I remember walking into a changing room a few years ago before a championship game and seeing an article from an old colleague pinned to the wall.
“Coleraine’s attack can do the damage. Steelstown’s can’t,” the headline read.
One-by-one, players filed in. Some confused, some indifferent, some scanning the page checking for any mention of their names.
“Do you see that, boys? That’s what they f**king think of you,” was the gist of it.
So what, I thought. Who’s they? It’s just one man who hasn’t seen us play all year, working against a deadline, trying to fill pages and, if anything, I probably gave him the info.
Who really cares?
Imagine: the amount of preview pieces up and down the island, all over the counties, every single week, and they’re just banged out before moving on to the next one. Banged out by one writer who probably hasn’t seen either team play.
Some people do care though. Jim McGuinness cares.
Jim McGuinness cares so much that he spends a great deal of his memoir settling scores. Including one against this journalist, then of a different parish.
In hindsight myself and a lot of congenitally optimistic Derry fans put too much stock in Donegal’s poor 2013. We headed into the 2014 Ulster SFC quarter-final with hope and no shortage of confidence.
On May 25 last year, I was taught a valuable lesson by Jim McGuinness and have long since eaten my words, especially after big Neil McGee put me in my place.
The Glenties native waited for his new book though to settle a score.
‘My only concern was that the boys would subconsciously absorb the dismissiveness. Nobody feared us. There is only so much you can hear and read without taking notice. We spoke about self-reliance and about only ourselves mattering. Still.
‘Shortly before we played Derry, an article appeared in the Derry Journal – which would be a big paper north of the Gap in Donegal – that wasn’t so much scathing as degrading. It referred to us as a so-called mythical team that could be broken into three syllables. Don-e-gal.
‘And the old question came back: Would they write this about Kerry or Dublin? Would they write about Tyrone in those terms? They felt they could write anything they wanted about us.
‘The author queried whether we had anyone to cope with Mark Lynch. Nobody, he reasoned. That jumped off the page. Lynch is a terrific all-round player but it was an issue I was happy to put to our players when we met. I asked Neil McGee if he felt he was up to it. Then I went to Karl Lacey. How many All-Stars have you, Karl? They don’t think you are up to it.’
In a county career that spanned just five years with the seniors and under-21 team, the Donegal man set himself apart as one of the greatest managers of all time. All time. And yet he still places more stock in what a 25-year-old supporter of their biggest rivals writes in a local paper in a different county than what his own views are.
Brian McIver guided a young team to the National League final, beating Dublin and Mayo and Kerry en route, and Donegal were headed in the opposite direction. Or so it seemed. We got carried away as a county. Won’t be the last time.
Donegal’s 2013 was a relative disaster after relegation and a quarter final thumping to Mayo and it was high time that teams stopped fearing them. Then they lost to Monaghan in the Division Two final.
“We lost 1-16 to 1-10 and the defeat conformed to the national view that we were finished,” McGuinness wrote in Until Victory Always.
And I hopped on that bandwagon too, blinded by the bloody hope that a Derry crest dares to give you every few years.
The reasoning – in hindsight, the naive reasoning – was that Donegal’s secret was their fitness. They burst through that wall and took the game to new limits and, whilst in the same article I still had them as favourites to beat Derry in Celtic Park, they had proved they were beatable the year before.
And moreover, teams had simply caught up on their conditioning. The work rate that McGuinness introduced in the hills was just the bare minimum now for every county and we were on a level playing field again. We thought.
Mea culpa. Like many across the country I underestimated McGuinness’ ability to remotivate a small but concentrated pool of talent.
Still, reading his take on my take 18 months on, five things jump off the page.
- Calling Donegal a mythical team was taken completely out of context. Deliberately, of course. If anything, it was exactly in line with the tone of McGuinness’ book and thinking when he wanted his own county to stop worshiping these other successful teams and to stop accepting second best. I said that Donegal were human. And not a myth-like legend.
- I wouldn’t write about Dublin and Kerry in the same way, he’s right. I wouldn’t come close to it. They have 62 All-Ireland titles between them, compared to Donegal’s two.
- I’ve written a lot worse about Tyrone.
- Sorry, Mark Lynch, I obviously did you no favours.
- Saying I used to write for the Derry Journal wasn’t so much scathing as it was degrading. The article appeared in the Derry News and the County Derry Post. His final insult.
Now, I would never suggest that any GAA manager would ever manipulate an article to drive their own team and create a siege mentality…
I might suggest, however, that Jim McGuinness would suck motivation out of a corn flake. And it’s crazy to think that a man operating at that level – revolutionary at that level – would drop to the same old stick-it-to-the-changing-room-wall trick.
It’s nice to know someone is reading though.
