Pointing Donegal in the right direction

GAELIC GAMES: KEITH DUGGAN profiles the Donegal manager whose honesty and passion for the job have been reflected in his side's progress

‘TO ME, that was living,” Jim McGuinness says, remembering those transcendent few minutes when the footballers of Donegal and Kildare were locked into an extra-time battle that made those present forget about everything else in the world.

“People are very rarely ‘alive’, you know. And for those 20 minutes in extra time what was going through my mind was: ‘this is unbelievable. Because those boy are in the thick of this now. Every moment counts and they are living on the edge. And it would be brilliant if they can come through this and win but even if the don’t, this is going to be a great life experience’.

“Because in that moment, they were living in the fullest sense. The atmosphere that evening was as raw as I have ever felt. And the lights coming on made it too. It was all kind of magical.”

This was on a rainy August afternoon in a hotel in Letterkenny. McGuinness sat on a blue sofa in the hotel, the same sofa where he had met each of the Donegal players individually at the beginning of the season.

If Donegal’s Ulster final win over Derry, after a 19-year wait, reawakened local interest, then those Saturday evening minutes in Croke Park sent a huge electric volt through the county. For young people in Donegal, the jubilant mood was shockingly new. For those with clear recollections of Donegal’s All-Ireland-winning year of 1992, it felt comparable to a time that had come to seem hallucinogenic.

For McGuinness, there has been little time for reminiscence. On the Sunday night of the Ulster final, there was a homecoming in the Diamond in Donegal Town and the scenes evoked memories as a 19-year-old member of the All-Ireland squad.

“It was only then that the actual time lapse crystallised for me. Nineteen years! It’s such a long time. When you are chasing something – as we were – you don’t think of it that way. And I thought about all the really, really good players who were there during that time and didn’t get an Ulster medal. But to be honest, I haven’t really had time to look back at it properly.”

On the field in Clones minutes after the Ulster final, a photographer caught McGuinness being congratulated by Brian McEniff, the man who had guided Donegal to their previous five Ulster titles. “He didn’t say much because he was quite emotional,” McGuinness recalls. “ His eyes were welling up. I suppose he had been there so many times and to see someone else come along and replicate it was strange. And I owe Brian a lot. He plucked me from nowhere, almost.”

There is a fated aspect to Jim McGuinness’s Donegal story. He was home for Christmas holidays from Boston in 1991 when he got an unexpected invitation to attend a Donegal trial in Ballyshannon. He recalls the day clearly: it was cold. Donal Reid from Ballybofey marked him. He fired over a few points and managed to score a goal against Gary Walsh.

“I was wild chuffed with that. Afterwards I got showered up and was walking out of the ground and there was McEniff waiting, the big John Motson sheepskin coat on him. He invited me to join the squad. I was beside myself. I think I probably broke a few speed limits getting back to Glenties, because I just wanted to tell someone.”

That day changed McGuinness’s life. Boston was dropped. By the following September, he had an Ulster and an All-Ireland medal. He would play intercounty football for almost 13 years – a horrific leg break ended his career. He would never win another thing with Donegal after that first year.

In 1998, a few weeks after Donegal lost the Ulster final to a late Joe Brolly goal, he was being driven to Dublin Airport by his brother, Mark, when their car went into a spin at Lisnaskea. It was enough to claim Mark’s life. Mark was the second boy the McGuinness family lost: their oldest boy Charles died from a heart condition in 1986.

And possibly because of that, Jim was – and remains – extremely close to Mark. In the years afterwards, he struggled for a time.

“You have to do a lot of soldiering on your own in a situation like that,” he told The Irish Times in 2002, a summer that marked a thundering return to form. “And you know that some people just break and away they go. So this year, I said that it had to change. For my sake and for Mark’s sake, I had to just bang it out of my head for the 70 minutes of the game.”

And after that, the waning years of his football career were the richest. He was player-manager when his home club of Glenties won its first ever senior county title in 2005. That led to his appointment as Donegal under-21 manager and a run to the All-Ireland football final against Dublin last year. McGuinness’s team played with ferocious energy and application and battled through a collective bout of swine flu in the final and seemed to have that game at their mercy when Michael Murphy was awarded a last-minute penalty.

The shot hammered against the crossbar and was cleared. McGuinness was beside the Dublin manager Jim Gavin almost as the whistle went. He has no regrets about that match nor has he thought about it since because he knew his players had given everything they could.

“There is always going to be a winner and a loser,” he says.

Then, having been steadfastly ignored during an earlier application, he was given the senior position at the age of 38. And so it has come full circle.

McGuinness as a young player had a casual way about him then and a mop of curls that sort of disguised how much it mattered to him. It turned out that he was always watching, always learning.

He has a forensic memory for the details and people involved in those games. When he talks about that trial game, his thoughts turn to Brian Tuohy, captain of the All-Ireland winning under-21 team of 1982 and a stellar senior player for the next decade.

“To me, Brian Tuohy had always been brilliant. And he had decided to finish up over that Christmas period when I came in. He left and that was it. Timing in sport is everything. It can be very unforgiving. Me coming in to get that All-Ireland medal was pure luck, when it comes down to it. And then this year, Paddy McBrearty comes in at 17 and gets an Ulster medal a few weeks later.”

And when he talks about Glenties, he talks about Manus Brennan, who taught him basketball and football in the local school. He can recall things Brennan said to those school teams over 20 years on. Much later, he would watch Armagh and Tyrone and come to understand how much of sport is about repetition. After Donegal played Tyrone in the Ulster semi-final this year, his respect for Mickey Harte – already huge – went even higher.

“He had that team coached to perfection as to how to get through us. Anthony Thompson got a block and only for that we would have been nine down. We came back but I went down the road thinking: ‘he’s a great coach as much as he is a great manager.”

He never really believed Glenties could become county champions when he was in his 20s. He felt that maybe there was a natural order to these things and that Glenties was about the summer school and Tidy Towns and Brian Friel and intermediate football. “Just chugging along. The grass on the pitch cut every now and then.”

When he worked in Killybegs for a while, the local team showed up regularly in county finals.

“I remember thinking: ‘they have no idea just how privileged they are to be there.’ I would have done anything to have been there. So to finally get one, after 17 years, was one of the biggest thrills of my life.”

“I met lads I would have played with when I was starting off, 10 years older than me and it was very special to them to see the cup sitting there in our town.”

All of that fed into McGuinness’s idea of how he wanted his Donegal team to be this year. When he sat on this same couch with the players, he spoke to each of them about what he wanted and he asked their opinion as well.

“The seniors were, collectively, like an old dog that had been battered. Their confidence was hit. You picked it up in conversation. But they still wanted to play. And that was the important thing.”

For his part, he pledged efficiency and the idea of a fair chance. Doing things properly always mattered to McGuinness. His experience of breaking his leg gave him a lesson in that. He had collected a ball at midfield and was delivering a ball into Leon Thompson when someone went to block him. His shoulder met McGuinness’s leg and it buckled as he kicked through. The pain was horrendous, cruciate ligaments, a broken leg and a smashed kneecap the diagnosis. Months later, he was still trying to get satisfactory treatment.

A friend was at a Manchester United function in Mayo and told Roy Keane about McGuinness’s woes. Keane gave the friend a number. “Try this man,” he advised. The next day, McGuinness was on the phone and he had secured an operation in Manchester a week later with a regular surgeon for the Old Trafford club. His leg is fine six years on. “Never met Roy Keane in my life and I doubt he knows he did me a good turn,” he smiles now. “But I am very thankful to him.”

McGuinness wants his players to feel that they will be looked after. But he felt it was vital that Donegal lose its reputation for being laid back.

“Nice football. Nice people. Nice place to go on holidays. There is warmth there, an easy-going thing. Its great. But that stuff wins you nothing.”

He took the bric-a-brac from 19 years of learning and watching and shaped his own team. Those lessons Armagh gave did not go unnoticed. McGuinness hated losing to them but he liked the austere way in which they carried themselves.

“They never got into sledging. They never were bad-mannered. But they would break you for a 50-50 ball. They were manly and I respected that. I want our boys to play like that: hard and fair. I don’t like them to get into anything unbecoming. I want them to be tough and to respect their opponents as well.”

There is something of the under-achieving years with Glenties in there too and much of his own positive energy and something of the heartbreaks in his life and plenty of the psychology he studied in college. You only have to watch the televised games to see how much trust he places in his management team of Rory Gallagher and Maxi Curran. It has all added up to a season that began with a modest draw in a league game against Sligo after trailing by eight points to tomorrow: a late August date in Dublin.

Shades of 1992 colour the weekend, and this All-Ireland semi-final represents another dive into the unknown for McGuinness and Donegal.

“Dublin are at a totally different juncture to us,” he says. “I would have wild admiration for Pat Gilroy because I feel he had certain things to do and he made tough decisions with humility.

“When you win six of seven Leinster titles, you are thinking about the All-Ireland. That is natural. Whereas we started this year trying to win a game in Ulster. That was it. This was Michael Murphy’s fourth campaign and he had never won a game. The boys have a league and championship medal so they have two things to reflect on whenever the season ends.”

Not that he wants it to end. It’s the performance that interests him. That is why the idea of his Donegal team going out and “living”, as he puts it, matters so much. “In games this year, their whole being was exposed and they had to respond the situations. So the pride that people felt in Donegal reflected the way they reacted. And that is a big thing for this team – as people as well as footballers.”