Kingdom high-flyer dominates summer sky

All-Ireland SFC semi-final, Kerry v Cork:  Keith Duggan reports on the phenomenal impact that basketball player Kieran Donaghy from Tralee has had on Kerry football

When Kieran Donaghy ambled away from the flailing Francie Bellew and emphatically hammered his by now famous goal past Paul Hearty, this year's All-Ireland football championship felt truly exhilarating and alive for the first time. The importance and quality of the Armagh-Kerry quarter-final made all the earlier fare of an ordinary championship seem like a prelude to that absorbing day.

Donaghy's goal was a thing of clean, simple strength and cunning but his immediate reaction, a howl of joy and aggression right in the face of the indignant Hearty, felt like a battle cry, a release to which the rest of his Kerry team-mates responded. The next half-hour was not quite a rout but the Kingdom played with a traditional combination of toughness and verve that served as a stinging rebuke to the loudening criticisms to which they had been subjected within and beyond the county. They arrived in Dublin as the sickman of the championship and headed south on Sunday evening as hot favourites.

Donaghy's blatant emotion and his exhibitionism seemed almost daring in an era when Gaelic football players, even the traditionally gregarious, household personalities that once made up the Dublin team, have bought into a code of ultra caution and dullness. In every sense, the arrival of Donaghy has been a breath of fresh air.

The relocation of the novice (and soon-to-be ex) midfielder to the edge of the opposition square has worked a treat for Jack O'Connor against Longford and, more critically, Armagh and after just two matches, the basketball star from Tralee has come to dominate the sky of this football summer. There has been an inevitable rush to proclaim him as the new Eoin "Bomber" Liston amid hasty critical agreement that his unique combination of high-calibre handling skills and height and strength makes him an impossible proposition for opposition defences. And yet he remains, by intercounty standards and certainly by the ruthless, unflagging standards of Kerry football, a raw young lad.

"There is nowhere better than the Kerry football dressingroom to keep a young player grounded," laughs Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, the man who in some ways authored Donaghy's transition from basketball cult hero to the bright new emblem of Kerry football.

"Jack O'Connor and the selectors desperately needed this to work and I am sure they must be delighted by it. It was unfair to expect Colm Cooper and Mike Frank Russell to win primary possession but until Donaghy went up front, Kerry had nobody else to do it. And the attack was rudderless. He is 6ft 5in, he handles the ball well and has a bit of wit and intelligence about him, he has great peripheral vision and his presence means Kerry can keep defences guessing with the long, direct high ball or the cross-field passes for Gooch and the other forwards to run onto. It has worked very well. But I think the danger is - and I am sure Jack O'Connor would hate for this to happen - that Kieran will be hyped to a ludicrous degree.

"And I believe he is going to find it difficult against Cork. Derek Kavanagh is experienced, he is tough, he will compete in the air and he knows what to expect from Kieran. The secret is out. It must be remembered that Longford did not have their first choice full back when Kerry played them. And we may have seen the last flutter of a great Armagh team that simply died on the day. We do not know."

O'Sullivan lured Donaghy onto TG4's Underdogs GAA reality show after consulting with his fellow coaches. After an initial month of trials, they agreed they had not found midfielders of sufficient quality and Donaghy, a gangling, athletic young man who made it to the fringes of the Kerry minor panel having just taken up the sport lingered in the back of his mind (Conor Counihan alerted him to a young Cork midfielder named Pierse O'Neill during the same series).

Donaghy had played at under-21 level for Kerry, doing reasonably well. But he was callow and not particularly strong and although Jack O'Connor had taken a look at him, there was a distinct possibility that he could have fallen through the net. Kerry football had no shortage of quality midfielders.

O'Sullivan remembered, however, that Charlie Nelligan, who trained Donaghy at minor level, had been convinced that the Tralee boy would make the cut at senior standard, and before some of his more prodigious contemporaries. He met with Donaghy and reasoned that the Underdogs would give him a stage and an opportunity to play a competitive match against the Kerry seniors.

Donaghy was eager. That late flowering ambition was a radical turnaround from his teenage years, when he was, like many young basketball players, obsessed with the hoops game, paying only a passing interest to the popular religion of Kerry football. John O'Keeffe taught him PE at Tralee CBS and it simply never occurred to the great full back that Donaghy would go on to wear the green and gold hoops as senior level.

Even now, he admits he is surprised by the all-conquering impact his former pupil has had on this championship.

"When he was a teenager, he was very athletic but not especially strong. And he was so established as a basketball player, the best in his year the whole way up, that you never really thought of him as anything else. But he has filled out, probably from his exploits with Tralee Tigers where he is often assigned with marking opposition American players and also from the training programme that Pat Flanagan has made for him. He was so involved in basketball and got a kind of stardom from it, I suppose, that it was hard to imagine him ever taking to football as he has done. Kieran was and is so good at basketball that maybe he had plans to go abroad and use his skills there. And then when the opportunity to play for Kerry came up, he probably saw that as a chance to shine on a really big stage and was drawn to it."

In the Underdogs series, it was in a challenge match against Offaly that convinced O'Sullivan that his protégé had the right stuff. There is no such thing as a soft night in the company of Ciarán McManus and Donaghy held his own against the muscular, driven Offaly man. Afterwards, they had a chat and O'Sullivan persuaded him that if he wanted to give elite football a crack, he could no longer afford to be a dilettante. He needed to work on his kicking game and he needed to give the sport his complete dedication.

"The Kerry management could not be expected to take him seriously otherwise."

Last year, he impressed in limited minutes as an understudy in the Kerry midfield and gave some storming performances for Austin Stacks. But it would have been impossible to foretell the electric charge he would generate by his repositioning at full forward for the qualifying game against Longford, a match which had rumours of in-fighting and unhappiness as a backdrop. Donaghy was ringleader of the tormentors in that four-goal declaration against Luke Dempsey's emerging young team and although it was clear he gave Kerry a startling new dimension, the part he played in the downfall of Armagh has arguably changed the path of the championship.

Although the comparisons to Liston are obvious and easy, O'Keeffe believes they are "far-fetched".

"It is unfair, too, in many ways. I was with the Bomber there recently and we were talking about how it took him time to adapt and settle into the role at full forward. What Kieran has done in his first championship starts there is phenomenal really. But the thing is, Kieran has to do it over a sustained period of time, as Eoin Liston did. He is still only finding his feet and it would be wrong to place too much expectation on him."

Kevin O'Donoghue, a Tralee basketball player and also a former pupil of O'Keeffe's, was in the crowd in Croke Park for the Armagh match, his eyes glued to Donaghy.

There was a period about 17 minutes in when it looked as if the novice full forward was on the verge of becoming demoralised by the implacable defending of Bellew. O'Sullivan noticed the same thing and held his breath but was impressed at how Donaghy toughed it out and then, towards the end of the half, begin to work his way under the Crossmaglen man's skin. The goal turned the match and the football summer upside down.

Never before had Bellew, one of the smartest operators in the game, been so explicitly beaten. And it was a classic basketball post-up move. O'Donoghue could read it before it happened. Once Donaghy gathered possession - scrambling on the ground to pick the ball up - he squared his back to Bellew, froze the defender with a quick dip of the shoulder towards the end line and then pivoted away quickly towards the goal. Instead of floating a lay-up off the glass, he sent a booming, no-nonsense shot past Hearty. Then came the howl.

"A fair few Kerry people around me were a bit taken aback at that but I think it was blown a bit out of proportion,"says O'Donoghue.

"Kieran wears his heart on his sleeve, he is very passionate about sport. And in basketball, he grew up with lads saying stuff to him on the court. Especially when he began marking the American players, the chat would be constant. It is no big deal, just part of the game and Kieran had no problem giving it back. But it is a different culture in football and it probably surprised people. I think it was just that instinct coming out in him, just a release of adrenaline. And it was harmless, really."

Although Kerry football's gain has been Tralee Tigers' loss, O'Donoghue is delighted for his friend. He testifies that Donaghy's game-day persona mirrors his general personality, warm and confident and big hearted. "He has a ferocious competitive instinct and with the Tigers he was a good motivator. But he is a very fair player too. Not so long ago, Stacks were playing a match and in a challenge, a lad from another team broke his ankle and Kieran was up at the hospital three hours later to see how he was. He lives for the ball. Like, when Kieran was younger, he played point guard for Ireland because he was small. So he was used to having that control and had the excellent distribution and then, overnight it seemed, he shot up and his role on the team changed but he still had the small-man skills."

Donaghy's metamorphosis from winter hoops star to one of Gaelic football's more spectacular high-flying acts is nothing new. Liam McHale was ordained the original of the species and now Ronan McGarritty has returned from a basketball scholarship in America to fill the void left by his Ballina predecessor. Galway midfielder Kevin Walsh enjoyed a juvenile career as an Irish basketball international, Limerick's John Galvin has also represented his country and Jason Sherlock was one of the best young prospects to emerge from the St Vincent's nursery before his world collided with that of Dublin football to produce fireworks through the long hot summer of 1995. Brian Clarke also made the transition under Páidí Ó Sé in the 1997 championship that sparked the revival of the county.

The last few weeks have been heady stuff for Donaghy, perhaps dangerously so. As the admirably disciplined and loyal Dara Ó Sé might well explain to his young team-mate, lasting respect does not come cheaply in Kerry football. But it seems fair to say he has the eagerness and the right temperament and is in the perfect environment to make a major contribution to Kingdom football over the coming years. As the saying goes in basketball, he's got game.