ON A SEPTEMBER Sunday in Croke Park, Kieran Donaghy’s rebirth was complete.
A goal, two points, a third Allstar, and a fourth All-Ireland medal – not a bad haul for a man who couldn’t even fight his way off the bench a few months earlier.
From a once-bleak footballing future, he is starting the new year as Kerry captain while also fighting to seal the greatest honour of them all with Austin Stacks.
A return to Jones’ Road for the AIB All-Ireland club finals on St Patrick’s Day is within reach but, Donaghy is quick to point out, Sunday’s semi against Ulster champions Slaughtneil is enough of a challenge to occupy even the most idle mind.
“It’s not in the back of my head, honestly,” he said.
“If we get over the next game it’ll be all that I think about probably for a month, but right now it really isn’t. It’s about trying to win a semi-final to give yourself the option to think like that.
If you’re thinking like that now I think you’re in trouble as a player and it’s something Stephen [Stack, the Stacks manager] has emphasised and we’ve been good at that all year: taking the next game as it comes and one game at a time.
“I think it’s a cliché, but I think we’ve really been good at it all year. We played Dingle here in the [Kerry] semi-final and if we looked past Dingle we would have been beaten hands down but we didn’t and we just concentrated. We didn’t care about the other game.
“It was just about getting there, getting to a final and giving yourself the chance to win it and that’s what we did.”
Donaghy has been living, breathing proof of that mentality throughout the campaign. The tradition in Kerry is to appoint the inter-county captain from the reigning county champions and as the established Stacks man in the squad, the honour was his with victory over Mid-Kerry.
“It’s a great honour, massive honour and something I look forward to,” he said.
I tried not to think of it going into the county finals obviously because you don’t want to think about it and not achieve it and have another depressing factor as well as losing the county final that the chance of that is gone as well.
So I really didn’t think about it until the business was done with the Stacks. Actually it’s funny, I never even thought about it until on the bus that evening, one of the boys shook my hand, one of the Stacks fellas like, and that was the first time it dawned on me.
“It’s an unbelievable honour even for me go on and put on a Kerry jersey and play for Kerry as a youngster, I wasn’t one of these young talented fellows that was scoring 1-8 in a county minor finals or anything.
“I was outside in a minor final when I was 17 almost getting in the way around the place at full-forward so, you know, to go on and play senior football for Kerry was a huge achievement for me in my career and obviously to go on and captain this great county is an just unbelievable honour for me.”
