Kieran Donaghy is putting the pain of the All-Ireland final defeat behind him as he warms to the task of helping Ireland lock horns with formidable Australia, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THE FORK in the road isn’t always dramatic. Indeed, it hardly ever is. Sometimes, it’s just a guy on the other end of a phone chancing his arm. When Kieran Donaghy took a call a week or two after the 2006 All-Ireland final, the Aussie voice that greeted him was full of chat and hope and cheer but didn’t carry much in the way of a concrete proposal.

Gave him the whole beauty-rich-and-rare routine and talked about a life that could exist for him in a new country playing a new sport but without a whole lot to back it up. Donaghy said “thanks all the same” and pushed the plate away.

“Yer man on the phone wasn’t even from one of the clubs,” he says. “He was an agent or something. I didn’t really know what to make of him. He was making claims about being able to set up things with all these different teams and that he was talking to a few teams about me. I didn’t have full faith in him, put it that way. Maybe if it had been a club doing the talking, I might have gone over for the experience of having a try-out. But he wasn’t too impressive now.

“It was a pretty short phonecall in the end. I was just after winning my first All-Ireland medal for one thing and I saw nothing else in all honesty but the green and gold in front of me. But as well as that, in my own head I was thinking, ‘I’m 23. It would take me a year or two to learn how to kick the ball to the standard needed’.

“To get to know the game and to get my body into the shape needed for the demands of that game, I would just be starting from too far back.”

Not so much a fork in the road then as a motorway with a bit of the crash barrier missing. Donaghy moved on and the AFL did the same, without a backward glance from either of them. When he catches it on TG4 on Thursday nights, it never crosses his mind that he could have taken the plunge. He tunes in purely because he likes the sport.

This will be his third stint with the International Rules panel and his second in Australia. Such a polyglot is he when it comes to sport that it’s hardly too surprising to hear he quite enjoys the bastardised game the two countries play against each other.

More so now that the whiff of bare-knuckle has been taken out of the series since his first appearance in 2006. The game now is one of speed, both of boot and brain.

“What makes a good player is someone who is very aware of where they are on the field at all times. You have to know what’s going on around you before the ball comes to you. Much more so than in Gaelic football. In football, you can go win a ball and then decide what to do with it but in this game you have to know what you’re doing before the ball gets to you.

“That’s the main difference in the game – the fact that you can’t just go, win a ball and let something develop. If you do that in this game, someone will have you rugby tackled in a heartbeat and you’ll turn the ball over.”

This year, the series came along at just the right time. He wallowed in Kerry’s defeat in the All-Ireland final for a couple of days but had to shake it off to get ready for a squad session in Carton House the following Friday.

Anthony Tohill was prepared to wait for a few of those involved in the All- Ireland final but the leeway wasn’t going to stretch to just ushering them into the travelling party. Donaghy would have to pack up his woes from the previous Sunday and perform.

“It was hard alright, physically as much as anything. When an All-Ireland is over, whether you win or lose, you put the body through the ringer for a couple of days. Mentally, I was fine, I was looking forward to it. That’s what sportspeople do when they lose a game, they try to look forward to the next thing, try to find a brighter picture than what’s just happened.”

It’s in his nature to be Mr Brightside. The All-Ireland defeat to Dublin was hard to take but he says the 2008 one against Tyrone was worse. They were going for a three-in-a-row back then and got taken down by an arch-enemy and it took a long time for them to be able to stomach it.

This one hurt but it’s one they’ll come back from, he’s sure of it.

On the day though, it buckled him at the knee. When he stopped to talk outside the door of the players’ lounge that afternoon, his voice was so low you could barely pick it up on the tape afterwards when you listened back. He leaned on the bonnet of a car as if for support, as broken as any of us had ever seen him.

“It was very raw at that stage,” he says now. “The dressingroom was in a state of shock, fellas didn’t know what to say to each other. You’re showering in silence and thinking what might have been, what should have been, what if this happened or that happened. And every player is there thinking the same thing.

“You know you’re going to be going into the players’ bar and getting a drink and that the Dublin team will come in in a minute and they’ll be on just a whole different level to us altogether. I’ve been on a losing team and a winning team a few times after a final and it doesn’t get any less tough as you go on.”

He hasn’t seen the full match yet and has no desire to either. Not out of curiosity at least. When he does finally watch it, he says, it’ll be because duty will have called again and Kerry will be setting out on the road to September.

Jack O’Connor will prescribe it as homework at some point or they’ll get clips on a DVD to illuminate a point Donie Buckley has been making but until then, it won’t cross his mind to settle back and flick it on.

“No, no I wouldn’t do that at all,” he says. “I won’t watch it now until the start of next year when we start getting back training with Kerry. If I watched it now, I’d just be picking up on negatives and getting bogged down in the things that went wrong.

“As soon as January 1st, 2012 comes, I’ll be able to sit down and watch it and take what I need from it. I’ll be able to go through it and see if there’s anything to take from it that can improve me as a player or improve Kerry.

“It’s easy to watch it when you win because the mistakes people made during the game are good fun then. You can watch it together and have a laugh when somebody drops a ball or hits a wide. But when you lose, you just don’t want to be looking at it at all. It’s just too raw.”

Between now and then, he’ll look to write a new story in an Irish jersey. The squad is back in Dublin today, with a squad session designed to identify the last five names to be added to the panel. With the first game in Melbourne a week from next Friday, they don’t have a huge amount of time to bond but Donaghy isn’t worried.

“The touring side always has an advantage,” he says. “At home, you’re more fragmented. I remember in 2006, I would be working all week and then heading up to Dublin on a Thursday night for a Friday game. The touring team is together, talking tactics, working, training, the lot. It’s a big thing in our favour.”

Negatives into positives. Knocked down but getting back up again.

The kind of attitude that will keep him – and Ireland – in clover over the coming weeks.