THOUGH THEY HAVE only met seven times in championship football, there’s more needle in Dublin-Donegal than an Asian sweat shop.
The game will be played Croke Park, rather than the kite-flying of Parnell Park last Sunday by Dublin manager Ger Brennan. And every single championship game between the pair has been played at Headquarters. Donegal have won two, Dublin have won four with one draw.
What exactly was Brennan hoping to achieve with his preference for Donnycarney? Perhaps it gives Dublin another chunk of perceived injustice.
That’s if they needed it. We wonder just how the Dublin supporters might react to close-ups on the big screen of Donegal manager Jim McGuinness, the man who escaped the 12-week suspension inflicted on their own manager, after he did something remarkably similar.
Dublin and Donegal have a tangled and distrustful relationship over the past 15 years, since the arrival of McGuinness as manager in 2011.
The Glenties man was involved the very first time they met each other was in the 1992 All-Ireland final, Donegal winning their first Sam Maguire on a 0-18 to 0-14 scoreline.
Donegal forward Declan Bonner after Donegal beat Dublin in the 1992 All-Ireland final. INPHO
INPHO
McGuinness was a teenage substitute who began the year looking to return to America where he had been working, only for manager Brian McEniff to invite him in for a challenge match over the winter and had him on the hook from that point on.
His playing career peaked before it got going. He started at the top and it petered out with a horrific injury sustained playing for his club Naomh Conaill. He never got to earn an Ulster medal on the field of play.
By 2002, he was a veteran in midfield alongside his clubmate, John Gildea. He hit what was termed a ‘fifty’ when they drew with Dublin in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
The replay wasn’t until a fortnight later, but what happened after the drawn game would inform McGuinness’ approach as manager. The Donegal lads were feeling good about themselves as they returned to the Camden Court Hotel for a post-match meal.
Someone made the decision they could have two pints. They were thrown down like tea dregs in a sink. The dinner was wolfed as quick as possible to get back to the bar.
Manager Mickey Moran stared at the Donegal bags flung at the foot of the stairs rather than on the bus. He made a few enquiries and players were for staying down.
Only three players returned on the bus.
While the replay was a fortnight away, it was a sign of how they weren’t taking themselves seriously as a county. They bombed in the replay, losing 1-14 to 0-7.
****
By the time they met next, Donegal were a different animal. Dublin found themselves in the middle of a severe All-Ireland drought, but there were signs under Pat Gilroy that they were morphing from the ‘Startled Earwigs’ that lost 1-7 to 1-24 to Kerry in the 2009 quarter-final.
To get a sense of how both parties felt about each other from that point on, we consult the sacred texts: the autobiographies of Jim McGuinness, Rory Kavanagh, Bernard Brogan and Kevin Cassidy’s contributions in ‘This Is Our Year’.
Gilroy was in year three of his project. He had taken a JCB to his soul and his mind, later inflicting this on his players by arranging a series of winter challenge matches against Monaghan in Inniskeen.
Gilroy stationed a selector on each line of the field reminding the players that the only score that mattered was how many times each player got in a hard tackle.
Personally, he engaged the services of Bart McEnroe, a leadership consultant and psychotherapist from Cavan who had worked with Mickey Harte when he delivered three All-Irelands to Tyrone the previous decade.
Their first meeting began with McEnroe telling Gilroy what a disgrace he was to preside over the Dublin side that failed so miserably to Kerry. He used cutting words, loudly. BLUFFER! NOVICE!
He went face to face with Gilroy, a man not used to this kind of stuff, and eventually Gilroy grabbed McEnroe.
The response was a wide smile. He had broken Gilroy and said so, saying, “You’ve been emotionally hijacked again, Pat.”
With McEnroe, Gilroy would work on how he dealt with stress. He would also relate this back to his players and offer challenges.
At one team meeting, Bernard Brogan was sitting in the front row. Gilroy gave a signal for Philly McMahon to grab him by the neck. Brogan immediately went into survival mode, grappling back.
It must have been a startling scene, one that Gilroy halted and explained to the entire group about your fight or flight reflex. They started using medical terminology of an ‘amygdala hijack’.
‘If any team ever set themselves up to emotionally hijack Dublin, it was what Donegal threw at us in the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final,’ wrote Bernard Brogan in his autobiography, ‘The Hill.’
That was the day that Gaelic football was changed. At the time it was radical and brave. It became the broad blueprint for all teams to play, thereby souring Gaelic football as an overall spectacle.
McGuinness developed an idea that had succeeded with his Naomh Conaill team to win their first county title in 2005. His assistant Rory Gallagher had played on a St Gall’s team with a similar approach to win the 2010 All-Ireland club title.
They would bring every player back, apart from Colm McFadden as a lone forward.
Johnny Cooper and Colm McFadden. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
“We formulated our ideas and decided that at heart Dublin were a cautious and defensive team. The back six would always stay at home. We went to Redcastle for a weekend and everything was hashed out,” said McGuinness.
“It was then that we floated the idea of bringing every single player into our half of the field to try to lure them out. We knew it would cause outrage. But we decided we didn’t care what anyone thought.”
And how. But they didn’t want anything getting out either.
“…On the Sunday morning of the game, we gathered in a huddle. I told the squad that I was putting my phone in a bag for the day and hoped everyone else would do the same,” said McGuinness.
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“Three hours before the game, back in our hotel in Ashbourne, McGuinness had actually presented us with the team and how he wanted us to play,” said Donegal midfielder Rory Kavanagh.
“He wanted to wait until the final minute, if he could. He wanted nothing getting out. He laid out the whole plan.
“Who was taking this Dublin player. That Dublin player. The role of every single Donegal player was laid out on paper. Our phones were collected and put away.”
Kevin Cassidy said, “You never ever question Jim. Nobody was looking at each other or anything like that; it was a case that we had believed in him all year and we were going to go with this too with everything we had.
He told us, ‘This is the way it’s going to go. This game could end up four-three, doesn’t matter. As long as we’re on the right end of the result, that’s all that matters.
‘The longer we keep them without scoring their first-half goal, without getting their big run for 10 or 15 minutes at the start of the game, the pressure will be all on them. ‘They’ll start kicking crazy wides, the Brogans are going to shoot from anywhere…’”
The Brogans. Poster boys for the Dublin attack at the time, they were part of a unit that kicked 0-22 against Tyrone in the quarter-final. 0-19 of that was from play. Bernard clipped over five, one free, and Alan kicked 0-3.
Diarmuid Connolly was on fire that afternoon, hitting 0-7.
“But that night we’d encountered basically no sweeper,” said Brogan.
“Against Donegal we were coming up against 14 men behind the ball. Fourteen. Mickey Whelan had us steeled to meet a massed defence by having our starting 15 play against 18 men in training but this was beyond what he or anyone except Jim McGuinness could have envisaged.”
Bernard Brogan holds off Neil McGee. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
He referenced Cassidy’s comments about the Brogans being forced and panicked into shooting wides, adding, “By half-time it was as if we were all just actors in his script.’
“I had Neil McGee in my face and Mark McHugh playing right in front of me.
“… So I was frustrated alright. But maybe not to the point McGuinness had been hoping for. I hadn’t been emotionally hijacked.”
Gradually, Dublin came back into it. Brogan might not have shot the lights out, but he hit four frees and was fouled for two of them. He exerted a massive influence on the game.
Ultimately, with the approach they had taken, Donegal needed a goal. They got their chance with Colm McFadden from close range. But it whizzed over and they scored just two more points in the second half.
It was the most severe test any team in Gaelic football had been put through in terms of a brand-new formation.
At half-time, Pat Spillane labelled it ‘Shi’ite football. Colm O’Rourke said it was ‘The game from Hell.’
The Dubs had to go through Hell to do it. Gilroy’s work had paid off.
****
From that point, the two sides decided that they just did not like each other whatsoever.
Donegal won the 2012 All-Ireland, with Dublin taken out by Mayo in the semi-final.
Being champions puts a target on your back. An hour-long documentary, ‘Jimmy’s Winnin’ Matches’ about the manager, aired on RTÉ One in early January, 2013.
It’s not the sort of thing that endears you to other teams. Their rivals suspected that Donegal were full of themselves. That 2013 league campaign proved difficult for Donegal, relegated with just two wins, a draw and four defeats.
Away to Tyrone, a spectator spat on the injured Karl Lacey as he made his way down the tunnel after the game. Worse was to happen on the final day as Donegal claimed Patrick McBrearty had been bitten by a Dublin player.
They invited the Dublin team doctor to examine McBrearty and the GAA conducted an investigation. Dublin defender Kevin O’Brien was charged and suspended for three games.
A couple of weeks later, he was cleared by the Hearing’s Committee, after McBrearty did not present himself at the hearing.
Kevin O'Brien up against Patrick McBrearty. Presseye / INPHO
Presseye / INPHO / INPHO
They would get a chance to come up close again in 2014 for the All-Ireland semi-final.
By then Dublin were carrying irresistible form throughout the summer, beating Laois by 11, Wexford by 16 and then Meath in the Leinster final by 16 points. They crushed Monaghan in the quarter-final by 17.
Donegal had recovered some of their old form but were not blowing sides apart to the same extent. Dublin were 10/1 on to win the game.
In his book, McGuinness devotes just over eight pages to the game. In a way, even though he won an All-Ireland and five Ulster titles, that 3-14 to 0-17 win was his most impressive achievement as a coach.
As the game was only getting warmed up, the big screen camera cut to Jim Gavin sitting beside Declan Darcy and other members of the Dublin management. They were smiling. The score went out to 0-9 to 0-4 as Dublin kept pinging over rockets from distance.
All season long, McGuinness had been preparing a dossier on Dublin but it felt like it was going up in smoke.
“Normally, you would like three weeks to prepare for a team but I knew in my heart it wouldn’t be enough for Dublin,” he said.
“I spent all my spare hours – between working and preparing for the quarter-final – watching recordings of Dublin games. I was studying as deeply as possible. It meant that once we reached the All-Ireland semi-final and the boys began to turn their thoughts towards Dublin I could say to them: I know what Dublin are about. I know what they are going to do and how they are going to do it and that’s all you need to know.”
Donegal got back into it, sniping points here and there while Dublin’s radar started getting blurry. Ryan McHugh’s goal started it an avalanche.
Ryan McHugh gets the first goal of the 2014 semi-final. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
They gathered a momentum that took them right through to the end of the game, 3-14 to 0-17.
“Heading into that match I thought I’d almost mastered the mental game,” said Bernard Brogan.
“But during that second half I found myself over a couple of frees, thinking, Jesus, I actually don’t know if I’m going to be able to kick this free over the bar.
“… I was just in shock at how the game had unravelled. My amygdala had been hijacked.”
Rory Kavanagh’s role was to break forward with the ball, but get back into position without the ball, to engage Michael Darragh Macauley when he went on a run. He bumped and grabbed and tortured Macauley.
In his book, he says that in the height of frustration, Macauley called him a tramp. That’s when he knew Donegal were going to win.
Jim McGuinness and Jim Gavin shake hands. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
In taking out Dublin though, Donegal had shown their hand. Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice shook down a few northern contacts. In the final, he decided to mirror Donegal. Aidan O’Mahony man-marked Michael Murphy to the ends of extreme. They clogged up the middle and kept their defence in place.
It became one of the worst All-Ireland finals in living memory, decided by a botched Paul Durcan kick-out that landed in the big paws of Kieran Donaghy to kick to the net.
Several weeks after the semi-final, Jim Gavin made an amazing admission at a product launch.
“I accept full responsibility for that performance,” said Gavin.
“And I accept full responsibility for the philosophy and for the way Dublin play their football, for the attacking style we play and sometimes for the vulnerability that it brings and the unpredictability of it.”
The 2014 All-Stars Tour to Boston featured a number of Donegal and Dublin players in the touring party. It was noticeable how the two tribes barely mixed, even when in the same venues.
****
A few years later in 2019, with McGuinness long gone, Donegal took a principled stance against the idea that Dublin could nominate Croke Park as both their home venue, and a neutral venue, thereby gaining an advantage for the Super 8s competition format, where each side had to play games at home, away and a game at a neutral venue.
Dublin beat the system and had two games at home and one away. It was a remarkable situation.
Donegal brought a Motion to GAA Congress in February 2019 that gained just 36% of the vote.
What was odd was the debating against it.
Dublin CEO John Costello labelled it a ‘Divisive and mean-spirited motion’. He also estimated Dublin’s core support as being around 35,000 at the time, notable now for the extreme fall-off.
Former GAA President Sean Kelly also, puzzlingly, rode to the Dubs’ cause.
All of this is history to some degree. But there will be one final element of bad blood that could rear its head come Sunday lunchtime.
Back in 2012, Niall Moyna – now part of Ger Brennan’s backroom team – was DCU manager. They had Donegal’s Martin McElhinney as a player, and were due to play Meath in the O’Byrne Cup.
Given McElhinney was in the middle of exams, they told him to spend the day studying and not to worry. Instead, he was called up to play a challenge match for Donegal that day against Monaghan in Clones, where he picked up an injury in the warm-up.
Moyna spoke to RTÉ Radio and said, “I only found out at 5:15pm that the management team at Donegal demanded that he go play a challenge game against Monaghan today.
“What annoys me is not so much that he had to play the game, but that it is in the middle of his examinations when we have purposefully given him time off. So he lost the whole day, went up to Clones, and turned on his ankle in the warm-up, and we didn’t have him tonight.
“He wouldn’t have played tonight [for DCU] if we had known he had played today [for Donegal], and I think there is something wrong there.
“We talk about player welfare and that is abuse of players.
“…I don’t own him and Jim McGuinness does not own him. He is an amateur player, playing in an amateur organisation, trying to get an education and we should be facilitating that.”
McGuinness answered those claims, saying, “Seemingly Meath requested the game be brought forward to Saturday night and DCU agreed.
“When Martin told me he had a game on Saturday evening, I said to him we have our first league game in two weeks and I had all the players from the other college back to get a look at them. I said to him how can we expect to play you if we haven’t seen you play?
“After investing so much time and expertise do people think I would abuse such a player? It’s ridiculous, I’m annoyed someone would make that claim.”
More recently, Moyna made claims on behalf of the Dublin side about their belief that McGuinness escaped the type of 12-week suspension that Ger Brennan recently completed.
Ger Brennan holds off Michael Murphy. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
Within the set-ups, some links to these times remain with McGuinness back as manager, supported by Colm McFadden and Neil McGee, while Ryan McHugh and Michael are still playing.
With Dublin, Ger Brennan is manager, with Dean Rock, Stephen Cluxton and Niall Moyna in the backroom, while Cormac Costello is the only remaining player.
It all makes for a spicy lunchtime dish on Sunday.
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Red cards, accusations, taunts and a Congress motion - Dublin and Donegal have history
THOUGH THEY HAVE only met seven times in championship football, there’s more needle in Dublin-Donegal than an Asian sweat shop.
The game will be played Croke Park, rather than the kite-flying of Parnell Park last Sunday by Dublin manager Ger Brennan. And every single championship game between the pair has been played at Headquarters. Donegal have won two, Dublin have won four with one draw.
What exactly was Brennan hoping to achieve with his preference for Donnycarney? Perhaps it gives Dublin another chunk of perceived injustice.
That’s if they needed it. We wonder just how the Dublin supporters might react to close-ups on the big screen of Donegal manager Jim McGuinness, the man who escaped the 12-week suspension inflicted on their own manager, after he did something remarkably similar.
Dublin and Donegal have a tangled and distrustful relationship over the past 15 years, since the arrival of McGuinness as manager in 2011.
The Glenties man was involved the very first time they met each other was in the 1992 All-Ireland final, Donegal winning their first Sam Maguire on a 0-18 to 0-14 scoreline.
McGuinness was a teenage substitute who began the year looking to return to America where he had been working, only for manager Brian McEniff to invite him in for a challenge match over the winter and had him on the hook from that point on.
His playing career peaked before it got going. He started at the top and it petered out with a horrific injury sustained playing for his club Naomh Conaill. He never got to earn an Ulster medal on the field of play.
By 2002, he was a veteran in midfield alongside his clubmate, John Gildea. He hit what was termed a ‘fifty’ when they drew with Dublin in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
The replay wasn’t until a fortnight later, but what happened after the drawn game would inform McGuinness’ approach as manager. The Donegal lads were feeling good about themselves as they returned to the Camden Court Hotel for a post-match meal.
Manager Mickey Moran stared at the Donegal bags flung at the foot of the stairs rather than on the bus. He made a few enquiries and players were for staying down.
Only three players returned on the bus.
While the replay was a fortnight away, it was a sign of how they weren’t taking themselves seriously as a county. They bombed in the replay, losing 1-14 to 0-7.
****
By the time they met next, Donegal were a different animal. Dublin found themselves in the middle of a severe All-Ireland drought, but there were signs under Pat Gilroy that they were morphing from the ‘Startled Earwigs’ that lost 1-7 to 1-24 to Kerry in the 2009 quarter-final.
To get a sense of how both parties felt about each other from that point on, we consult the sacred texts: the autobiographies of Jim McGuinness, Rory Kavanagh, Bernard Brogan and Kevin Cassidy’s contributions in ‘This Is Our Year’.
Gilroy was in year three of his project. He had taken a JCB to his soul and his mind, later inflicting this on his players by arranging a series of winter challenge matches against Monaghan in Inniskeen.
Gilroy stationed a selector on each line of the field reminding the players that the only score that mattered was how many times each player got in a hard tackle.
Personally, he engaged the services of Bart McEnroe, a leadership consultant and psychotherapist from Cavan who had worked with Mickey Harte when he delivered three All-Irelands to Tyrone the previous decade.
Their first meeting began with McEnroe telling Gilroy what a disgrace he was to preside over the Dublin side that failed so miserably to Kerry. He used cutting words, loudly. BLUFFER! NOVICE!
He went face to face with Gilroy, a man not used to this kind of stuff, and eventually Gilroy grabbed McEnroe.
The response was a wide smile. He had broken Gilroy and said so, saying, “You’ve been emotionally hijacked again, Pat.”
With McEnroe, Gilroy would work on how he dealt with stress. He would also relate this back to his players and offer challenges.
At one team meeting, Bernard Brogan was sitting in the front row. Gilroy gave a signal for Philly McMahon to grab him by the neck. Brogan immediately went into survival mode, grappling back.
It must have been a startling scene, one that Gilroy halted and explained to the entire group about your fight or flight reflex. They started using medical terminology of an ‘amygdala hijack’.
‘If any team ever set themselves up to emotionally hijack Dublin, it was what Donegal threw at us in the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final,’ wrote Bernard Brogan in his autobiography, ‘The Hill.’
That was the day that Gaelic football was changed. At the time it was radical and brave. It became the broad blueprint for all teams to play, thereby souring Gaelic football as an overall spectacle.
McGuinness developed an idea that had succeeded with his Naomh Conaill team to win their first county title in 2005. His assistant Rory Gallagher had played on a St Gall’s team with a similar approach to win the 2010 All-Ireland club title.
They would bring every player back, apart from Colm McFadden as a lone forward.
“We formulated our ideas and decided that at heart Dublin were a cautious and defensive team. The back six would always stay at home. We went to Redcastle for a weekend and everything was hashed out,” said McGuinness.
“It was then that we floated the idea of bringing every single player into our half of the field to try to lure them out. We knew it would cause outrage. But we decided we didn’t care what anyone thought.”
And how. But they didn’t want anything getting out either.
“…On the Sunday morning of the game, we gathered in a huddle. I told the squad that I was putting my phone in a bag for the day and hoped everyone else would do the same,” said McGuinness.
“Three hours before the game, back in our hotel in Ashbourne, McGuinness had actually presented us with the team and how he wanted us to play,” said Donegal midfielder Rory Kavanagh.
“He wanted to wait until the final minute, if he could. He wanted nothing getting out. He laid out the whole plan.
“Who was taking this Dublin player. That Dublin player. The role of every single Donegal player was laid out on paper. Our phones were collected and put away.”
Kevin Cassidy said, “You never ever question Jim. Nobody was looking at each other or anything like that; it was a case that we had believed in him all year and we were going to go with this too with everything we had.
‘The longer we keep them without scoring their first-half goal, without getting their big run for 10 or 15 minutes at the start of the game, the pressure will be all on them. ‘They’ll start kicking crazy wides, the Brogans are going to shoot from anywhere…’”
The Brogans. Poster boys for the Dublin attack at the time, they were part of a unit that kicked 0-22 against Tyrone in the quarter-final. 0-19 of that was from play. Bernard clipped over five, one free, and Alan kicked 0-3.
Diarmuid Connolly was on fire that afternoon, hitting 0-7.
“But that night we’d encountered basically no sweeper,” said Brogan.
“Against Donegal we were coming up against 14 men behind the ball. Fourteen. Mickey Whelan had us steeled to meet a massed defence by having our starting 15 play against 18 men in training but this was beyond what he or anyone except Jim McGuinness could have envisaged.”
He referenced Cassidy’s comments about the Brogans being forced and panicked into shooting wides, adding, “By half-time it was as if we were all just actors in his script.’
“I had Neil McGee in my face and Mark McHugh playing right in front of me.
“… So I was frustrated alright. But maybe not to the point McGuinness had been hoping for. I hadn’t been emotionally hijacked.”
Gradually, Dublin came back into it. Brogan might not have shot the lights out, but he hit four frees and was fouled for two of them. He exerted a massive influence on the game.
Ultimately, with the approach they had taken, Donegal needed a goal. They got their chance with Colm McFadden from close range. But it whizzed over and they scored just two more points in the second half.
It was the most severe test any team in Gaelic football had been put through in terms of a brand-new formation.
At half-time, Pat Spillane labelled it ‘Shi’ite football. Colm O’Rourke said it was ‘The game from Hell.’
The Dubs had to go through Hell to do it. Gilroy’s work had paid off.
****
From that point, the two sides decided that they just did not like each other whatsoever.
Donegal won the 2012 All-Ireland, with Dublin taken out by Mayo in the semi-final.
Being champions puts a target on your back. An hour-long documentary, ‘Jimmy’s Winnin’ Matches’ about the manager, aired on RTÉ One in early January, 2013.
It’s not the sort of thing that endears you to other teams. Their rivals suspected that Donegal were full of themselves. That 2013 league campaign proved difficult for Donegal, relegated with just two wins, a draw and four defeats.
Away to Tyrone, a spectator spat on the injured Karl Lacey as he made his way down the tunnel after the game. Worse was to happen on the final day as Donegal claimed Patrick McBrearty had been bitten by a Dublin player.
They invited the Dublin team doctor to examine McBrearty and the GAA conducted an investigation. Dublin defender Kevin O’Brien was charged and suspended for three games.
A couple of weeks later, he was cleared by the Hearing’s Committee, after McBrearty did not present himself at the hearing.
They would get a chance to come up close again in 2014 for the All-Ireland semi-final.
By then Dublin were carrying irresistible form throughout the summer, beating Laois by 11, Wexford by 16 and then Meath in the Leinster final by 16 points. They crushed Monaghan in the quarter-final by 17.
Donegal had recovered some of their old form but were not blowing sides apart to the same extent. Dublin were 10/1 on to win the game.
In his book, McGuinness devotes just over eight pages to the game. In a way, even though he won an All-Ireland and five Ulster titles, that 3-14 to 0-17 win was his most impressive achievement as a coach.
As the game was only getting warmed up, the big screen camera cut to Jim Gavin sitting beside Declan Darcy and other members of the Dublin management. They were smiling. The score went out to 0-9 to 0-4 as Dublin kept pinging over rockets from distance.
All season long, McGuinness had been preparing a dossier on Dublin but it felt like it was going up in smoke.
“Normally, you would like three weeks to prepare for a team but I knew in my heart it wouldn’t be enough for Dublin,” he said.
“I spent all my spare hours – between working and preparing for the quarter-final – watching recordings of Dublin games. I was studying as deeply as possible. It meant that once we reached the All-Ireland semi-final and the boys began to turn their thoughts towards Dublin I could say to them: I know what Dublin are about. I know what they are going to do and how they are going to do it and that’s all you need to know.”
Donegal got back into it, sniping points here and there while Dublin’s radar started getting blurry. Ryan McHugh’s goal started it an avalanche.
They gathered a momentum that took them right through to the end of the game, 3-14 to 0-17.
“Heading into that match I thought I’d almost mastered the mental game,” said Bernard Brogan.
“But during that second half I found myself over a couple of frees, thinking, Jesus, I actually don’t know if I’m going to be able to kick this free over the bar.
“… I was just in shock at how the game had unravelled. My amygdala had been hijacked.”
Rory Kavanagh’s role was to break forward with the ball, but get back into position without the ball, to engage Michael Darragh Macauley when he went on a run. He bumped and grabbed and tortured Macauley.
In his book, he says that in the height of frustration, Macauley called him a tramp. That’s when he knew Donegal were going to win.
In taking out Dublin though, Donegal had shown their hand. Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice shook down a few northern contacts. In the final, he decided to mirror Donegal. Aidan O’Mahony man-marked Michael Murphy to the ends of extreme. They clogged up the middle and kept their defence in place.
It became one of the worst All-Ireland finals in living memory, decided by a botched Paul Durcan kick-out that landed in the big paws of Kieran Donaghy to kick to the net.
Several weeks after the semi-final, Jim Gavin made an amazing admission at a product launch.
“I accept full responsibility for that performance,” said Gavin.
“And I accept full responsibility for the philosophy and for the way Dublin play their football, for the attacking style we play and sometimes for the vulnerability that it brings and the unpredictability of it.”
The 2014 All-Stars Tour to Boston featured a number of Donegal and Dublin players in the touring party. It was noticeable how the two tribes barely mixed, even when in the same venues.
****
A few years later in 2019, with McGuinness long gone, Donegal took a principled stance against the idea that Dublin could nominate Croke Park as both their home venue, and a neutral venue, thereby gaining an advantage for the Super 8s competition format, where each side had to play games at home, away and a game at a neutral venue.
Dublin beat the system and had two games at home and one away. It was a remarkable situation.
Donegal brought a Motion to GAA Congress in February 2019 that gained just 36% of the vote.
What was odd was the debating against it.
Dublin CEO John Costello labelled it a ‘Divisive and mean-spirited motion’. He also estimated Dublin’s core support as being around 35,000 at the time, notable now for the extreme fall-off.
Former GAA President Sean Kelly also, puzzlingly, rode to the Dubs’ cause.
All of this is history to some degree. But there will be one final element of bad blood that could rear its head come Sunday lunchtime.
Back in 2012, Niall Moyna – now part of Ger Brennan’s backroom team – was DCU manager. They had Donegal’s Martin McElhinney as a player, and were due to play Meath in the O’Byrne Cup.
Given McElhinney was in the middle of exams, they told him to spend the day studying and not to worry. Instead, he was called up to play a challenge match for Donegal that day against Monaghan in Clones, where he picked up an injury in the warm-up.
Moyna spoke to RTÉ Radio and said, “I only found out at 5:15pm that the management team at Donegal demanded that he go play a challenge game against Monaghan today.
“What annoys me is not so much that he had to play the game, but that it is in the middle of his examinations when we have purposefully given him time off. So he lost the whole day, went up to Clones, and turned on his ankle in the warm-up, and we didn’t have him tonight.
“He wouldn’t have played tonight [for DCU] if we had known he had played today [for Donegal], and I think there is something wrong there.
“…I don’t own him and Jim McGuinness does not own him. He is an amateur player, playing in an amateur organisation, trying to get an education and we should be facilitating that.”
McGuinness answered those claims, saying, “Seemingly Meath requested the game be brought forward to Saturday night and DCU agreed.
“When Martin told me he had a game on Saturday evening, I said to him we have our first league game in two weeks and I had all the players from the other college back to get a look at them. I said to him how can we expect to play you if we haven’t seen you play?
“After investing so much time and expertise do people think I would abuse such a player? It’s ridiculous, I’m annoyed someone would make that claim.”
More recently, Moyna made claims on behalf of the Dublin side about their belief that McGuinness escaped the type of 12-week suspension that Ger Brennan recently completed.
Within the set-ups, some links to these times remain with McGuinness back as manager, supported by Colm McFadden and Neil McGee, while Ryan McHugh and Michael are still playing.
With Dublin, Ger Brennan is manager, with Dean Rock, Stephen Cluxton and Niall Moyna in the backroom, while Cormac Costello is the only remaining player.
It all makes for a spicy lunchtime dish on Sunday.
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