Somewhere, some day, in summertime: the hottest day of the year confirmed on Sunday, May 30th, 1982, the Northern Ireland football team preparing for the World Cup in Spain and, on the sideline in Ballybofey, Mickey McDonald bent over and looking for a suitable patch of ground on which to place the football.
The referee had already given his watch a few meaningful looks, and Armagh and Donegal were level on the scoreboard. McDonald was on the river side of the ground and on the right-hand side of the field, where the perimeter wall in MacCumhaill Park runs fairly close to the sideline.
“No, there wasn’t much room at all,” laughs the Lurgan man now. But the space was the least of his difficulties. Armagh had won a sideline ball on the Donegal 14-metre line so it was a geometrically severe kick; the kind that free-takers might have practised for a laugh, rather than from habit.
Peter Makem, the Armagh manager would later say that as McDonald was going through his routine, he was gathering his stuff up from the dug-out having resigned himself to a replay. The whole of Ballybofey guessed there would be a replay.
McDonald had different ideas. That was true of his approach to sport in general then. He was one of the few sportsmen who managed to balance his time playing soccer and Gaelic football at the elite level in Northern Ireland, known to soccer aficionados as a skilful attacker with Glenavon and Cliftonville while the Armagh GAA community prized him as one of their craftiest forwards.
“I was young and I just wanted to do what I wanted to do,” is his explanation of why he risked the wrath of everyone. Some Armagh managers tolerated his winter game and picked him on their panels. Others didn’t. At away grounds – and McDonald’s then-record transfer fee for Cliftonville in 1983 was bound to guarantee him attention anyhow – the fans gleefully serenaded him with rhymes composed about his moonlighting for Armagh.
“I’ll not bore you with the details of those songs. I’m not sure they are printable anyhow.” He just got on with it because he loved both games.
Turnaround
“In hindsight, it wasn’t easy to do. When I look at it then, I would have seen the likes of Glenavon as more professional in outlook than the county teams – apart from Kerry and Dublin, possibly. It has gone through a complete turnaround.
“Soccer seemed more serious and professional then whereas now Gaelic games have surpassed it, from what I know. I used to chat to Brian McAlinden [then the Armagh goalkeeper and later manager] about wee things I felt would help the Gaelic code in making it more professional and attractive to the younger players.
“There would often have been a load of pints after training then, which wouldn’t have been the form in soccer. So I would have come off a full soccer season when I was brought into the Armagh panel and I would have a good reserve of fitness.”
Winter training at soccer helped with his place-kicking duties in the summer. He needed it on this afternoon. There was no particular history between Armagh and Donegal and certainly no real animosity. Armagh were Ulster champions in 1980, had lost to Down in 1981 and expected to win in Ballybofey.
Jimmy Smyth had finished up playing after 1980 but Makem quickly recruited him as a selector and he recalls them all sitting in the shadow of the dug-out watching the Donegal team doing a hot-knife-through-butter act. If McDonald hadn't managed to smuggle a goal from nothing in the first half, the home team might have been out of sight at the break. Donegal were still two points up in the last five minutes when Armagh continued to press, with one point actually deflecting off Donegal defender Michael Carr before John Corvan levelled the game with two minutes remaining.
When McDonald prepared for his free, time was up. It was effectively the last kick of a match in which Armagh had never led.
A summer later, his parents were holidaying in the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran. Brian McEniff, the proprietor, stopped to talk to them, but shook his head when they told him that Mickey McDonald was their son. He told them he had been standing behind the goal when McDonald took his free and that he had actually caught the ball.
That catch was where Donegal’s championship summer ended. McDonald’s shot had sailed through the hot afternoon to the disbelief of everyone in the ground. Donegal supporters were stunned. For the entire 70 minutes, the game had been theirs. Delighted Armagh visitors promptly ran onto the pitch. The final whistle went.
“I just remember really taking my time with the kick and then I stuck it over. There was silence their end but we were ecstatic,” McDonald says.
“I am not sure whether or not we deserved to win the game. Donegal were up for it. At the time, I would have said that we expected to go there and win because we had won in 1980. But it was tough, end-to-end football and they almost had it.”
That win set Armagh up for another long summer. It was easily the most difficult match of their provincial campaign. On June 20th, they amassed 1-20 in disposing of Antrim.
In the Ulster final, on July 18th they beat Fermanagh by 0-10 to 1-04. By then, the entire island of Ireland had been smitten by the heroics of Billy Bingham’s team in the world cup in Spain.
“It did bring the North together for those few weeks but it wasn’t a great time in our society. I had good Catholic and Protestant friends and none of that ever mattered to me.”
On August 15th, Armagh met what McDonald terms “the Kerry machine”, looking utterly invincible on their way to a fifth All-Ireland title. It finished 3-15 to 1-11.
Avenged
“We did believe we could win but it was extremely difficult to beat Kerry because of their conditioning. Their approach was just completely different to any other teams playing then.”
A year later, McEniff’s team avenged that dramatic defeat on their way to winning their third ever provincial title. Their season ended against Dublin, and neither county featured prominently for the remainder of the 1980s.
He finished with Armagh around 1986 but continued to play soccer and coach GAA teams. He started playing some golf and considered himself fairly handy until his nephew Rory showed up on the Gerry Kelly show one Friday night chipping golf balls through the open door of a washing machine.
McDonald has tried to tell his sister Rosie and her husband Gerry that Rory gets his game from the McDonald side but nobody is listening to him. He was there to see McIlroy win the 2012 PGA at Kiawah Island and was at the US Masters in 2013.
“Just so proud of him. I suppose he has surpassed what we imagined. We knew he was going to do well in the game from when he was no age but he has done the country proud and hopefully brought a lot of people together through sport. It is a medium that brings people together,” McDonald says.
“He is a lovely young guy. Not saying that because he is my nephew but he just is. And he likes the craic and the normal things in life. But his mum and dad have a lot to do with that.”
Relentless quest
McDonald isn’t fully sure if he will be at the Athletics Grounds for the game between Armagh and Donegal. He is full of admiration for the relentless quest for betterment which characterises contemporary county teams and enjoys the speed of the game, but the heavily defensive emphasis leaves him a bit cold.
“Anyhow, I am not that good a watcher,” he says. “I become too animated. When you can’t be out there doing the things that you would like to do.”
