Left bare by northern exposure

GAA: KEITH DUGGANon Donegal's 19 years of frustration at trying to escape from Ulster as they lurched from one extreme to another, all the while trying to 'ad-lib' their way past the local powerhouses

A GORGEOUS June evening in Newbridge some 10 summers gone and the immediate aftermath of a minor classic football match between Kildare and Donegal. This was a first round qualifier match when the system was still new and exotic and although it was not televised, it was a marvellous advertisement for the modern championship.

It went, as the radio men breathlessly reported, down to the wire. Thoughts among the crowd had begun to turn to getting a quick choc ice in before what seemed to be an inevitable period of extra-time. Then, with several minutes of injury-time played, Kildare made a last surge and corner back Ken Doyle popped up to punch the winning point and that was that.

Afterwards, in the Donegal dressingroom Mickey Moran paid tribute to one of the great servants of Donegal football, Glen’s Noel Hegarty, who had made it known he would retire whenever Donegal were knocked out of the championship. The moment had come. Mickey made a quiet, passionate speech and everyone then waited to hear Hegarty’s valedictory note.

Among those sitting in the room that evening was Jim McGuinness. “And we had all turned to look at Noel to see what he had to say,” McGuinness recalled in an interview with this newspaper in the summer of 2002. “You know the way you imagine your retirement to be this wild emotional moment? Well, Noel just raised his two arms into the air and shouted, ‘Hal-le-f***in-lu-jah’. As if to say, well that’s the last 15 years out of the way. I was sitting beside him and I just looked at him. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever heard.”

That anecdote was a perfect illustration of Donegal at a place in time. Another of the 1992 players bowing out and McGuinness – a teenager and part of the Donegal All-Ireland winning squad – among the new generation who would attempt to carry on without them.

Brendan Devenney gave one of his best Donegal performances that evening, enjoying a riveting duel with Kildare corner back Brian Lacey. “Know why that was?” Devenney said wryly this week. “It’s because it was the first round of the qualifiers and not an Ulster match in bloody Clones. That was a beautiful evening in Kildare and I was burning up grass and both teams were playing man-for-man open football.

“That was all I ever wanted but playing in Ulster against Armagh and Tyrone, you never got one-on-one. Ever. That was the main problem for us: we ran into the Armagh machine. And you look back now at that Armagh team and what they achieved and you have to say that they were awesome.”

Devenney is one of a number of Donegal players who experienced long careers with the county that glittered with mostly unrealised potential. Players like Barry Monaghan and Brian Roper – both of whom represented Donegal over 100 times – Adrian Sweeney, John Gildea, Shane Carr and McGuinness himself were at the heart of a quixotic attempt to win Ulster in the years since the landmark win in 1992.

Several of that gang played in the Ulster final defeats of 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2006. A measure of the interest in those games is the last two finals were moved to Croke Park: 67,000 showed up for the 2004 final. But equally, they had this parallel career outside of Ulster which brimmed with potential. In 2003, they were dismal in the first round against Fermanagh but then kept on winning until the All-Ireland semi-final – against Armagh. They took a fancied Dublin side to a replay in the All-Ireland quarter-final of 2002.

They were relegated from Division One in 2003 and won the thing four years later. There was this sense that with Donegal, anything could happen.

“Ad-libbing” is the phrase that Damien Diver uses to talk about the Donegal teams he played on. Diver grew up near McGuinness in Ardara and was another one of the players who played on teams that just couldn’t make the breakthrough.

“The players on this Donegal team are instructed and play to suit their game. It was in the Donegal tradition to always just go out and play. It was probably really nice attractive football but it wasn’t so attractive when you were ad-libbing your whole way up the field only to get stripped by Armagh. The Ulster final was a carbon copy of us against Armagh in the past – us flying up the field, hit a brick wall, and get stripped off the ball, one pass and over the bar.

“The difference has been Jim McGuinness. It is easy to say that now but he came in and changed the whole approach.”

For Diver and Devenney, the years in which they played are defined by a sense of never being quite sure of where they stood as a team. Their form tended to be extreme – in complete contrast to the steady graph of improvement that the current team has shown under McGuinness. The game that stands out for Devenney is the 2002 Ulster final against Armagh, in which McGuinness scored a goal.

“Funny, that is the one time we outplayed Armagh. We never did. Even in 2007, when we finally beat them in the championship, they outplayed us.

That 2002 game was Moran and Morrison’ s first year in charge and they had tapped into what we were good at – quick hands and natural players and they got us to up our tempo. What let us down that day was our forwards, myself included. We got off to a terrible start – we were 1-1 down – but we did come back and outplay them and would have won if we had taken our chances.

“They came back and won the All-Ireland. So you wonder now where Donegal were at during that period.”

Whenever Diver bumps into McGuinness now, he jokes with him about not being around to manage when he was a player. “Even after 1992, when Brian McEniff left, we needed someone to grab the bull by the horns and play a game we could win with. But I don’t know if it was the way we played or just that we came up against Tyrone and Armagh so often. Maybe in another era we would have won two or three Ulster titles.”

A reputation for indiscipline and a fondness for late nights was something that stalked Donegal teams as frequently as Armagh and Tyrone. All that stopped with McGuinness’s arrival: the manager’s impatience and annoyance with the fact that Donegal teams were perceived as something of a joke was apparent during his television interview after the Fermanagh game.

Devenney agrees the old joke has finally stopped being funny and puts the silence down to one thing. “I think it has been erased by the fact that they are winning consistently.

“All of those stories came from days after those Ulster final losses and we would go out for beers. I remember when we won the league in 2007, we went out and I was thinking, ‘well, nobody can say anything to us about that now’.

“This team can’t be questioned. And anyhow, all the players know if they step out of line they will be cut from the squad and nobody wants to miss out, there are too many good things happening.”

Devenney has been plagued by injuries in recent times but is still involved with his club, St Eunan's, and writes a weekly column for Gaelic Life. He was working with the BBC for the Ulster final and remembers telling his colleague he hadn't a hope of getting on to the field to conduct spot interview with the players afterwards.

“That relief and hysteria was a buzz that you wouldn’t have seen for years down in Clones.”

Devenney was no stranger to the blueprint for success that McGuinness has implemented: he devised a similar defensively orchestrated system of cover when he was managing his local club Naomh Conall, who went on to frustrate St Eunan’s in several county championships.

When Devenney meets his club-mate Rory Kavanagh now, he jokes with Kavanagh that he has become part of the system that they used to hate playing against. But although Devenney and Diver typified the old laissez-faire approach to Donegal football, both are adamant that the new way is the only way to go.

“People give out,” Diver acknowledges. “You get those people everywhere – on the television, in the newspapers, in the shops and in the pubs. I think it is just something to give out about.

“But they aren’t giving out too much around here now that the Anglo-Celt is back. I don’t see the point to the argument. Donegal still play good football on the ball and the Derry game was their best performance. What is the point in going out and playing beautiful football and losing?”

The ludicrous throw-in time may dissuade Donegal fans from making the journey to Croke Park in the same numbers as they once did but Devenney is confident those who will travel will do so in a good frame of mind.

“It’s a very tough game. In other years, you would be wary of getting a tanking but I think with this team there is a feeling that they will stand on their own two feet no matter what.”