Why bitter rivals are always up for a fierce showdown

GOD knows what was going through the mind of the person who spat on Karl Lacey, Donegal’s injured defender who was walking back to the Healy Park dressing room during their league defeat to Tyrone in 2013.

It was a vile act towards the reigning Player of the Year, on an afternoon that had a desperate edge to it. Afterwards, Mickey Harte went to apologise to Lacey on behalf of Tyrone GAA, but that wasn’t what Donegal manager Jim McGuinness took away from that brief talk.

Instead, it was a line from Harte recounted in McGuinness’ autobiography when they shook hands and Harte said: “You were great All-Ireland champions.”

The implication of the word ‘were’ drove McGuinness mad.

If you thought that was the low point and things couldn’t get any worse between these two counties after that, then you were badly wrong. Back to that in a minute.

The two sides meet tomorrow in the final group clash of the Super8s. They have never faced off this far into the All-Ireland competition. Clubs cannot match the demand for tickets. It is, simply, the biggest game Ballybofey has hosted.

Some might trace the enmity back to the infamous ‘Battle of Ballybofey’ in 1973, when Donegal’s star of the time, Neilly Gallagher, almost lost an eye after a punch from his marker, Mickey Joe Forbes, with reports of stones and bottles being flung at the dugouts.

McGuinness (right) was determined to change the relationship from his playing career, which was of Tyrone supremacy.

Prior to the very first challenge match he had as manager of the county Under-21s against Sligo in Ballyshannon, he told the story of the time he played for the Under-21s at full-forward against Tyrone in Castlederg. His marker beat him to the ball and put his boot into his face in the process, laughing heartily when the referee did nothing about it.

“The point was that we held Tyrone and teams like that in the height of respect and they regarded us as players to be toyed with, to mash down,” he recounted.

“Tyrone and Armagh had been driving me demented for years, but they weren’t gods. They were not superhuman. People in Donegal thought they were. We elevated them in our minds and they regarded us as a joke. They knew we would always buckle in the minutes that mattered. The inference was there.”

In 2011, Donegal met Tyrone in the Ulster Championship. The night before, in a meeting room in the Slieve Russell Hotel, McGuinness spent two hours dissecting Tyrone — right down to the type of sledging they would try.

In that Ulster semi-final win, the relationship flipped. Tyrone misread the signs.

When they met again in 2012, Harte’s message to his players was not to respect their opponents, but to ask, ‘What have they done in the game?’

Another defeat, on the way to Donegal’s All-Ireland title, drove Tyrone mad.

Donegal defender Eamonn McGee recalled: “They were a means of testing ourselves and it fed into the narrative that Jim was telling us. And we bought it. They looked down their nose at us.

“It wasn’t a case that they actually did look down their noses at us, we were never on their radar. But it was the way that Jim sold it to us. We were eager and easy to