ALL-IRELAND SFC QUALIFIERS ROUND FOUR: KEITH DUGGANwonders which version will show up tonight: the brilliant one who trounced Derry or the pale imitation who struggled against Carlow?
THIS EVENING, Galway and Donegal meet under Ben Bulben in a championship match that carries echoes of six summers ago. Then, the Ulster men grappled with the very real prospect of career humiliation before embarking on a slightly dizzying run that ended against the granite version of Armagh in that year’s All-Ireland semi-final.
Only four Donegal players (Barry Monaghan, Michael Boyle, Kevin Cassidy and Brian Roper) from the starting side that defeated Galway in that quarter-final replay started against Derry last weekend, but, in the Northwest, the mood remains the same. Donegal remain as baffling as ever. It has been a season defined by the turbulence that has become the registered trademark of the county: board room intrigues, wildly unreadable league form, player indiscretions and an Ulster campaign that fell so short of expectations it led to stinging criticism that took even the players back.
Their loss to Antrim led to Martin McHugh, one of the shrewdest observers in the game, to declare on radio it was time to disband this particular group of players and to start from scratch. The Kilcar man was not being unkind in his assessment – he praised the service they had given the county – but he voiced what a lot of people felt: this particular generation of Donegal players were all washed up.
Yet here they are, six weeks later, one match away from an All-Ireland quarter-final. They remain a mystery to everyone, even themselves.
“There is a famous old saying: one swallow doesn’t make a summer,” cautions PJ McGowan, the former Donegal player and coach and current vice-chairman of the county board.
“The big question now is to see if this group of players can replicate the performance that they gave against Derry. If they go back into old habits and play as they did against Carlow or Clare – a game in which we could have been caught in – then in a way, they are back at square one.
“But if they go out and carry the spirit they showed against Derry into the Galway match and if they perform to their abilities then, regardless of the result, they will have made considerable progress. I do feel they have it in them but it remains to be seen.”
McGowan had a sense of foreboding coming up the Antrim match, when the wheels appeared to have fallen off Donegal football.
The talk that Donegal were a shoo-in for an Ulster final slot – that victories over Antrim and Cavan/Fermanagh were a birthright – had become hard to ignore and he felt the squad had to have been affected by it. And he could never remember Donegal ever dispatching Antrim in Ballybofey without making heavy weather of it.
“Invariably, we won those games in the end,” McGowan notes, “but not without a struggle. And this time, they gave a young Antrim team a sense that there was something to be taken from this game and they went with it.”
The aftermath did not augur well. As John Joe Doherty stood in the lobby of the new complex at MacCumhaill Park, the rain tumbled down and the stadium looked desolate. The Donegal players filed out on to the bus, heads down and tapping texts into mobiles. It was hard not to feel sorry for the genial Glen man, who had taken up the reins on a famously volatile stagecoach. When someone made the bleak joke that the only way things could get worse was if Donegal drew Kerry in the next round, Doherty said something interesting.
“Well, I would like to play a team like that because we were just sitting ducks here today.”
Wishing for the most consistent and decorated championship team in the history of a game just minutes after such an ignominious collapse seemed delusional. But Doherty’s central point only became apparent during the Derry match: that it took something extreme to rouse the players out of their skins.
Apathetic against Carlow and fitful against Clare, Donegal seemed to be limping on aimlessly, unable to leave the championship as much as determinedly progressing through it. It wasn’t long before the old chestnut of squad indiscipline surfaced, with two players suspended by Doherty, boozing being the unacknowledged reason.
Ciarán Bonner had already endured a tempestuous relationship with the county squad, bouncing off and on it with regularity. Disciplined prior to the league match against Galway this spring, he came on at half-time and cantered forward for three lovely points (in a game that Galway had all but won) and then promptly left the panel until the championship. Bonner was on a last chance. But the punishment for Neil Gallagher, captain for the team’s national league triumph in 2007, drew some sympathy.
“I know big Neil and I like him,” attests John Gildea, the Glenties man who was an automatic selection at midfield for Donegal for over a decade.
“The thing is, Neil knows he stepped out of line. And John Joe resolved to take a certain course of action to deal with it. And there have been calls among the players and the public to bring him back. But the thing is: you can’t do right for doing wrong. Neil is a very useful asset to this squad and in terms of this championship, there is no doubt that having him in there would be a big help.
“But in terms of the bigger picture, the manager probably has to set a precedent. Even in my time, players would always have their views that this or that player should be on the county side. But it is up to the manager to make those decisions.”
The sympathy for Gallagher would appear to be widespread but is balanced by an acknowledgement that Doherty is correct in taking a firm stand. As far as the rest of the world went, it seemed like the same old story in Donegal. Sensational reports about the social dimension of Donegal teams have dogged them throughout the decade.
The tales of a Behanesque pub-crawl in Dublin after a famous quarter-final draw against the Metropolitans in 2002 are legendary. References to those Rocky Road days infuriate the current players as most of them weren’t even on the squad then. It was a point that Rory Kavanagh, the captain made during the week.
“I know from talking to people that Donegal have a certain reputation and I think the majority of players on that panel are very committed and work just as hard as players in other counties. So some of the criticism is unwarranted and some people do start bringing up the stories of yesteryear. And you have to hold your hand up and say that people maybe did do wrong but I don’t think that it is right to tar everyone with the same brush.”
Nonetheless, the implication that the Donegal football team is the GAA’s version of the Merry Pranksters continues to follow them.
“It has always been there,” sighs Gildea. “I would go to Railway Cup matches and would get looks of amazement because I wasn’t drinking on the Saturday night. It was sort of: “Thought all you Donegal boys were alcoholics.”
The reality of any team in any sport is it is made up of individuals with very different attitudes. And for sure, we have had players fond of a few pints — but probably no more so than in other counties. The problem has been in knowing when to draw the line, of deciding that come May, it is a time for business only.
“The vast majority of the squad were not even involved with the messing after the Dublin game. And what happened didn’t help, but it didn’t cause us to lose the replay. The reality is more complicated. In the drawn match, we had set ourselves up to contain Dublin and to not fall behind and hit them late in the match. It nearly worked. In the replay, Barry Monaghan was off injured after three minutes, I got a dead leg and was gone 15 minutes later and Ray Sweeney got cut. We lost the spine of our team and then Dublin got a run on us, they got a soft goal. And you play Dublin in that sort of mood in Croke Park and you are up against it. That was the real cause. But the other stuff did not help.”
Gildea bowed out of the game two years ago with a bunch of nearly days and a few small regrets. He played in Donegal teams that lost Ulster finals, in 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2006, lost the 2002 quarter-final and the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final. In addition, Donegal teams lost the Division Two play-off in 2007 and an All-Ireland quarter-final to Cork (by a point) the same year.
Gildea is still torn when he tries to assess those years. He partly believes Donegal simply fell short in those three Ulster finals, when they came up against an exceptional Armagh team.
But he sometimes wonders too if there is maybe just something too easy-going about the Donegal attitude that has made the critical difference: a fundamental sense that losing is not, after all, the end of the world.
“That could be true. Maybe we have been content to accept the role of gallant losers. There is a kind of openness about the way the game is played here at club level. Our game probably doesn’t have the physically aggressive nature you would find in other club championship across Ulster, particularly Tyrone. And I think the best teams – Tyrone and Kerry – do have that meanness that maybe does not come that naturally to us.”
But it did once upon a time. There was a bloody-mindedness about Donegal’s victory year of 1992, a narrative that also involved Derry. That Ulster final is a match John Joe Doherty will remember with conflicted feelings: Donegal won a bitterly contested match playing with 14 men in the second half but Doherty was the man sent to the line. (He was substitute for the All-Ireland semi-final and was called onto the starting 15 on the morning of the All-Ireland final, after Martin Shovlin was forced to relinquish his spot due to injury. (Such are the fine lines).
Contentious as Doherty’s appointment as manager was, the hope was his involvement would provoke something of the old fire. Last Saturday, against Derry, it did. It could be said they had nothing to lose going into that match but on another level, everything was at risk. Had they gone down obediently, as expected, surely the state of the game would have left in a deeply depressed state.
PJ McGowan coached the Donegal under-21 team that won the All-Ireland in 1987 and formed the backbone of that 1992 side. He is not sure how far this Donegal squad can go but he maintains they have the potential to make something out of this championship.
“They had come in for some stinging criticism which, hard as it may have been, probably was merited too. These players are amateurs and they are good lads but a lot of time and, I suppose, money is invested in them as well and there is a certain expectation they will reach a level of performance. This group have come close over the years and have a league medal to show for it. It could have been more. But they suffered a huge setback this year and have responded it to it now in a way that is encouraging.”
And so on – or back – to Galway. The maroon team have history with the Donegal men. In 1983, Val Daly caused Brian McEniff to spend the night sitting on a park bench in Dublin after he hit a late goal to edge Galway through in that year’s All-Ireland semi-final. Ten years later, McEniff was back, his third period in charge and Donegal’s fourth All-Ireland semi-final.
John Gildea still has wistful memories about that Armagh match, which exploded into unexpected territory after Christy Toye’s sensational goal. Speaking on a television review programme that Christmas, Toye recalled what had convinced him to drive through the notoriously mean Armagh defence and shoot for a goal. “I thought: I might not be up here again.”
As it turned out, he hasn’t been, not yet. None of them have. Now, the next generation of Donegal outsiders press on and as ever, their public is in the dark as what will happen next.
“It has always been there . . . . I would go to Railway Cup matches and would get looks of amazement because I wasn’t drinking on the Saturday night. It was sort of: “Thought all you Donegal boys were alcoholics
