Benny still haunted by visions of Croke Park horror show

OCCASIONALLY, Benny Coulter will find himself travelling or just musing on the sofa when thoughts of 2010, Croke Park and the All-Ireland final they lost to Cork invade his space like a cat burglar.

He does his best to chase away the unwelcome intrusion. “A killer,” he says. “There is not a day goes past that I don’t think about it. You could be driving down the road and the next thing think back to 2010. And you try to get it out of your head as quick as possible because it puts you in bad form.

“Even people talking about it puts me in bad form. It’s brutal.”

That summer began with a hot day in Ballybofey, Down taking the field in their club jerseys for the warm-up before facing Donegal, who happen to be Sunday’s opponents in this Ulster semi-final.

Down fell behind to an early Dermot ‘Brick’ Molloy goal, but a side-footed goal from Coulter four minutes from the end of extra-time settled the issue.

That was the last time Donegal had been beaten in Ballybofey, in league or Championship football.

In the interim, Donegal have crushed Down’s Ulster dreams.

The two sides met in the 2012 decider. Coulter had spent the weeks prior to their remarkable second-half comeback against Monaghan in the Ulster semi-final offering up novenas to his broken ankle as he took daily dips in the saltwater in Warrenpoint. He made it back to start the final and although he won a couple of early balls inside, a yellow card for preventing Mark McHugh launching a counter-attack hampered him from the day.

The year after that, Donegal were All-Ireland champions, Jim McGuinness was hailed as a genius and everywhere they went, they cut off the oxygen of scores as they strangled a succession of opponents.

Down had went up to Celtic Park and beat Derry in an old-fashioned shoot-out in the quarter-final. Then they came in for the usual Tuesday night training and McCartan ( far right) and his new coach Aidan O’Rourke had something very radical and different in store. Indeed, something that would repel those that talk of the ‘Down Way’ of doing things; they were going to mirror Donegal exactly, play their own sweeper system and hit them on the counter.

“Wee James was unbelievable that time. He did it all in three weeks,” says Coulter.

“They had it down to a tee on the board, how we would play and they made it so easy for us.

“None of the boys could say they were confused, everybody had their role and we should have beat them that day, we missed an awful lot of scores.

“It wasn’t entirely natural to us to play that way, but they put it across to us very well. They had two boys that covered the full-back line and covered all the avenues of balls going into Murphy and McBrearty. They had it worked to a tee.”

Down lost a struggle 0-9 to 0-12, but they provided the perfect blueprint to Monaghan manager Malachy O’Rourke on what he might do for the Ulster final. To beat ‘The System’, you had to become at one with the system yourself. In doing so, Monaghan dethroned the Ulster and All-Ireland champions and mercilessly whipped away all the mystique about that Donegal side.

It would be hard to identify anyone as immersed in Down football as Coulter. At present, he is an underage coach with the county board, helping out with age groups right up to the St Colman’s and Abbey CBS footballing academies. He manages and still plays with his club Mayobridge.