It’s hard to move these days without hearing some sort of talk about Jim McGuinness being the greatest sporting guru in the history of sporting guru-dom.
Just this week Tommy Boyd tipped the former Donegal coach to become the manager of a soccer team in the UK.
But in an excellent interview in the Donegal Democrat, midfielder Rory Kavanagh reveals that he was very sceptical when McGuinness first got the Donegal job, especially when he bumped into him the night before their first training session… outside Dublin nightclub Copper Face Jacks!
“I was very sceptical when Jim was coming in,” Kavanagh says.
“He was a Glenties man who I had come across on the pitch and had battles with many times. He was the buck who used to drive around Jordanstown with the sunglasses in the Toyota Celica.
“Yet here he was now – the Donegal manager. St Eunan’s played at the Kilmacud Sevens the weekend of the 2010 All-Ireland final and I’d actually met Jim the night before our very first Donegal training session, which was a kind of trial in Ballybofey. But I’d met him outside Copper’s!
“I just couldn’t imagine him being this sort of father figure that we needed there and then. I thought he was too much like us.
“For me, Jim was a very different person to what I know now. The person I thought that he was and the person he actually is are two completely different people.”
So there you have it. Jim McGuinness and Copper Face Jacks in the same sentence.
