GAELIC GAMES/National Football League: Donegal bid for a semi final place without Brendan Devenney, who instead will be playing for Finn Harps. The county's star turn talks to Seán Moran about pay-for-play and his thoughts on how the GAA might improve the players' lot.

Donegal's Hyde Park showdown for an Allianz National Football League semi-final place will be missing a key player tomorrow. Calling it "Hamlet without the prince" would be a bit dismissive of the improvements wrought by Mickey Moran and his other players during the campaign, but there's no doubt that Brendan Devenney is currently the county's best-known player and one of the country's most menacing forwards.

But this weekend he is required elsewhere. While his team-mates chase an extension to their NFL season, Devenney will be helping Finn Harps in their crucial National League soccer match against Dublin City - with promotion to the Premier Division on the line.

This juggling of the two games has been a frequent feature of the past couple of months. He says that he is "split down the middle" in relation to the sports, but soccer holds an additional card. Devenney is contracted to Harps and gets paid in return. It's hardly likely to be a fortune, but for someone with a wedding in October and a newly-acquired mortgage, as he says, "it all helps".

In the flash-fires of controversy that break out on the amateurism issue within the GAA, predicaments like Devenney's are illuminated.

"It's not just a cash thing," he says. "I enjoy playing with Harps, but you'd be a fool to turn down a good contract."

Players in his position aren't unusual. With the preponderance of the soccer season overlapping with the least significant time of the year for GAA inter-county activity, accommodating both sports hasn't been too much of dilemma. But that's about to change.

So far there has been peaceful co-existence in Brendan Devenney's sporting life. Last October Finn Harps were generous about his decision to set aside his contract in order to travel to Australia for the International Rules series. Donegal have borne with equanimity his inability to be in two places at once and have been quite happy with his combining Saturday evening soccer with Sunday afternoon football.

Normally March would be the end of it, but this year the FAI have decided to switch their season to summer scheduling.

"That's definitely a problem," he says. "It's going to be choice time for me in the summer. I'll have to decide which way I go. If Harps get promoted, that could have a lot to do with it. I'd have to take a good look at the contracts on the table then. It would certainly make the choice more difficult."

Whether you believe that the loss of players to part-time professionalism is a bad thing, or consider it a fact of life outweighed by the potential damage that could be unleashed by scrapping amateurism, there's no doubting that the attraction of some sort of income is becoming a factor in decisions reached by players.

There have been a number of skirmishes on the question of amateurism in recent months. Among them has been the proposal of the unofficial players' union, the GPA, that all inter-county players be paid a weekly retainer of €127. Devenney sees inter-county players coming from a long way behind that baseline.

"At this stage it's not a question of being given something. Players are starved of reimbursement. It's costing money to play for your county, probably a couple of hundred euro. There's time off work. Most people would do a bit of overtime if they could but training three nights a week doesn't leave much room for that. And some jobs aren't that handy about you missing work.

"Then there's diet requirements. Since I started taking that seriously as part of my preparation and recovery, I'm eating a lot of carbohydrates and spending a lot of money just eating.

"No-one's paying for that. You play all summer for the county and then for the club so you can't get a summer holiday. I never go on one and I'd have paid twice the money if I could go away with my friends.

"That's worse now with the qualifiers. They took in an extra €5,000,000 for the GAA and there was no gesture to the players from Croke Park. You wouldn't believe the number of players close to the edge about all of this, really dissatisfied with the GAA."

In response to this general argument, the GAA points out that it isn't a profit-making organisation and that money generated by its big events goes back into the association's financial ecosystem. Devenney isn't impressed.

"You could say that about any organisation. Ask Paul Scholes to play for Manchester United for nothing. He might if it was a local club. But when he looked at the television advertising and the merchandising money being made, he'd soon think twice. The GAA isn't marketing itself properly. O'Neill's having such a monopoly (on playing gear and sports equipment) is a joke.

"Let Umbro and other companies come in and build up a bit of profile and add a bit of colour. Even that on its own would enable players to get something. The GAA isn't realising its full marketing potential."

Realising his own potential has taken Devenney a couple of years. After a bright start, which brought Donegal to NFL semi-finals and an Ulster final and Devenney to the Ireland panel for the first revived International Rules series in 1998, his career dipped. He attributes the decline to inexperience and lifestyle.

"When I first came on the scene with Donegal there was a bit of a buzz and I thought this is great. Then the team started to stutter and the buzz wasn't so good. We'd got to the stage where people were beginning to expect things.

"I also had dietary and blood-sugar difficulties that needed to be sorted out. Sometimes I used to feel like a bag of jelly going out. Certain foods didn't agree with me. I found out that my form's about energy. If I feel good I'll play well."

His restoration was completed in Australia last autumn, as his predatory instincts formed a major part of Ireland's weaponry - top scoring in the first Test - in a surprisingly emphatic series victory.

The success must have been doubly gratifying for a player whose inclusion in the travelling party prompted references to favouritism on the part of Ireland manager Brian McEniff, a countyman of Devenney.

Between the first and second Test last October, he spoke about the allegation: "One of the reporters was saying maybe he (McEniff) brought me because I was from Donegal.

"I didn't know anything about that. Just having him there and him knowing my game was great. He believed in me and I didn't want to let him down."

In retrospect he lets the criticism go.

"That didn't bother me at all. If something annoys me, it's beaten me. If it was true, how come I was the only Donegal player asked to trial?"

Having done so well at three (including International Rules) sports within the last six months, he's aware that the time to specialise may be approaching - a leading player getting ready to nominate his stage.