THE DOWN LOW
Ten years ago this weekend, Down’s memorable win over Donegal sparked a run to the All-Ireland final but why have the Mourne men slumped so badly since, while their rivals have thrived?
ACRUEL “either or” hypothetical question brings out the child in Danny Hughes. ‘Why can’t I have both?’ he fires back. And the question? If a time-machine transported him back to Ballybofey for Down’s clash with Donegal on this weekend 10 years ago and he was offered – as he walked away from MacCumhaill Park on that sun-splashed Sunday evening – either an Ulster Championship medal or playing in an All-Ireland final, which one would he choose?
As it transpired in real time, Tyrone would answer one half of that question by dumping Down out in the Ulster semi-final, and the team Hughes captained answered the other by making good on the longer journey through the qualifiers to take the county back to a first September final appearance in 16 years.
His comfort, on that front, is that he has no regrets.
‘I think I would have taken getting to the All-Ireland final. There are a lot of people who played in Ulster finals and have medals but never got to play in an All-Ireland final.
‘You look at the Monaghan lads and a lot of them would have Ulster medals, which can never be taken away from them, but the bigger prize for them in recent years has been the All-Ireland and even just trying to get to play in a final, so that experience was special,’ he recalls
And painful, too. It was not so much that they lost to Cork by a kick of the ball, but that Hughes would never get near it again.
It serves as a reminder of sport’s glorious – and cruel – unpredictability.
If Neil McGee had been told back then that Donegal’s extra-time defeat by Down – ultimately decided by Benny Coulter’s goal four minutes from the end – would come to represent a diverging path for the two counties, he could only have anticipated the worst.
Bad enough that they lost 1-15 to 2-10, the defeat reaffirmed the view that Donegal were a team that could not be trusted. How could they be, when they could not even trust themselves? ‘We were never sure if we were going to win or lose in Championship. It was always a case of what happened on the day and that was the way we thought then,’ recalls the three-time All-Star Donegal full-back.
‘We just did not have the right mindset to push on and win. It was real hit-and-miss on the day, every day. They were days when we could go out and beat good teams and then there were days when we would go out and get hammered. We were up and down all the time.’
As Down worked their way
through the qualifiers – in truth their season did not catch fire until they unexpectedly maintained their perfect record over Kerry in the All-Ireland quarter-final – Donegal’s ending was brutishly feeble. Their lack of aggression and ambition in a first round qualifier defeat to Armagh in Crossmaglen left their supporters seething and Colm McFadden took the brunt of the heat after television cameras captured him smiling in the dug-out as the game petered out to its painful conclusion.
Not even McFadden’s explanation that his smirk had come at his own expense after he had just been told he was to receive a presentation to mark his 100th appearance at the end of the game.
There was no point in telling Donegal football folk that if it wasn’t for black humour, there would be no humour at all.
As it was that nine-point mauling in Crossmaglen (2-14 to 0-11) wasn’t even the low point for McGee.
‘That would have been losing to Antrim the previous year. We just were not at the races at all that day. We had some good days that year as well those times and we went on a run after the Antrim game in the qualifiers, including beating Galway.
‘You remember those days as being good days too but once we got into the serious stuff we were just chewed up back then.’
The Cork team – the same one that edged to a one-point win over Down – ended Donegal’s run of ‘good days’ with a 14-point reality check in the 2009 quarter-final.
However, as the teams left the pitch in Ballybofey ten years ago, it was the men in red who would have believed that their’s was the brighter future.
Ten years on and the truth has long revealed itself.
McGee’s pockets are bulging with five Ulster medals and not only has he got to play in two All-Ireland finals, he enjoyed victory in one.
And if the current lockdown lifts, his team are right at the top of the short-list of counties most likely to out it up to all-conquering Dublin.
Meanwhile, Hughes hardly caught a break after 2010. He was dogged by injuries, including a problematic groin issue, playing inter-county for just three more seasons before retiring in early 2014.
‘It was a great journey but at the end of the day I look at it as a missed opportunity because in the years previous and the years after, we never had that consistency,’ says Hughes. ‘I suppose there is a raft of emotions there still. One is that you are thankful you had one season like that because it is better than nothing and half a loaf is better than no bread, but the flip side to that is, if we had been more committed as a county we would have been there every year.’
As for McGee, his reason to be thankful is obvious.
Everything changed in the aftermath of Jim McGuinness’ appointment as manager that autumn.
From losing to Antrim and Down in successive Ulster Championship matches, they would go undefeated over eight years – a sequence that extended to 19 unbeaten games in National League and Championship – on their home patch in Ballybofey. Tyrone eventually drew a line under that run in a crucial Super 8s clash in 2018.
‘It just showed that the football was there, the athleticism, we had all the tools there it was just the mindset that was missing,’ adds McGee.
‘That was the one thing Jim did, he changed the whole mindset of Donegal football and it is going to be like that for a long time because Jim changed it.
‘We always had the raw tools to do something, but I don’t know if we always had the mindset to use them.’
The evidence would bear that out too. Seven of the team that lost to Down had won a National League medal on the pitch under Brian McIver in 2007 while 14 would be All-Ireland champions inside two years.
That latter statistic was used mainly in two ways. It was either used to elevate McGuinness’ achievement in taking the same team that were perceived as a joke in Gaelic football to being the number one team in the land.
Or it was used to batter the reputation of McGuinness’ predecessor John Joe Doherty, the 1992 All-Ireland winning hero, whose two-year stint as county manager ended in Crossmaglen.
Kevin Cassidy’s contribution to
‘WE HAD ALL THE TOOLS, JUST THE MINDSET WAS MISSING’
‘WE HAD COMMITTED PLAYERS BUT NOT A PANEL OF THEM’
Declan Bogue’s This is our Year book – a project that would also see McGuinness bring down the curtain on the two-time All-Star’s county career – claimed that the players were so unhappy under Doherty they were on the brink of a revolt.
That prompted a furious public denial by Doherty’s assistant Tony Boyle, and it is also not how McGee views it, insisting that there is a third way to view the manner in which they made the journey from chumps to champs.
‘I really don’t think it mattered who was in charge at the time. John Joe came in and I loved working under him. I actually feel I played some good football under him and I think I benefitted from his presence because of what he knew about being a defender and that advice has stood the test of time because I still take it on board as a defender.
‘The management was brilliant in that they tried everything they could.
‘It was all down to the players, we were just not near it in those couple of years. We just did not have the mentality to do it,’ insists McGee.
Within two years, they did and Hughes got to see them close up and personal in the 2012 Ulster final. The colour of their shirts was the only thing that reminded him of the team they had beaten two years previously.
In 2010, Donegal were a team waiting for something to happen. Their shot selection might as well have been dictated by a lottery drum – they kicked 16 wides – while Coulter’s late goal came about after Neil Gallagher had been turned over.
Two years on they were both ruthless and relentless.
‘No, I couldn’t recognise them,’ admits Hughes, reflecting on an afternoon when 11 Donegal players got on the scoresheet from open play as they torched Down by 2-18 to 0-13 on what would be one of their most complete performances on the way to the 2012 title.
‘The crux of the same players were there but they were a completely different animal and I mean a completely different animal.
‘The movement, the understanding, the pace was just a different level.
‘We lived with them for long enough in the first half but you felt that they were a bit like Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle in that they could absorb anything we could throw at them except they threw more than one knock-down punch,’ recalls Hughes.
In the end, Down were effectively counted out. They have not been back in the last eight of the Championship since and if Hughes has a regret, it is that they did not follow the Donegal way.
But he found that tradition – gifted primarily on their status as the breakthrough county from the North in the 1960s and reaffirmed by their success in the early 90s – is not always your friend.
‘When Paddy O’Rourke took over in 2003 there were still ideas of how Down should play football and I am not sure how innovative we were to be honest, because we were still very much in a purist’s mindset as to how football should be played and had to be played. As a result you had players who played like that.
‘That takes time to develop and Tyrone and Armagh had managed that and they also had far better players than us, but a lot of us came in who were very young and we did not have the experience or the years behind us,’ concedes Hughes.
More than anything, echoing McGee’s view of Donegal’s dressing room pre-McGuinness, they simply did not possess the mental edge that separates the top teams from the rest.
‘One player won’t make a difference, you need a panel of players to make a difference at that level and unfortunately we did not have that,’ he admits.
‘We had players who were committed but we did not have a panel of them and that was just the stark reality.
‘When McGuiness came in with Donegal, he got numbers 31 and 32 on his panel to be as committed as number one and that is what it takes to win Ulster and All-Ireland titles,’ says Hughes.
While the pandemic has stalled McGee’s career, it has ended it for Hughes who, now 38, has decided that this is as good a time as any to stop lacing the boots for his club Saval, and has now turned his focus to coaching.
And the distance now between Down and Donegal is every bit removed as the 10 years that has passed since his defining All-Star season.
‘I don’t know if there are too many distractions in this county, structurally and otherwise, whereas in Donegal and Kerry you tend to have very strong rural populations and football has a very strong presence there but we have a big county and socially there are a lot of other distractions.
‘As the saying goes, wealthy people make poor revolutionaries and that applies to football, too.
‘Playing for Down is not the be-all and end-all and that is completely different as it is in Kerry, Donegal and Dublin now.
‘It is not the be-all and end-all here and that is the big thing that is holding us back.’