‘WE FELT IF YOU PUT DONEGAL IN A DIFFICULT CORNER, THEY WOULDN’T COME BACK. THEY’D ACCEPT’

Tomorrow’s Ulster final will renew a rivalry which reached its zenith between 2002 and 2007, when, as some of those involved recall, Armagh held Donegal in an iron grip

Ask Brendan Devenney for his memories of an Ulster football final 20 years ago that was so big it went to Croke Park and he doesn’t hesitate. The hunger on the journey home to Donegal! Even the pain of the result, 3-15 to 0-11 in Armagh’s favour, subsides with his recall of the consequences of a bus load of empty stomachs and where that led to.

With the game switching from its traditional venue in Clones to Dublin to accommodate a bigger crowd, Devenney suspects the provision of food afterwards fell between the cracks as to whose responsibility it was, the venue, the board or the organisers.

“So we hopped on the bus, got stuck in traffic, there was no M3 motorway at the time, and down to Virginia,” Devenney remembers. “By that stage the boys hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Eight hours and a match in between. Lads went in and started having a pint, more drink on the bus. It was a recipe for disaster with what happened later on.”

‘Later on’ was their arrival back in Donegal town that night; needless to say they didn’t have the demeanour of a team that had been on the receiving end of a 13-point hammering. And consequently their reputation as a team that liked to party was significantly enhanced.

In contrast, it had been Armagh’s peak Ulster day in a decade that saw them win seven of the 10 Ulster Championships between 1999 and 2008.

And it was peak Ulster in those years too. Armagh and Tyrone were back-to-back All-Ireland champions, first titles for both counties in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Donegal were in their slipstream, quarter-finalists in 2002, semi-finalists in 2003.

Collectively, they had outgrown the province and were generating such interest that, even before the pairings were known, the Ulster Council had settled on taking the pairings out of the province for the first time since 1939. It paid off too with 67,136 in attendance, just under 10,000 fewer than the 76,321 present for the All-Ireland semi-final between the teams some 11 months earlier.

Scrapping

“Football was on the up and up, everything was booming, attendances. There didn’t seem to be anything at the time that the GAA couldn’t do so it was like, ‘This game has got too big for Clones’. Seems a bit crazy to think about that now,” reflects Devenney, back coaching his club St Eunan’s this year.

As much as Armagh’s rivalry with Tyrone defined the era, Armagh had an ongoing side hustle with Donegal all the time in those years. From 2002 to 2007 they met each year in the Ulster Championship, apart from 2003 when it was that All-Ireland semi-final. Only once, in 2007 when Devenney scored the winning goal, did Donegal prevail.

“And being honest we were quite fortuitous. If it was in a final it would have been properly sweet. But it was a first round. And Armagh played the better football,” he concedes.

Invariably,Armaghplayedbetterfootballinthose years and played it within a better system.

A year earlier, Devenney had stepped away from Donegal, frustrated, angry, at himself and their whole approach to it. Armagh had got to him, they’d got to Donegal, in truth. Four successive years, four defeats, another to come in the last of that sequence of Croke Park Ulster finals. Too much.

“It was such a tough time in Donegal,” says Devenney, who spent the year out playing Irish League soccer with Portadown. “I wasn’t sure where we were going. It’s a different world now. It was killing me so much that we weren’t getting to where we needed to go to.

“We were never addressing the biggest elephant in the room which was Armagh. We were training as a football team to win football matches. We were good at that in some ways but when it came down to that ultimate day which was often Armagh, they had a rhythm and tactics.

“I’m not blaming managers but they [Armagh] were obviously ahead of the curve and took a lot of ownership. They were very good at what they did in championship games, particularly against us.”

Armagh knew they had Donegal’s number in those years. Aidan O’Rourke played in both Croke Park finals against them and recalls a “sense of superiority” developing in them over their rivals after the 2002 Ulster final win.

“We didn’t really get out of second or third gear, we held them at arm’s length and at that stage we were learning how to manage games. We felt Donegal didn’t really threaten us and we felt that would have sustained. The ironic thing was that Donegal were a really dangerous team.

“A lot of days they would have had Tyrone’s number and while they were always capable of beating them, just how things develop, they never believed they could beat us on those big days. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to anybody because they have talked about this themselves. It was more of a psychological thing. We felt they were weak.

“Tyrone would bring it for 70 minutes all the time, no matter where they were you had to keep your foot on them because they would be scrapping the whole time. We always felt if you put Donegal in a difficult corner, they wouldn’t come back. They’d accept,” adds O’Rourke, who spent time as interim Donegal manager during a difficult 2023.

“Some of their key players had a habit of losing the head in games, Just doing stupid things or how they spoke to people around them. And cards,” continues O’Rourke. “We would have felt discipline-wise, if a game was going against them, players would walk. That happened quite frequently with them.”

In a 2005 Ulster final replay, three Donegal players were red-carded – Brian Roper, Eamon McGee and latterly Adrian Sweeney, in addition to Armagh’s Francie Bellew. Two years earlier Raymond Sweeney was gone for most of the second half.

Devenney was routinely a target for Armagh suppression, Enda McNulty more often than not his shadow. They were games Devenney never looked forward to. In fact, he hated them for the congestion they brought, the cold-blooded clamping of his free spirit.

“Armagh controlled them, they were a tough team

“It wasn’t that you weren’t just beat, it kind of left a bad taste in the mouth” Brendan Devenney

to play against. A lot of stuff was going on off the ball. It wasn’t that you weren’t just beat, it kind of left a bad taste in the mouth,” he admits. “Donegal just did not suit playing Armagh. We could beat Tyrone as All-Ireland champions but there was something about Armagh, a real nemesis of Donegal.”

All these years later he can rationalise it better. “I couldn’t understand the bigger picture and it was only now when you look back at it, we realise that if we were going to train to beat Armagh in Clones or Croke Park, we needed to be preparing for that from at least the previous September or from the year before that.

“We were just training normal, playing league and intochampionship,seewhoweget,seewhathappens. Then you get Armagh and you try and deal with Armagh. We could have done with Jim [McGuinness] being a few years older and stepping in!”

McGuinness was there too for some of it, scoring Donegal’s only goal from midfield in the 2002 1-14 to 1-10 defeat. Those years helped shape his blueprint for future management success and could again tomorrow. For O’Rourke, playing Ulster finals in Croke Park was a sign of the province’s well-being but meant little else to them.

“Between 1999 and 2000 there the folklore was that we couldn’t win in Croke Park but once we did, it was a home for us then. Everyone starts believing into these narratives. That teams had to be four points ahead of us going into the last 10 minutes because our conditioning was that good. We played off that quite a bit.”

No one believed it more than the Donegal team of the time, an education that would eventually serve them well.