Donegal driven by fear of failure

Anthony Thompson is the most fascinating type of ball player of them all: so brilliant at what he does that nobody notices him.

It was significant that on the night of Donegal's win over Dublin that when the Sunday Game panel analysed Ryan McHugh's second goal, the Glenties man was not actually name-checked during the replay. McHugh's finish was sublime, as instinctive and precise as a Roger Federer passing shot at Wimbledon.

But it was Thompson who made the run to support Eamon McGee along the right wing and then took the ball into the heart of the Dublin defence, drawing three sky blue shirts to him as he pivoted out of trouble and found the Kilcar man with a perfectly weighted pass.

Thompson rarely does anything flashy or exhibitionist but he does stuff like this all the time. You seldom see him sprinting but he has this uncanny facility for being in the right place at the right time.

Gary McDaid summed Thompson up best in a conversation with Chris McNulty of the Donegal News: "He is always at something."

Thompson is regarded as one of Donegal's worker bees, one of the cogs in the McGuinness system. If Donegal win tomorrow, he won't be mentioned as a potential footballer of the year even though there is an argument to be made that he should be a contender.

That probably suits him fine.

One of the reasons Thompson goes unnoticed is that he is so resolutely low key. When he accidentally clashed with Patrick McBrearty in the 2012 quarter-final against Kerry, the Kilcar man predictably came off the worst and ruefully joked afterwards: “The quietest man on the team hit me.”

Under Jim McGuinness, Donegal have held comprehensive press events. Some players attend these while others do not. Thompson never does. He has been at the heart of the McGuinness revolution: a club-mate from Glenties accustomed to the vision that the manager developed there and a player of tremendous versatility and commitment. He has been indispensable, playing 51 of the 53 league and championship games under McGuinness – and he was injured for the league matches missed against Cork and Kerry.

The forgotten thing about Thompson is that, like many of the Donegal players, there are two distinct paths to his football life. You have to go back to 2006 and a Donegal team bus bound for Brewster Park for a fourth-round qualifying match in order to reach Thompson’s starting point. That’s when Brian McIver, the then manager

, told him he would be starting.

In football terms, that match seems like a lifetime ago. But it is easy to gloss over the fact that over half the Donegal players who will feature in the final can trace their formative years to that period.

Consider, for instance, a damp Sunday on the last day of April in 2006. Kerry had won the actual league a week previously, with Declan O’Sullivan as captain. Donegal found themselves in Breffni Park, battling against Louth in a replay for rights to the Division Two trophy. (Or was it a cup? Nobody really knew).

There was unexpected interest in the game between two counties desperate for any bit of football joy – 12,000 turned up on a day of steady rain as Louth won by 1-12 to 1-9. Paul Durcan, Neil Gallagher, Karl Lacey, Christy Toye, and Rory Kavanagh all started that day. Frank McGlynn was introduced as a substitute.

By the time Donegal played Fermanagh later that summer all of the above starters were picked, both of the McGee brothers had nailed down starting spots and Thompson was given his debut at midfield. The team had already played in Croke Park, losing an Ulster final to Armagh, a county that habitually and, it seemed, effortlessly inflicted pain on them. In the build-up to that Ulster showpiece, Christy Toye had tried to make sense of the riddle of playing for Donegal.

“One day we would go out and defeat the All-Ireland champions and the next game we would go out and be pure rubbish. If you could explain that, you’d be a genius.”

Quite. Consider how the 2006 Division Two finalists fared in the following year’s league. Donegal went and won the thing for the first time in their history.

That winning team against Mayo featured Durcan, Neil McGee, Neil Gallagher, Karl Lacey, Christy Toye and Colm McFadden. Eamon McGee and Rory Kavanagh were introduced as substitutes.

Adrian Sweeney, in describing what it meant, name checked recently-departed servants like Damien Diver and Shane Carr. He might well have thought about Jim McGuinness and an entire cast of former team-mates who had toiled through Donegal's difficult years and minor catastrophes before disappearing into the ether.

The 2007 league champions told themselves this was a turning point: that they meant business now. But Tyrone destroyed them in the Ulster championship. They were back at square one and McIver, a manager the panel respected, left a year later.

It was then that Jim McGuinness first put his hand up to volunteer his services. He was told they weren’t required and Donegal set out for another year, still whistling in the dark. The task of managing the side was taken up by John Joe Doherty.

But Doherty belonged to the rare stable of Donegal All-Ireland winners. It wasn’t his fault he was gone from the dressingroom too long to understand just how institutionalised the squad had become to a cycle of crushing championship days. Every year they promised it would be different but every year it was the same, something Eamon McGee touched upon a few weeks ago.

“Every year we set out we always said that this is going to be our year. And we believed that

. We believed that we were going to do it. I have said before that me and Cassidy and Neil have spent hours upon hours in the car travelling up and down to training talking about what we were going to do if we won the All-Ireland. All this partying we would be doing and where we would be visiting.

“And maybe that was part of the problem. We were prepared to talk about it but not prepared to put in the actual work and the attitude wasn’t there.”

Other county teams were only too happy to illustrate the differences given the chance.

Armagh seemed to toy with Donegal throughout that period, beating them for five successive summers, the 2-15 to 0-11 Ulster final drubbing in Croke Park in 2004 being the most vividly cruel of those afternoons.

The aggregate effect of those beatings had to be damaging. Even when Donegal went on a run, supporters were never sure when the next bad day was around the corner. The worst of those were pitiful: the 2-15 to 1-07 beating by Tyrone in 2007 (just weeks after finally beating Armagh thanks to a Hail Mary goal in the last seconds); the 1-27 to 2-10 evisceration by Cork in the All-Ireland quarter-final of 2009.

By the time that Donegal showed up in Crossmaglen for a championship qualifier in June 2010, they had the look of just another county side going through the motions.

Anthony Thompson had faded off the scene and looked set to join the vast ranks of decent players who had played for the county for a while. But along with the old guard, Michael Murphy, Mark McHugh and David Walsh were all on board now. The younger generation was beginning to experience the cycle of disappointment. The final score was 2-14 to 0-11.

It is hard to know when the notion of Donegal as a party team started but the legend of the August night in 2002 they spent in Dublin holding the city team to a draw in thrilling All-Ireland quarter final didn’t help. “It was like we had woken up on O’Connell Bridge with our boots on and that jazz,” recalled Barry Monaghan in this newspaper in 2004.

It was a reputation they couldn’t shake off even if the younger players had nothing to do with it. And by the end, the sense that they weren’t taken seriously by other teams must have seeped into their souls.

“It’s true,” acknowledged Neil McGee a few weeks ago when asked about how it felt to take on heavyweight teams now. “A lot of those team in the past would have laughed at us and looked down at us. To get up to that level and take them down is great but . . . we are just glad we are where we are and want to make the most of it.”

That may be the key observation in this remarkable chapter for Donegal football. What has happened to that generation of footballers has been nothing short of a miraculous intervention. They were on the road to nowhere. There was nothing to suggest that the pattern was breakable, nothing to indicate that they would retire having won anything of significance.

Then McGuinness stepped in, with his bold, clean vision and the force of personality to make them all believe in it. The turnaround has been so startling that it has perhaps obscured the truth that for years, it was possible to see the glimmer of a serious team within Donegal.

“You don’t go out and win that with a bad team,” says Eamon McGee of that 2007 National League win.

“That is an important part with Jim too. He has given us those extra percentages but the players are there . . . you have someone like Christy Toye who would walk into any county team in Ireland, in my opinion. It is about getting the best out of the players. Jim knew he had good players and it was a case of . . . I think it hurt Jim to see us doing so badly and lacking direction and that is why he wanted the Donegal job so badly. He wanted to be involved and I don’t know how many times he was turned down.”

Somewhere in their sub-conscious, the senior Donegal players know that there is a parallel football universe. When McGuinness began talking and they began believing, the unflinching honesty and hunger of their response illuminated just how much they dreaded returning to those days of habitual failure. The memory of those failures has been the spur in escaping their fate.

For it must surely have crossed their minds: what if McGuinness never got the job? What if he lost interest after being turned down twice? Then, there would have been no Ulster championships, no All-Ireland, no full houses in HQ Park.

There may well have been no second act to Anthony Thompson’s football career. They’d all be in that car, always, motoring to Gweedore under moonlight, forever fantasising about days like tomorrow.