After 20 seasons and 144 appearances for Derry, Mark Craig’s career deserves a fairytale ending

Christy Ring Cup final

Derry v London (Saturday, Croke Park, 5pm, live on Sport TG4)

AFTER 20 laps of the sun, Mark Craig will lay down his armour at 6.30pm today.

Internally, he’s been pretty insistent that he’ll hand in his gun and badge when this year is over. He said the same last year. There is still convincing to be done on that front.

Does it stare up at him from the Croke Park sideline or sits at his feet in the zone where beaten teams stand, respectfully but unhappily back from those that dance on the floor they both wanted to own?

If everyone got a fairytale to finish on then their market value would be diminished. But of anyone, Mark Craig deserves one.

Life off-Broadway in the lower tiers of inter-county hurling is often unglamorous.

In 2021, Offaly hit 0-41 in a Christy Ring decider as he stood ashen and frustrated on the sideline.

Earlier that year, the self-employed joiner had gone for a scan on his back. By the next day, he was prepped for the operating table and being told his hurling career was over.

Mark Craig will make his 145th appearance for his county across both hurling and football when he lines out at Croke Park this afternoon. Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

The knife had been through his elbow, his knee, his shoulder. Injuries took away a chunk of his late 20s, without ever taking the bite out of him they would have taken from others.

By the time the back came for him, he was 33.

Since being told his hurling career was over, Mark Craig has won two Christy Ring All-Stars and played what regular observers will tell you is the best hurling of his career.

Craig will be 38 in October.

In pre-season the last three winters, he’s won just about every fitness test they’ve held.

Manager Johnny McGarvey has a unique relationship with Craig. They are married to two sisters, Cathy and Bronagh.

McGarvey had been Lavey manager just a few weeks when they ran into a Kevin Lynch’s team still looking for ways to fill the full-forward void left by Geoffrey McGonagle’s retirement.

“Mark played in there against us. They beat us well. They were maybe 15 points up and there’s a minute to go. He gets the ball and puts it in the corner of the net.

“Then he came out fist pumping as if he’d just won the All-Ireland. And I always thought to myself, once he crossed the lines, there was no friends.”

Mark Craig in action for Kevin Lynch's against Lavey. Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

Outside the lines, there have been so many friends.

The Mark Craig that will make his 145th appearance for Derry in Croke Park is an entirely different animal to the Mark Craig who quietly goes about life off the pitch.

When the chance arose a few years ago, Mark bought the house next door to his parents in Mitchell Park.

From he first togged out with Kevin Lynch’s, Peter and Jacqueline Craig, and now wife Bronagh and their three daughters, have followed him to the ends of the earth to watch him hurl. Every single week, everywhere, forever.

Inter-county hurling didn’t look like a path he’d walk early on. Dungiven had decent underage football teams at the time and he was coming up rightly on them.

He’d go on to become a stalwart of club football too.

“The mad thing about Mark is that he took up hurling so late. He never lifted a hurl until he was maybe 14,” says his former club and county team-mate Kevin Hinphey.

“Once he started, he just went crazy at it. Until he was maybe 18, you never seen him around the town that he didn’t have a hurl in his hand.”

Mark Craig has undergone surgeries on his shoulder, elbow, knee and back during his career. Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

Craig didn’t go to St Patrick’s Maghera but was the same age as a crop of players that came through having won Ulster and All-Ireland B titles at school.

He would play on the first and captain the second of Derry’s provincial U21 champions, who scored back-to-back victories over Antrim teams that had run Limerick and Galway to the wire at minor level.

“They had [Neil] McManus, Shane McNaughton and those boys. So it was a serious Antrim team, that was no mean achievement for Derry,” says Hinphey.

Craig, who now counts McNaughton’s brother Christy as a team-mate, has outlasted them all.

In the 21st century, only Mark Lynch (164), Chrissy McKaigue (156), Paddy Bradley (156) and Ruairi Convery (152) have played more games for Derry.

We try and distil the whys of these things but for Mark Craig, the secret sauce was simple: discipline.

Hinphey recalls one night the club went up to Ballycastle for a friendly in the pits of winter. Drenched, skinned alive, they defrosted in the showers and headed downstairs for tea and sandwiches.

“I looked over and I saw him picking at the sandwich. He was picking for the chicken pieces so he could eat them, but he didn’t want to eat the white bread.”

A fellow joiner, McGarvey recalls when they did Housing Executive work together a few years ago in Limavady and Craig would sit in the van in the freezing cold eating dry chicken and broccoli out of a dish.

“No sauce. And I mean it was freezing cold.”

The first time Hinphey ever stepped through the doors of a gym, it was in his mid-20s and Mark Craig had taken him there.

All of which paints a certain picture.

Mark Craig played football for Derry 44 times, including coming on in the 2014 National League final. Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

“You know the way sometimes boys that are like that can be pushing that on other people? But he was never like that. He never went on like that. He’s the most affable man on the planet,” says Hinphey.

“You would go a long way to find somebody that has a bad word to say about Mark Craig.”

Inter-county football had flirted with him, gave him 44 appearances of which seven were in championship. The first of them in 2008, the last of them in 2017, with gaps in between.

He started the championship game against Donegal in 2011 and came on in the 2014 League final having marked Alan Brogan in Celtic Park earlier in the campaign.

In 2016 he’d been out of the team for a couple of months when Dungiven found themselves in relegation trouble. He couldn’t stand back and watch them go down. So he and Kevin Johnston went against instruction and played in a big game against Banagher, which resulted in them being expelled from the panel for the rest of that season.

“I know that that hit him very hard because he felt like he had given his all for his club. The way he looks at that is he didn’t have any choice.

“I don’t think any person that’s a genuine GAA person would ever question that he done the right thing,” says McGarvey.

A lot of men would have told Damien Barton where to go when he came back to him that winter. Not Mark Craig. The thing was what it was. He parked it and went back for the following year.

Football offered Craig a brief spell on Broadway. Hurling in Derry stalks the edge of the shadows, sticking its toe occasionally into the light. He has pushed it harder than almost anyone else.

“If you’re picking a greatest ever Derry team, Mark Craig’s in it. I don’t think anybody that knows Derry hurling would argue with that,” says McGarvey.

“If you’re talking about the best players, obviously there’s a context to that forwards always get the glory, but I think if you’re talking about best players in the last 25 years, I think Mark Craig sits right at the top.”

At the plinth in the Hogan Stand would be some way to go, if that is his decision.

All they do know is that by half six, he will either be back with his shield or on it. Same as it ever was.

Donegal's David Walsh being chased by Mark Craig from Derry