GAELIC GAMES: KEITH DUGGANmeets the man who has played for Fermanagh and Cavan, earned All-Ireland success with a Belfast club and is now a Donegal selector

THE PHONE Call came out of the blue. Rory Gallagher was just getting used to the idea that he probably wouldn’t be playing for Fermanagh again and was warmed by the anticipation of all those Tuesday and Thursday evenings to himself.

Then Jim McGuinness interrupted with an invitation to join the Donegal management team. He explained that Peter McGinley had been forced to step down because of work commitments and McGuinness knew Gallagher’s own work took him to Killybegs regularly.

Gallagher had grown up in Belleek: a walk across the family farm takes one across the border into Donegal. He knew the football cartography of the neighbouring county well. McGuinness talked of his plans, persuasive and confident and Gallagher was intrigued.

More than is common in Gaelic games, Gallagher had a wherever-I-lay-my-hat attitude to football. Several exiles from Fermanagh – the first self-imposed, the next not – led to periods with St Brigid’s in Dublin, with the Cavan county team and winning an All-Ireland with St Gall’s in 2010. But to go into management was a step through the looking glass.

To become a selector – a figure of authority and all that – was perhaps to officially recognise your career as over.

Over the last decade, there has been a peculiarly chameleonic quality to Gallagher’s football life.

From 2000, when Armagh and then Tyrone began to rumble, the top scorer in the Ulster championship was not one of the feted front men from those leading counties but Gallagher. In a single match – the 2002 Ulster championship against Monaghan – he fired 3-9, a feat that required hasty dusting down of the record books before it was established that John Joyce of Dublin had registered 5-3 in the Leinster championship 44 years earlier.

“Just a bit of craic, he says of that achievement. “Something for your friends to slag you about. My cousin Raymie was always a better finisher than me.”

But no player has scored more in a single championship game in the history of the GAA. Gallagher’s tally was unprecedented in the modern game and in an age of defence is unlikely to be bettered any time soon. Those three years illuminated his great potential but in the seasons afterwards, he was a curiously elusive presence, famously sitting in the stands during Fermanagh’s fabulous run to the All-Ireland semi-final in 2004.

If anything, Gallagher seemed proof of just how quickly the life of a Gaelic footballer can become rear view mirror material. Except he kept reinventing himself and appearing in different colours and even now, Gallagher is still only 32.

He was back playing with Fermanagh last summer but prior to this season was parcelled up with a number of veteran footballers considered surplus to requirement. He accepted the decision with no great agony. Like McGuinness, who is lean as a greyhound, he still looks like he could cut it on the field.

“Don’t know about that,” he laughs. Gallagher is sitting in a coffee shop in Killybegs at a table with a commanding view of the glassy, mutinous water of Donegal Bay. Outside looks like February rather than May and it hard to believe the All-Ireland championship will start on Sunday.

“With the county stuff, when you are not involved, you go from it quickly.

“I think for Jim more so than me because he is finished up a bit longer than me. So when we get ready for training, he is out kicking the ball about more than I would be. But no, it’s black and white for me: when it is over, it is over.”

“So this has been a surprise,” he says of becoming a selector.

“It was not something that was on my radar. But I knew a reasonable amount about Donegal and I saw what Jim did with the under-21 team last year and said I would give it a go. I knew Jim was big into sports science and sports psychology and fitness.

“And I knew there was an impression out there that he had this system of playing and teams stuck to it rigidly. I feel that is just lazy comment. What he does have is a fair level of professionalism.

“Training is very much fun. They train hard and he encourages them to be themselves so he definitely wasn’t this systematic, robotic manager I had heard so much about.”

McGuinness and Gallagher came to football prominence during the same era but their experiences were radically different. McGuinness was a talented if unproven young midfielder from Glenties who was as surprised as anyone else when Brian McEniff brought him onto a squad that had been through the wars.

With his lean frame and mop of black hair, he was like Donegal’s emblem for youth on a team of battered and bandaged men. The timing was staggeringly good: that September, Donegal won the All-Ireland for the first time in their history. With just a season under his belt, McGuinness had a Celtic Cross.

After that McGuinness established himself as an indispensable Donegal player for the next decade and then set about becoming an exceptionally promising young manager. Gallagher, five years younger than McGuinness, grew up in Belleek and made the short drive over to Bundoran on the night of the All-Ireland homecoming.

“We weren’t looking at them enviously. For a while, we went into Aodh Ruadh to play against them in under-age games but they were that good, we wouldn’t score. We just had my cousin Raymond and we couldn’t score. That’s how good they were then.

“Up until I was 13, I think I believed that the Donegal border ran from Ballyshannon to Glen because that was the entire county team came from within that region. Now it has switched completely to the north of the county. But Donegal was important to me.

“We looked up to what they achieved. People forget that from 1983 to 1999, Fermanagh won two championship games. Because of that, when I was growing up guys like Manus Boyle and Matt Gallagher probably meant more to me.”

Nonetheless, he was firmly of Fermanagh, going to school in St Michael’s of Enniskillen rather than three miles into De La Salle in Ballyshannon, his calibre shining through under Dom Corrigan. Gallagher was a minor for Fermanagh in 1993 and played full forward on the county team that won the All-Ireland B championship in 1996 – the first national title in the county’s history.

By 2000, he was both playmaker and marksman on the Fermanagh team that won a championship match in Ballybofey for the first time in 70 years. McGuinness was playing midfield that day.

“I have strong memories of it. It was a shock to people generally but not to our team.”

Part of Gallagher’s mounting frustration stemmed from his belief that with an extra push, a Fermanagh team might have actually gone and won an Ulster title in the last decade.

He left the squad after the 2002 championship because he felt disappointed with the way things went under Dom Corrigan – Fermanagh exited the championship after a pulverising 2-15 to 0-4 defeat by Kerry. He came back in under Charlie Mulgrew but it wasn’t long before he had packed his bags again.

“I wouldn’t have lasted the season under Charlie. It was a relationship that wasn’t going to work.”

His absence gave way to the perverse situation where the county with the tiny playing population stood on the threshold of an All-Ireland final with their most prolific and gifted forward of the previous three years watching in the stands.

There is a strong argument to be made that if Gallagher had played that semi-final against Mayo, there would have been no replay. He surely must regret his absence.

“Not in the slightest,” he says straight away. “Look, I played for Fermanagh for many years and it meant a lot to me. Sometimes you are better off biting your lip and now I am in management I can see that. And I suppose some people felt it was as well I wasn’t there after opting out, that Fermanagh was better off without me. And there were times I did things that weren’t the right thing to do.

“But that was because I also felt Fermanagh was a county that didn’t put its best foot forward for success. I don’t buy into a small county or having small numbers as an excuse for lack of success or limited performance.

“Greece won the European championships. Ajax won the Champion’s League. You need 24 players: that is it. There were under-21 teams I was involved with that just got together the night before. We beat Donegal, ran Armagh to a point. But I don’t think we did everything we could.”

And it wasn’t as if he quit. His performances with St Gall’s 10 years after those glitteringly clever turns with Fermanagh are testimony to a personal discipline.

He is going to play with the Belfast club this year as well and speaks glowingly of his affection for them. Gallagher’s experiences with the Troubles were minimal: he recalls the inconvenience of being stopped on the way to games at the checkpoint past Belleek and that the school bus driver would stop there because he had been shot at once after doing a run in the town.

But the Gaelic clubs in Belfast were steeped in decades of perseverance and oppression that, while rarely spoken about, still fuel their efforts to succeed. Winning, at 31, an All-Ireland club medal with St Gall’s has been an unexpected joy for Gallagher and could be interpreted as an oblique reward for following an independent path all the years.

It was only his second time playing in Croke Park. In April, he was back there, watching as Donegal, playing with 14 men in the second half, seized a league Division Two title.

He smiles when asked how he has found a group whose reputation has preceded them down the years.

“Been all sorts of stories about the Donegal squad, I suppose. To me, there is a nice blend of young players and older lads who aren’t actually that old. Guys like Karl Lacey have been around but he is only 26. There is a great energy about them and they are serious about their football.

“They are probably not happy about how it has gone in the last few years and feel that they have a point to prove. The comparison to the 1992 team is always there and they want to leave their own mark. I would be exceptionally wary of Antrim.

“I know they have quality players and they have phenomenal pace and natural athleticism. They won in Ballybofey two years ago and I saw some crazy odds there: lazy book-making because they didn’t look at the teams Antrim put out in the league.”

Tomorrow is a perilous opening day for Donegal. Because of a typically sleepy championship schedule, this game is the main billing. Donegal have not won a championship match at home in four years and Antrim beat them in MacCumhaill Park two years ago.

Antrim coach Liam Bradley has been offering not-so-subtle digs, declaring Donegal football is “real puke football in a sense”.

It is all perfectly set up for Antrim.

“Big time,” Gallagher agrees. “They are playing a team they don’t fear and I know a lot of those players: they are phenomenally athletic and have great pace and ‘Baker’ is a very astute manager. He is energetic and he seems good craic but he definitely is tactical.

“He is very good at seeing weak points in teams and I am sure he is going to have something worked. But we have enjoyed the league and the longer it went on the more we found out. Ideally, we would have liked more time but the league final was good preparation.”

“We” may sound odd coming from a Fermanagh man whose best first years in the green shirt involved tormenting Donegal defences. But it is easy to see why McGuinness wanted him in his background team.

Gallagher’s knowledge of Antrim is bound to be of use in the dressingroom tomorrow but at least the gods have spared him a meeting with his native county.

“It could only be the Ulster final,” Rory Gallagher smiles.

The thought has crossed his mind but he shakes his head when asks it if would bother him.

“Not in the slightest,” he says and starts to laugh.

“No, I wish Fermanagh well, always will. And sure when you have played with as many teams as I have, it doesn’t matter.”