ULSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL:Donegal and Derry have won the last two league titles, but it is a long time since either enjoyed championship success, writes Keith Duggan
THERE WILL be shades of 1993 about Ballybofey tomorrow and memories of that wet, eternal Sunday when Donegal and Derry truly were kings. When the counties contested the Ulster final that July in infamously poor conditions, Donegal were the reigning All-Ireland champions and Derry, it transpired, were the champions elect.
Eamonn Coleman promised as much when he said in victory, "We'll go down to Dublin next week to have a good look at what youse have got down there. And we don't need directions either, thanks."
Those were heady days in the northwest. But tomorrow will be of paler fire. Donegal and Derry may have won the last two league titles but it is 10 years since the Sperrin men were crowned in the province and Donegal, remarkably, have not won an Ulster title since that All-Ireland deliverance in 1992. In the currency that counts, these Border counties are in dire poverty. That fact has been preying on Donegal minds in particular.
"I am looking forward to this more than any other game in the last few years," reveals Eamonn McGee, the imperturbable Gweedore man who now forms the central spine of the Donegal defence with his younger brother Neil.
The McGee men had arrived in Mac Cumhaill Park early for what would be the penultimate training session before the championship and standing in a fresh breeze near the dug-out, McGee acknowledged that Donegal have been a conundrum over the past few years.
"Last year was a disaster, personally and for the team. I just want to get back on again and start winning games and proving that we are a good team. We lost whatever respect we gained during the league. We didn't fulfil the potential. Everyone knows we have the footballers and we are a quality side but it is getting it out of us on a consistent basis that is the thing.
"We probably need a sports psychologist as much as a football trainer. We went through Division One undefeated and then when it came to training for the championship, the lift we needed wasn't there. The competition for places wasn't there and the intensity was missing. The hits you expect and the tackling you expect just weren't there. It was nobody's fault. We gave it a lot for that league and we couldn't keep it going.
"And maybe a lot of us were going about with our heads up our asses . . . myself included. I was happy with a medal and suddenly we were two weeks away from the championship and it was too late to turn it around."
The general feeling in the squad is they spent every day since last summer's abrupt exit against Monaghan stewing about their lot. That match, above all others, seemed like the ultimate proof that Donegal embodied the classic sporting motif of flattering to deceive. They won the league, got a pass from the heavens with a fluke of a winning goal against Armagh, their modern nemesis, and then blew it against Tyrone.
They showed flickering signs of life against Leitrim and Westmeath but looked flimsy of mind as much as body in that crunch match against Monaghan. It was the same old story. Since 2002, they had lost three Ulster finals, pushed Dublin to a pulsating All-Ireland quarter-final draw in front of a 79,000 Croke Park crowd, performed admirably in losing a gripping All-Ireland semi-final against Armagh the following summer, beat All-Ireland champions Tyrone with 14 men in the second half the year after that and perversely followed up the loss of a Division Two final replay to Louth by going unbeaten and earning their first league title the following spring. Monaghan seemed like the ultimate proof that they simply were not reliable.
"It was as if the ass just fell out of the team," recalls Neil McGee of that defeat. "Things went flat. And we were so rocked after getting beaten by Monaghan that it took a few days for it to sink in that we had lost Brian as well."
The decision of Brian McIver to quit the county only to return last autumn was a significant reversal of fortune in the current chapter of Donegal football. A perception that the squad was in it for a good time rather than a long time made it hard to secure a manager after Mickey Moran left in 2002, a stark situation that forced the dramatic return of Brian McEniff.
The Bundoran enigma worked minor miracles during his time in charge and it seemed as if the team were mature enough to break new ground under McIver, who came in with the reputation of being one of the shrewdest operators on the Ulster scene. The league title was welcomed but McIver is typically phlegmatic when he considers the view that Donegal have underachieved.
"It's like anything else in life. We started three years ago in Division Two and last year we performed well in the national league and the players needed to get a number of monkeys off their backs," he says.
The fact that Donegal's record since 1992 in finals has been bad was seen as a real stumbling block. So they got that off their back and the fact that players won a national title for the first time in their careers was a stepping stone.
"Last year, our championship performances were hard to gauge. I don't think there is one easy answer as to why. We had a number of big games. The league semi-final in Croke Park was a big game to these players because they needed to win in Croke Park.
"Then came the final. Follow that with Armagh and the serious history between the teams. Maybe we drifted into the Tyrone game feeling that we could get by that one too."
It all means there is a lot riding on tomorrow's encounter against Derry. As ever, Donegal enter the championship as something of a puzzle. McIver is, at best, hedging his bets on how central a role veteran attacker Brendan Devenney will play this season: the St Eunan's man remains among the most consistent forwards at club level, and this week McIver reiterated that the full forward will be up for consideration after this weekend.
Adrian Sweeney, Donegal's most recent All-Star winner (in 2003) is not on the squad. But there can be no question the team is changing radically under McIver, with younger players like Frank McGlynn, Leon Thompson, David Walsh and Michael Murphy earning considerable playing time. Brian Roper, who is on the bench tomorrow, is the lone indispensable forward from the players who lined out against Derry in the Ulster final of 10 years ago, when the Oak Leaf county thieved the game with a late and brilliant combination goal between Geoffrey McGonigle and scorer Joe Brolly - the last occasion on which the Dungiven man blew kisses to the gallery.
Kevin Cassidy, an All-Star in 2002, is team captain and the most obvious force of personality in a group that has sometimes appeared to doubt its right to play on the biggest stage. Inculcating that necessary arrogance has been central to the concerns of successive managements.
On the sideline tomorrow, standing on the edge of the pitch, will be a blond-haired man who preserves the connection between the All-Ireland winning squad of 1992 and the current group. Paul Callaghan was understudy to goalkeeper Gary Walsh in the shining year and has served as goalkeeping coach under McEniff and McIver. He admits the 1992 team was not short on forceful personalities and it was winning the Ulster final - against Derry, with 14 men in the second half - that stands out as much as the All-Ireland final.
"In a way, beating Derry was the highlight. What stands out for me is that we beat Fermanagh in the semi-final by four or five points, and afterwards some of the senior players asked for harder training.
The likes of [Martin] McHugh, [Anthony] Molloy, [Martin] Shovlin. I felt it was tough enough as it was but they felt it wasn't good enough.
"I remember us here on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights for terrible sessions. And these were players with a lot of mileage up them, most of whom had won under-21 medals and they might have sat back but they drove it on."
Replicating that bloody-mindedness is the trick for the current management regime. Callaghan believes that over the past few years Donegal panels have been filled with likeable football players who were content with the odd firework of a performance.
"Sometimes maybe Donegal players were happy enough with the profile and to be recognised as a good team and maybe there wasn't enough going into getting medals.
"With all respect to the National League, it is not an Ulster title and it is not an All-Ireland title. I think we have got into our heads now it is all very well to be playing for the county and being recognised on television and the rest of it but in 20 years time, when they think back to what they won, they have to know they will have given it all.
"And they are putting in the training and the effort - some of the boys are travelling two hours to get here so they may as well, when they are here, try to win something. Because it is a short career. And you don't realise that. I mean, I felt certain I would be getting back to an All-Ireland final with Donegal."
On the eve of the championship, it is all but impossible to predict whether Donegal are ready to make that leap to maturity. By all accounts, they focused on improving their physical strength through the league but acquitted themselves fairly comfortably and were still theoretically in with a chance of returning to the final on the day of the last match, when they lost by five points to Derry.
When the counties met in Ballybofey two years ago, Donegal played well and won but the match is memorable for two crushing challenges on Barry Dunnion and Michael Doherty, incidents that emphasised the need for Donegal to meat up.
"Derry are a strong team but we have a right strong team now too," reckons Neil McGee. "Most of the team are over six foot and Ryan Porter has had us working on a good programme so I think we will be able to match them physically."
But it is the wars within their own minds that Donegal will chiefly have to deal with, as Eamonn McGee alluded to when he considered the prevailing difference between Donegal and those counties that have pushed on to glorious conclusions over the last few summers.
"We need to be a bit more ruthless. Tyrone and Armagh, teams like that, there is a mean streak about them. We are just . . . kind of . . . footballers. We just like to go out and play. Maybe one or two of us have it - Neil, the brother, does - but the rest have lacked that bit of badness. Teams that are winning are ruthless. And we need that."
These are sentiments common on Gaelic fields all over the country. Yet there is a sense that at long last the Donegal players have begun to realise they have allowed a wealth of great opportunities to pass through their hands in recent years and have grown tired of the wastefulness.
Of course, Derry are pursuing their own agenda and look to have the skill and mettle to have a big say in this year's summer of football. The championship is badly in need of a thunderous football match and that this enduring local derby ought to provide the right elements for that.
The late, great Eamon Coleman will not, of course, be present but if he could be, one imagines him glued to events on the field. That road to Dublin has changed little since 1993, but for Donegal and Derry, getting there has become no easier.
