From Liverpool and Gerrard to chasing the Anglo-Celt Cup – Armagh’s Aidan Forker reveals ‘Road to Damascus’ moment

Even the following season, when a talented Armagh minor team were coming together for what would prove to be a successful assault on the All-Ireland, he waved them away.

He was on another path at that stage. One he hoped would lead him to a life as a professional soccer player. His brother Paul, signed by Preston North End as a teenager, and had paved the way but Aidan was ploughing his own furrow and was good enough to be invited cross-channel on trial a number of times, most notably to Liverpool and Melwood.

“It was daunting,” Forker recalled. “I found it hard because I was only 14, a bit of a homebird. My brother was in England at the time. He played for Preston North End so he signed when he was 16 and he went and played when he was 16, spent a few years over there and ended up coming home again.

“I was able to sort of bounce off him when I felt a wee bit weird. I was on my own, but you wouldn’t change it.

“A great experience, I got to meet all the players at that time, the Gerrards and Carraghers, Who was it? Sami Hyypia was playing and Djibril Cisse was there. All them. I think Peter Crouch was there at that time as well. It was nice and I got to play with the academy guys and see the level and see the youth set-up and all that.

​“Then I got a couple of other trials probably off the back of that. I spent some time in Liverpool with Kenny Shiels as well when he was with Tranmere Rovers. He was head of the youth there. All good experiences and good exposure I suppose to the high-performance set-ups and it would have whetted my appetite a wee bit.

“Obviously it didn’t come off. I’m lucky that I have played at an elite level for most of my life.”

He’d been good enough too to be called into Northern Ireland underage set-ups, playing centre-half alongside a lanky kid from Derry called Shane Duffy.

“I made final squads and final squads and didn’t get the full cap, you might say. My first trial for Northern Ireland, it was Under-14 maybe. There was, maybe, four teams of 11, maybe 44 players trialling and I was put in centre-back, which I was raging about. Who was beside me? Shane Duffy. Me and him lined out at centre-back in trial games. He was the same size he is now when he was 14 so I think that helped him along with heading the ball.

“He was a great communicator and talked very well. That’s really all I remember, him chatting beside me and keeping me right. Winning headers I suppose, that was my only real recall. I think I was the footballer between the two of us,” he laughs.

Perhaps Armagh winning the minor All-Ireland was his Road to Damascus moment, the point at which he turned to football. It came at a time in his life when his soccer career was still going well, and he had broken into the Dungannon Swifts team. But watching that team felt like he had missed something while another brother, Stefan, was an Armgh tyro, being called into the county set-up while still at school.

“I had been asked into that team but said no I was focused on soccer and was in the first team for Dungannon. And I still had aspirations of doing something in that regard at 16 or 17 and I said no (to the minors in 2009) and they went on to do their thing.

“And it was tough to watch because it would have been really nice to be a part of it in some capacity. They had a real top, top team there so I always said if Armagh came knocking again I wouldn’t say no.”

They did come calling. Paddy O’Rourke asked him in for a trial in the dead of winter.

“I remember going to play an Ó Fiaich Cup game in Navan, my first-ever game for Armagh. I’d been playing centre half-back for the club and he threw me in centre-back, it was a windy night, raining. And I travelled down with my brother Stefan and I was thinking ‘what am I doing going down here’.

“And in Navan if you remember the changing-rooms the hooks are real high up on the wall and I was thinking ‘Jeez there must be big men around Navan’. So it was a real baptism of fire, but I loved it and I embraced it.

“I think we got a good lesson that night. I was probably one of the better ones that night and never looked back after that.

“The opportunities came and I was fortunate to play in the championship that year and get a start and thankfully I’m still here what, 13 or 14 years later?

“Listen, I enjoyed my days playing football. Great memories from my childhood. Best days I ever had on trips away and different times, away over to England and stuff. It was a good time. A great formative experience.

“It’s funny, I am a completely different person now than what I would have been. It probably just meant so much to me, it weighed on me a wee bit that I wanted it so much.

“And the Gaelic was a wee bit more freedom. It’s ironic that the game, Gaelic, that came a wee bit easier meant a wee bit less at that time, and I probably performed better when that was the case and I wasn’t putting pressure on myself to be what I wanted to be in soccer and probably held myself back. But that’s a personal thing that I am grappling with in my own head, but it’s interesting.”

Forker has been with Armagh ever since, satisfied he’s exactly where he’s meant to be, playing the game he once swerved. Strange how life turns.