There’s nothing worse. The board goes up, your number’s on it. The announcer confirms it. Your game’s over before the first half even is.
Mattie Donnelly has been there.
He still remembers the 2012 and 2013 season with Tyrone and it still frustrates him. On too many occasions, he was substituted on or before the half time break but the last time it happened was in a league game with Kildare in 2013.
He made sure it wouldn’t happen again.
Donnelly has since used those experiences to become the player he is today – a beast of a man, a two-time All-Star, a real leader of the Ulster champions.
The fight back started only three weeks after that Kildare disappointment when he kicked 1-2 against the same opposition in the Division One semi-final.
He hasn’t looked back but he still curses the years he spent messing around at Jordanstown when he could’ve been pushing on. Monaghan’s Kieran Hughes isn’t entirely blameless either.
“That lifestyle would’ve started to peter out by 2012,” Donnelly explained in a brilliant interview on The GAA Hour.
“But maybe the damage was done in the years before that with a previous guest of yours, Kieran Hughes.Â
“I could’ve been on the scene quicker if I had applied myself right in them years but it’s all lessons learned.”
He enjoyed himself as he grew up to become a man but he uses the example of Rio Ferdinand missing out on a couple of years of his best too.
It took Mickey Harte’s early substitution in a qualifier with Kerry in 2012 to really kick him up the arse. The following league campaign’s disappointment was just the final straw.
“It was a turning point,” Donnelly said.
“It happened a few times that year [in 2012] where I was taken off at half time or before half time. It actually happened to me again in the National League in 2013, I was taken off at half time against Kildare.
“I was just at that stage where I had a decision to make: whether I was going to go for it or just keep floating about and staying in the position I was in.
“It’s not nice for any player to get taken off at half time but you just have to be honest about why you may have been taken off at that stage and, for me, why it was happening regularly. There were harsh lessons for myself and I like to think I learned from them.”
He also needed to cop on physically but he started to put that work in early enough that it stands to him now.
He’s one of the most athletic footballers in the country – he can sprint with the quickest of them, he can hit with the biggest of them but, more importantly, that just allows him to play ball at his pace.
And he does that pretty well.
“IÂ was only a wee slip of a lad,” the Trillick man recalled.
“I saw in the first year or two when I was in and around the squad in 2010 – you were in the dressing room alongside Kevin Hughes and Philip Jordan and Owen Mulligan and Conor Gormley and you were just absolutely no use to them in any sort of physical contest.
“They were the fellas that were actually playing at that level so I thought it was something I needed to address with the way the game was going. I saw the Dublin team and the Cork team that was on the scene around then and I just thought that if you were to make any impression, you really had to have a physical presence.”
Listen to the full interview below from 14:15.
