CHAMPIONSHIP DRAW 2012:WINNING THE Ulster football championship from the preliminary round used to be the great impossibility but when Donegal achieved just that this year, it was the second time in six years that it had been done.

Well now they’re going to have to try the impossible, for no county has ever done it back to back. Not just that, Jim McGuinness and his team will have to defeat Cavan, then Derry and then either Tyrone or Armagh just to reach the final. Not exactly what they were looking for from Thursday night’s draw, as selector Rory Gallagher admits.

“It’s probably the worst possible situation for us,” he says. “There’s a lot of big teams in that side of the draw, plus you’re out in the preliminary round. We found last year that there’s such a short period of time from the end of the league final to the beginning of the preliminary round and traditionally, we would have club championship matches played in that time too.

“Just for us personally, the geographical situation with Donegal is that any of our students who are in Belfast, Dublin or Galway find it very difficult to get up to train during the week and the preliminary round falls right in the middle of exam time. That’s our major concern with being drawn there.”

In Leinster, it has long been the case that the four provincial semi-finalists go straight into the following year’s quarter-final. Not in Ulster, however. They make you earn it up there, regardless of your status from the year before. Blank slate, no animal more equal than the next.

“The draw is tough,” says Gallagher, “but we know we can only face it in the knowledge that if we come through it, it will be a great success. The preliminary round is a nightmare draw but if you win it, you’ll be going into the first round proper in good shape. There’s no doubt that if we’re lucky enough to get past Cavan, it will stand us in good stead when we bring Derry to Ballybofey.

“Momentum can help you out and you do get a decent break between the preliminary round and the first round. So you have to balance the down side of it, being terrible timing, with the upside of getting a championship game under your belt while everybody else is waiting to get going.”

In hurling, the one tie that leaps off the page after Thursday night’s draw concerns Clare and Waterford and Davy Fitz and all that. Murphy’s Law decreed it and lo, it came to pass that assuming Fitzgerald is ratified as Clare manager next week, his first championship match in charge will be against his former foot-soldiers in the south east.

With a handful of the Waterford players still less than delighted at his exit – one declined to chat with The Irish Timesabout the draw out of respect for his erstwhile boss – the fixture will come freighted with all manner of hue and cry before next June.

“The first thing I thought was that everybody was going to have a field day over this,” says Stephen Molumphy, Waterford captain for the summer just gone. “I suppose we were going to have to come up against him at some stage anyway.

“But look, it’s going to be no different – you’re looking at a high stakes game just like every other year. It won’t make a difference who’s on the sideline and as players on the pitch we can’t care about that. We can only care about winning and getting through to the next round. We don’t even have a manager ourselves . . .”

Of more importance perhaps was the fact that Waterford – and indeed Clare and Cork have been sent straight into the Munster semi-final. No more than Donegal’s fraught route in football, a Munster quarter-final is an unforgiving place to begin a championship summer.

Not since Clare in 1997 has any county won a Munster and All-Ireland double in the same year from that starting point. Tipperary will have designs on it – Limerick’s targets for the year might not be quite as lofty – but for Molumphy at least, avoiding that fate was the best outcome of the draw.

“It’s all about taking a semi-final and turning it into another Munster final. We play so many league games and challenges through the year that all you want is that injection of championship to tell you where you are and how you’re doing.

“When you start at the semi-final, it feels like old-style championship in a way. You know there’s a back-door there but you still can see a Munster final within touching distance and you get a taste for it.

“That’s the case no matter who is the manager.”