For years, the Donegal team was a loose and freewheeling kind of outfit. Now, all of the players keep talking about “the circle”. For Eamon McGee it is the rebirth – a last chance which he has gratefully taken

‘I HAD the honour of kicking three points in Ruislip against Kilkenny,” Eamon McGee says at one stage, recalling a football life which could be best summed up in that old reliable of school poetry classics: The Road Not Taken.

The Gweedore man makes his 100th appearance for Donegal in tomorrow’s All-Ireland final and more than anyone on the team, he has borne witness to the nearly days (“We always had this impression of ourselves we were good enough”); the crushing days (“That defeat to Cork didn’t hurt enough”); the bleakest days (“We came off the field against Armagh and I remember Cass – Kevin Cassidy – saying that we’re just not good enough)”, the 24-hour party people days (“We shouldn’t have put ourselves in that position: boys about Dungloe, tops off, acting the eejit. It took a lot of growing up on our part”); the friendship days (“I had to pinch myself after that Cork game. Just thinking of all the tough days we had. Many a time me, Cass and Neil were talking: ‘Imagine if we ever got to an All-Ireland final.’ If you could count all the hours that we had those chats, it would be a massive number of hours. So to be in the final now is strange. It is an obsession.”); the sense that it was over (“Shook hands and walked. Me and Jim had played together. Felt I didn’t need it.”) and finally, the rebirth; the last chance which he has gratefully taken.

“Jim could have ploughed on without me, so I’m a happy man,” he says in a room where the only noise is of tea spoons against china. “To be honest, I’m a bit shocked by it all.”

We met in Gweedore’s Seaview Hotel on the sleepiest of Tuesday afternoons. McGee is pretty skilled at avoiding the madding crowds and spent the morning coaching kids at football and intended meeting his girlfriend late in the afternoon before driving down to Ballybofey for one of the last training sessions of the year. He knows this road by heart. It is a beautiful part of the world and remote and, like most townlands in Donegal, it feels entirely self-contained and of itself.

When McGee is talking to his team-mates from south Donegal they call anywhere north of Letterkenny “the top of the county”. But in Gweedore, they call south Donegal the exact same thing. “To us, Bundoran and those places are the top of the county,” he laughs.

And until recently, that is what Donegal was: a fractured place of a thousand identities. One of the most startling aspects of the unexpected rejuvenation of the county football team has been to make the county tighter and closer. For years, the team was a loose and freewheeling outfit. Now, all of the players keep talking about “the circle”.

They are a fiercely loyal group and the disparate parts of the county have pulled towards them. When Jim McGuinness took over the team, he sat down with the more senior of the McGee brothers and told him what he expected. Eamon didn’t think it was for him. Then, last winter, he began to notice a change in the scene. His brother Neil would be coming home from training late and waking up wrecked. The boys weren’t too talkative about what was going on. Eventually, Neil Gallagher, one of his closest friends, put it to him straight. “Neil just said: ‘Look, this is going to be a bit awkward because I can’t tell you what is going on now in training. So just don’t ask because I don’t want to bullshit you.”

So Eamon didn’t ask. And then a familiar fear gripped him, redolent of the feeling he had when he was living in London three years ago. He liked London and was completely taken with the emphasis and the importance of Gaelic culture there. In his spare time, he coached football in Catholic schools around the city and got a buzz when the odd kid from other ethnic backgrounds kicked a ball and enjoyed it.

“Hurling and football: they are attractive games, you know. Kids from anywhere can enjoy them.”

And he was dumbstruck by just how much it all meant to the Irish in London. “Better players than me had come to play. But they made a big deal of the fact that I was a county player and I think that made me realise how special the whole thing was. And I had this fear of missing out on an Ulster medal. That they might do it without me.”

So he came back for the summer of 2009 for the championship season when there was no Ulster medal but instead ended on a dark joke of a quarter-final exit against Cork. Same old Donegal: the closer they got, the further away they ended up.

Last winter, gone from the panel, that fear returned and it nagged at him. So he decided to get himself fit and try and catch McGuinness’s eye in club games. Towards the end of the league, his brother Neil told him Jim was interested in talking with him.

“I was delighted, you know. But it was straight in at the deep end. The first night I came in, Paddy McBrearty was coming back too. I thought I was in good shape. But it was unbelievable. I knew these guys. But it was a shock to my system. It was gruelling. To be honest, there were times when it came into my head: what the f**k am I at? Do I need this? Then you get so much satisfaction when you see your team-mates pushing themselves and putting themselves on the line. I hope to progress in coaching myself and I will take a lot from this. You have to suffer together.

“So you either give in and say bugger this or pretend to be injured or put the head down and get on with it. There are no bluffers at all. No niggly wee injuries! There were nights that you would get over Tuesday night and then come Thursday this trepidation would come over you. And in the car you would hear: ‘Jaysus, it’s gonna be tough tonight’.”

And it always was.

For years, Cassidy’s personality filled the car. They would take turns driving but the Gweedore crew would be the McGee boys, Cass, maybe Neil Gallagher and the Hanlon boys. Their emergence on the Donegal teams was proof of a paradigm shift within the county: the northern clubs were now dominating. Eamon McGee was born in 1984: he was eight when Donegal won the All-Ireland in 1992 and was nicknamed Tony Boyle, “Just because I’d a mop of curls. So he became my player.”

He retains hazy memories of that year’s semi-final win over Mayo and nothing of the final. Growing up, they watched teams from Killybegs or the Ardara side masterminded by Damian Diver sweeping all trophies and felt like outsiders looking in. It was only when Martin Coll broke into the Donegal team and then Cassidy had a storming, All-Star debut season in 2002 that they began to see what was possible.

McGee became an automatic choice during the topsy-turvy years when Donegal’s form was unreadable and unreliable, bouncing from Ulster finals to league relegation to bizarre qualifier runs. He saw a generation of players he admired and played alongside disappearing from the dressingroom, winter after winter and they were on his mind after last year’s Ulster final win, Donegal’s first in 19 years.

“Boys like Shane Carr, John Gildea, Jim himself – I know he had 1992, but he came through a lot of tough defeats. Damian Diver – we met in Ardara for a few pints a few days after that. We chatted and he was delighted but at the same time I felt a bit of disappointment there. Brian Roper. The legend that is Brian! It would have been nice for them to have been part of that.”

McGee didn’t play in that Ulster final and wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing. “There was still a bit of the “poor-me” going on. I didn’t even lift the cup because I was thinking: ‘what’s the point?’. It was only in the days afterwards that I realised how selfish I was being. To see my brother Neil and Kevin Cass and Christy Toye there after all the beatings we got was special. Just a massive things for us.

“And at training, I was marking McFadden and Murphy and I like to think I was giving them a hard time. And they needed that if they were to perform. So last season opened my eyes about what it is to be a panel player.”

But he started the unforgettable quarter-final match against Kildare, the slow-burning epic on a muggy Saturday teatime in Dublin and finished with Kevin Cassidy’s electrifying winning point. He marked Diarmuid Connolly in the notorious semi-final defeat to Dublin.

“That was the worst feeling I ever had coming off a field. Only time I got emotional after a game.”

And then the brouhaha over Cassidy’s contribution to a book on the Ulster championship broke and the meeting with Jim McGuinness after which he was gone from the squad.

For McGee, the event was deeply disappointing and shocking. He had drunk with both men; he looked up to them; he considered them his friends. If anything would test the new unity of the panel, it was this. There were rumours that the Gweedore boys would leave the panel in protest.

Then there were rumours that Cass would be back. Instead, time moved on. Training resumed. And now Cass is not in the car anymore. They miss him. The man could talk.

“It’s more of a conversation now,” McGee laughs. “Not just the one man.”

“But all that . . . it was a matter for Jim and Kevin. We are all big boys now. There have been disciplines before – I was involved. Kevin was involved. There was hurtful stuff said to myself and Neil about club-mates and what not. But it was nothing to do with us. It might be selfish but we wanted to look after our own corner. It is an awkward one to go into.

“I still go down to Kevin’s and mess about with the wee ones and have a cup of tea and I’m good mates with Sarah. Kevin respects that. It was an issue for Jim and Kevin. Nothing we could do would change that. Listen, we are over it now and no man will want Donegal to win on Sunday more than Kevin Cass. And we would all love Kevin to be there. I think Jim would love it. But things happen and we just have to plough on.”

On they ploughed. McGee’s return to prominence has made the void lefty by Cassidy easier to fill. In the quarter-final against Kerry, he achieved a lifetime ambition in marking Kieran Donaghy in what he calls a “career match”.

He knows he spent half the time yapping in the big Tralee man’s ear.

“But Kieran is a gentleman. Neil knows him well through the Aussie Rules and he is a real gentleman – he gave me the jersey afterwards and talked to me for a few seconds. Hopefully now when the season is over, I can meet him and assure him I never meant any of the stuff said!”

Maybe Donaghy did or didn’t know just what it meant to McGee to be there, to be competing against Kerry in a make-or-break summer game.

It was all they ever used to talk about in Gweedore but in a wistful, could-it-ever-happen kind of way. When Eamon McGee thinks back to the messier seasons that used to characterise life playing football for Donegal, he doesn’t see any badness as much as naivety.

“When we first came into the set-up, it is not as if we went out to deliberately to disrespect the jersey. But there was massive immaturity. When we came off a bad defeat, instead of going back to our own wee patch to have a few pints we were going out in front of the whole county in Letterkenny. Meeting up in groups. And a lot of stories were exaggerated but when you get a crowd of lads together and there is a bit of clousterin’, we definitely were our own worst enemies.

“We are all still free spirits and enjoy a bit of craic but we know now when to pick the right opportunities to go and stay away from crowds. We had a good night after the Ulster final but every man went to his own corner. Nobody was taking the piss – pardon the pun.”

And he laughs. He can’t resist it. But something has changed. He is deathly serious about all of this and knows how close he came to missing out.

“Donegal . . . we are competing for the now. We talked years ago about having to earn the right to be at top table of football. We feel we didn’t get the respect we deserved last year. This year we are. We want to keep that for as long as possible. It won’t last forever and ever,” he shrugs, lifting his car keys to leave.

So Eamon McGee will go out and play his 100th game tomorrow. Thoughts of the man who won’t be there will probably cross his mind but mostly these days, the Gweedore man’s gaze is steadfast as a bright star.