Donoghue’s Dubs determined to keep upsetting the status quo in Leinster

April 21, Wexford Park. A tunnel outside a dressing-room. Micheál Donoghue, often inscrutable, suppresses a sheepish smile. Every draw has winners and losers. The demarcation here is clear and obvious.

Dublin, requiring intervention more divine than a Hail Mary can provide, reach for the Novena. Their prayers are answered. Twice. Hallelujah!

We’re off. Summer has begun. A defeat avoided. The sun is high and the livin’ is easy.

Presumably, it wasn’t for his soothsaying abilities that Dublin went looking for Donoghue to bring some stimulus to the county’s stagnant hurling team. But he seems to have that in the locker too.

All week, the discerning talk had it that the winner of Dublin v Wexford would file obediently into line behind Kilkenny and Galway in Leinster.

This historically has largely been the case. Since the advent of the round-robin system anyway.

Each year there has been a winner, that team has progressed and the loser, discarded. In the absence of anything more persuasive, that line of thinking buttressed the pre-game analysis.

Donoghue practically bristled against that assertion. He rejected any notion that the game had been just that: a de facto third/fourth-placed play-off, crying foul on behalf of all six teams in the province.

Just how right he has been proven. Twice. First by Wexford versus Antrim and then, Wexford’s win over Galway. Suddenly something that seemed incredibly linear, almost predictable, is now a jumble sale of possibilities and outcomes.

“Yeah, I thought it was totally unfair because, like, it wasn’t to say that what I said was right but I just think that there’s a perception sometimes of where the top teams are and then everyone below that it’s nearly tokenism where, in reality, you can go anywhere and get caught,” Donoghue says.

Listen. You don’t need to tell him. It’s five years since Donoghue’s last game as Galway manager in, of all places, Parnell Park. A mad night when Leinster hurling howled at the moon.

Bright as it might occasionally shine, the Leinster SHC exists in a sort of semi-eclipsed state. But that night was one of the more epic hurling championship evenings.

“I’m mentally scarred with that!” admits Donoghue now.

He had taken Galway to an All-Ireland in 2017 and back to a final a year later. But 2019 was slower to the boil. Joe Canning missed most of it and had just come on in Parnell Park for his seasonal reappearance.

Seat-of-the-pants stuff but it all seemed to be coming together, right on cue.

The only thing that could prevent Galway progressing was a loss to Dublin and a draw between Kilkenny and Wexford. Hardly?

“I remember that night walking off the pitch and we went out on scoring difference ... a free late on, if you score it, you’re back in it. I know it’s the old cliche and it maybe sounds really boring but you can only concentrate on what’s in front of you and that’s game three for us next weekend and that’s what all our focus is on.”

Franny Forde was Galway selector that night alongside Donoghue, just as he is now in Dublin. The shared trauma runs deep.

“As an opposition, we felt that energy as well,” Forde admits. “Parnell Park is noted for its relatively tight confines. It’s not that it’s a tight pitch, it’s that the stands are so close to the action.

“We felt on that evening every bit of that energy. It was a difficult one to take. We had to take that one on the chin. Looking at it from a broader Dublin hurling point of view, it was a disappointment that they didn’t go on to greater things that year.

“It was ultimately a disappointing exit to the championship that year. In a way, that has been the story of Dublin hurling over the last few years ... we have pushed on occasion and we just haven’t managed to get the big win.”

It takes only a few minutes talking to Donoghue and Forde to appreciate they are serious hombres. Hurling isn’t some flight of fancy. Managing Dublin isn’t a kind of coaching midlife crisis either, like buying a convertible or having an affair.

They are men of hurling. Whatever piqued their interest initially, this little two-hander in the capital now consumes that part of their brain that is stimulated by the game.

It seems like a snug fit for the times. After a period of a stasis, Dublin don’t need someone prophesying about the mountain top when they’re still at base camp. Which isn’t to say they lack ambition.

Impatient

“What we’re about is getting the best team – and we’re probably a little impatient in wanting results now,” Forde stresses. “That’s our ambition. From what we see in the team, that’s the ambition we have for them.

“We think that’s where they’re capable of getting to. Winning these big games against top teams. We won’t apologise for that. Anything else would be just buying a bit of leeway for ourselves and we’re not into that.”

A Leinster final isn’t just a possibility, Donoghue says, it’s a target. That will likely require a result against Kilkenny back in Parnell Park next week, or – in a predictable twist of fate – Galway in Salthill a week after that. But experience, the very good sort and the very bad, have ensured Donoghue won’t speculate beyond Antrim’s visit to Donnycarney this afternoon.

“It is hard to get your head around all of the different connotations that could happen. But with that, you’re really only conscious about the next one and that’s our most important one, this weekend.

“But I think on any given day, in any of the venues, anyone can catch anyone, and I think we can’t go in blind to that.”