stick with them and we weren't that surprised when we did win it. Liam said on the bus we were the beatin' boys of Ulster, people laughed at us but we weren't responsible for what has gone on the last 30 odd years."

The demise of Antrim football over those same 30 years has been the fault of nobody in the sporting world. Just months after Antrim had won the All Ireland under-21 title in 1969, the RUC killed a nine-year old boy who was lying in his bed in the family flat in Divis Tower in Belfast. The Troubles had truly started. By the time the senior team reached the Ulster final the following year, the Falls Curfew was in place. Din Joe McGrogan whose goals had put Antrim into the under-21 decider was killed by a Loyalist bomb in 1975. His captain Liam Boyle served 18 years in Long Kesh while Michael Culbert spent 15 years behind bars too.

What should have been the start of something special for Antrim no longer mattered as, quite simply, the place endured more than any other county when it came to Irishness. In fact nearly half the killings that took place across the Troubles were there.

"You would expect from that base of the under-21 team and Ulster final side, things to go on and improve," says county secretary Frankie Quinn. "But Loyalists targeted GAA people. There were many murders here and people didn't want to be associated with the GAA. We've missed out on a lot but politics still doesn't make it easy. Belfast City Council provides over 100 soccer pitches but not even seven GAA pitches are given over by them. Maybe now some of these bodies are realising the GAA has a lot to offer. It won't solve the problem but last week's win helps us a lot."

Earlier this week Eamonn Grieve who was corner-back on the last team that reached an Ulster final alluded to the same problem through the county's history, saying people naturally had other things to worry about. It's something Bradley agrees with. "It's the same with Derry c ity, football is weak there after everything that happened and that's the case across much of Antrim. It hasn't been easy but things have to move on."

And they have been over recent years. In 2006, the county launched its strategic development plan laying out over five years a plan to gradually make the second-most populous county a force. It's year four and slowly things are changing for a side that didn't win a football championship match between 1982 and 2000. "We need to keep focussed and not get carried away," continues Bradley. "We've only won a single game. That has to be a beginning rather than an end."

The sleeping giant of Gaelic games may not quite be awake, but it could be soon.