You can take the man out of the county, but you can't take . . .

Commentator Martin Carney will have the three great strands of his life coming together to tie a knot all at once, while Mick Murphy will watch his son captain Donegal in an All-Ireland final – they both feel privileged to be part of it all

TWO MEN left home in 1974. One a rookie garda from Ballina, Co Mayo, the other a young teacher from Ballyshannon, Co Donegal. At that age they were just grains of pollen blown about on life’s breezes but as it happened neither had any great grumble with where they ended up sticking.

Like generations of Mayo gardaí before and after him, our man went north to Donegal, all the way up to Buncrana. “It was an established trend and we were glad to have it,” he says. “It was near to home, it was easily got at. It was better than being sent the other side of the country.”

Thirty-eight years later he carries an accent now that tells the second part of his story while at the same time hinting at the first.

The teacher went in the opposite direction to start his working life in Swinford, Co Mayo. Again, it was no hardship. His father had grown up one of 14 children in Lahardaun – just the other side of Lough Conn from Ballina, in fact – but had spent his days chasing work from Limerick to Wexford to Belfast to Fermanagh and finally to Ballyshannon. In a way, the young teacher was only doing as his father had done before him and he was getting off lightly by comparison.

Two random lives bouncing around the tombola all this time, drawn out this weekend for a day neither could have imagined. The young garda settled, married and in 1989 saw his son born with a hip out of place, meaning the boy needed to be operated on before the age of three or he’d have had a limp for life. Tomorrow Mick Murphy will watch his son Michael captain Donegal in an All-Ireland final against the county he left in 1974.

As for the teacher, he was already a Donegal footballer when he moved to Mayo and it was a label he didn’t get around to peeling off for another half a decade. Having won two Ulster titles in nine years, he finally switched jerseys in 1979 and spent another 11 playing for his father’s county, adding four Connacht medals along the way.

Tomorrow Martin Carney will sit in the press box in the Hogan Stand, co-commentating on a game where he doesn’t know who he wants to win, just that he doesn’t want either of them to lose.

“Donegal’s win over Kerry this year was one of the greatest days I ever had in Croke Park,” says Carney. “It’s funny, though, that the only one team in the country that I didn’t want to see coming through the other side was Mayo. And who appeared? Mayo. I’ve been living there for 38 years and I have so much love and affection for the place. My children are Mayo people through and through. There’s no doubt that it has created huge inner conflict.”

“It’s a bit different for me,” says Murphy, “because Michael is captain and I have to show support on that side. It’s the only natural thing to do. Now of course, I would still follow Mayo very closely and I still would be passionate about them. But I’ve put a lot of my life into Donegal football.

“I was involved with development squads that over half of that Donegal team would have come through. I would know them all from they were young little lads.

“That’s what you do as you get older in life. You look back. That’s what parents do, it’s what you do with neighbours and neighbours’ youngsters and children. So we’re not any of us doing anything different to what comes naturally.

“But I know I have brothers at home in Ballina – two brothers who wouldn’t be involved in football at all but who are just totally consumed by this now. One of them is ringing me now that you would never get on the phone and he’s just caught up in it. If it’s affecting people like that, it’s getting big.”

And yet, not as big as it might have been. At least not in Mayo. Carney has been on the preview night circuit this week in both counties, to wildly different audiences. The one in Castlebar on Tuesday got fewer than 100 people through the door; the following night in Letterkenny, they pulled up the drawbridge with 600 tickets sold. You don’t need access to a psychologist to work out why. A historian, maybe.

“The sense of longing in Mayo is huge,” says Carney. “There’s no doubt about it. The desire to have a win in the All-Ireland is greater than it’s ever been. But it hasn’t manifested itself publicly in the last few weeks. It’s been quite amazing just how low-key it has been and the amount of damping down there’s been. Even the optics, the visuals that you have in various towns is so different. Letterkenny is awash with colour and signs and everything but in Mayo it’s just not there.

“Mayo have been there before, that’s the thing. The people have seen the September gathering on quite a number of occasions, even at minor level as well. That sense of newness, that sense of being different is no longer there. And they’re definitely more cautious this time. That caution has been, shall we say, well earned.”

Mick Murphy earned and yearned with the best of them. In 1989, he sat in the nosebleed seats in the old Hogan Stand as Mayo blew their chance of a first All-Ireland in 38 years against Cork. Sitting beside him was Martin McHugh, three years away from Valhalla himself without knowing it.

“I was devastated,” says Murphy. “I couldn’t believe they lost it. There was so much expected of Mayo that year and they had a really good team. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t understand how they lost it. That’s what being a supporter is, that’s how much of an effect it has on you. There’s a lot to be lost when you lose a final. You will think about it all the way up the road. It won’t leave you. You’re so close to the team, you feel you’re there with them.”

It was how he always felt. Football was the cord that had kept him attached to home all those years. When he first arrived in Buncrana, he couldn’t understand how little GAA there was in the area.

There was a bit of hurling played in Carndonagh and a gesture towards football played in Burt but you were talking about no more than a couple of games every summer. Whereas back home, there were 15 clubs within 10 miles of Ballina and the same again in Claremorris, ditto in Castlebar.

So he travelled. Up and down the west coast to see games. County games, club games, whatever. Semi-finals and finals of the county championship in Mayo and then after a while, county finals in Monaghan and Cavan and Sligo and anywhere else that caught his eye. As a garda during the troubles, he couldn’t risk crossing the border for a game but he went everywhere else.

In time, he moved stations to Letterkenny and was persuaded to join Glenswilly sometime around 1986 by local man Finbar Glackin. It was a tiny club then and it’s not a huge one now but growth isn’t always measured in numbers. In 1996, they gathered up every eight-year-old boy in the area – his own included – and found the head count came to 21. Ten years later, 19 of them remained. (“And I can account for the other two,” says Murphy: “they left the area.”)

Last year, Glenswilly won their first senior county championship with a team sprinkled with those players. “The GAA is long-term,” he says. “If you stick with it, it comes to you. I’m convinced of that.”

If anything, Carney is living proof of just how long-term it can be. His uncle Jackie Carney won an All-Ireland with Mayo in 1936 and then went on to train the 1950/’51 back-to-back teams. Those family ties were what allowed him to ultimately make his peace with transferring to Mayo after five years of travelling up the coast for Donegal games.

“At the time, Donegal were probably the stronger team,” Carney says. “They were definitely more successful – Mayo had won nothing in the ’70s, absolutely nothing. It was a decade of huge disappointment because they had very good minor and under-21 teams but had never made anything of them.

“It took me two or three years to get used to playing with Mayo. That’s why I took a keener interest than most in the Seánie Johnstone thing this summer. I just couldn’t understand how he could have gone to Kildare where he had no blood ties. It would have been impossible for me to play in Mayo had I not had the family history, the very strong blood ties. If work had brought me to Sligo or any other county, I would have kept on playing for Donegal. I couldn’t understand the county of convenience thing.”

Families, fathers, football. It all weaves through itself like yarn in twine. Mick Murphy has been walking around for the past fortnight like a man who’s breathing only half the air in his lungs, trying his best to, as he puts it himself, “keep the whole thing ordinary”.

The first time he and Carney met, Carney was handing an award to his only son. Funny enough, that’s what he was doing the second time as well. The boy with the out-of-place hip grew up to be a special footballer who stands a good four inches taller than him in his socks. Doesn’t stop him worrying.

As for Carney, tomorrow feels like a privilege. The three great strands of his life coming together to tie a knot all at once and he gets to broadcast it to millions across the world. Last Sunday, his three daughters were heading off to college and work for the week but before they left the house, they went hunting.

“There was a thorough rifling of the hot press at home, looking for all the old Mayo jerseys,” he says. “There was all these jerseys from the 1980s on and they were mixing and matching them. They’ll head to Dublin with them, old tattered jerseys with ‘1988 Connacht Final’ written on them, holes in them, faded, the whole thing. Real retro stuff. It’s great to see that, for the tribes to be going to war kind of thing.”

Tribes are many-splendoured things all the same. They have blurred edges and soft boundaries and one of the glories of life is the chance to melt from one to another and back again and to see what you create along the way.

Two men left home in 1974. Look what happened.