‘It was absolutely horrible for the first five months’

McGuinness boot camp is just what Donegal needed, but Cassidy has no regrets about 2011 or a missing medal

That memory will never leave Kevin Cassidy. July 30, 2011: an All-Ireland quarter-final against Kildare that has lurched from looming disaster to imminent deliverance and back is now in its 92nd minute. Extra-time, two minutes into injury-time. Seconds remaining.

“He has it! He has it!” screams RTÉ’s co-commentator, Kevin McStay, as the Donegal wing-back’s 50-metre shot arcs towards the Hill 16 goal.

“In my head I was screaming for someone just to give it to me,” recalls Cassidy, a player born in Glasgow but made in Gweedore. “Because I knew where I was, in that position, and it was where I had (practised) those kicks for years.

“You find that pocket. And people don’t tend to pick you up because they think that you’re too far out. As soon as it left my boot I knew it was over. But I had turned to jog back and it was still in the air, and there was actually a split second where I thought, ‘Jesus, maybe it’s not over’ … but then I heard the roar.”

Donegal were now through to the semi-finals, there to face Dublin in a high-stakes game of poker cloaked in blanket defence infamy. It would be Cassidy’s inter-county swansong: not his own choice. And, some 13 months later, Donegal were All-Ireland champions without him.

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This evening in Netwatch Cullen Park, Donegal and Kildare renew battle. Even if this league fixture may lack the bigstage significance of 2011, the stakes are high – especially for Kildare, pointless in Division 2, on the brink of relegation and possibly worse.

Donegal, though, are soaring, on a seemingly unstoppable promotion drive.

Lots of familiar faces from 2011 will be in Carlow. Johnny Doyle, Kildare captain that year, is part of Glenn Ryan’s backroom. So too is Ronan Sweeney, who came off the bench that evening and kicked the first point in extra-time.

But there’s another, far more obvious and compelling connection: Jim McGuinness, the prodigal messiah.

McGuinness dropped Cassidy in November 2011 over his contribution to a book – This Is Our Year by journalist Declan Bogue – charting the 2011 championship through the eyes of different Ulster personalities. It was a huge story at the time, not least because Cassidy was a pillar of that team, having claimed his second All-Star the previous month.

If opening a window into Donegal’s inner sanctum was a bridge too far for the manager, Cassidy has long reconciled with the consequences. He harbours no regrets. Nor is there room in his head space for grudges, and he openly hailed the return of McGuinness last August.

“Life moves on. I think the last time I met him, I coach an U-10 team and we were out playing Jim’s club. I met him on the pitch and we shook hands and shared a few words and left it at that,” he reveals. “So, there’s no bad feelings. It’s sport at the end of the day; an awful lot worse things are going on in the world.”

But what about missing out on that Celtic Cross? “The world works in mysterious ways, and I honestly and I firmly believe that if I had stayed and played in 2012 and won the All-Ireland, I don’t think I’d have been able to do other things in my life that I wouldn’t even have thought of at that time,” he explains.

“I went on and played for the club (Gaoth Dobhair) for a number of years. Had I been standing on the sidelines in 2018 when my club won Ulster, and I couldn’tplaybecausemybodywasgone, that would have wrecked me more than missing an All-Ireland. People say, ‘Jesus, of course you’d rather be there’ … but honestly, I do sit easy with it because I think more good has happened than bad.”

At the time, though, it was “massive” to lose “the one thing I chased my whole life more than anything. But then, when I was playing with Donegal, I had no real plan. And I would say 90pc of inter-county footballers are the same way, because they’re so tunnel-visioned.

“So when that was gone from me, I had to sit down and say, ‘Which way do you want to go, Kevin?’ There was stuff that I wanted to pursue in my career that I didn’t do because of football – and my life, travel and everything. It’s not as simple as a medal or not a medal.”

At the time, he and Sarah were proud parents to infant twins; now Nia and Aoife are 13. Their brother, Fionn, is nine.

Back then, Cassidy was a teacher. Not any longer. “My original degree was in marketing and finance. So when I was 23-24, the choice was move to London or move to Dublin for that sort of work. But how was I going to continue to play for Donegal if I did that?

“I had to take a decision to change career to enable my football career, so I went back and I trained as a teacher. And I got a job in a local school, and then I worked with special needs … around 2014-’15 I left teaching and I went back to the business world and I set up different things that I was interested in.” Life moves on.

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Vomit covered patches of the field and there were calls for a hose to at least take the bad look off it. The smell was overpowering. — This Is Our Year (2011) What reads like a nauseous next-day flashback to Glastonbury is actually the