HE JUST CALLED him up.
It was as simple as that. But Kieran McGeeney had sussed Kieran Donaghy out. They knew each other from various International Rules trips and played an All-Ireland quarter final against each other in 2006.
And in 2019, Armagh lost a round 3 qualifier game to Mayo in Castlebar. Donaghy was there in his role as pundit for Sky Sports and the two met up for a drink afterwards. McGeeney quizzed Donaghy over his job as sales director for PST Sport, who install pitches.
Donaghy let it slip that a lot of work was happening around Dublin.
Before all that though, their first encounter was as two opposites who attracted on International Rules duty.
Donaghy was given the role of fines officer. He kept the fun going.
Back when McGeeney wore his hair long, it became the source of a daily fine.
“Then one day we came in and I looked around and couldn’t see Geezer at all, we didn’t know where he was,” recalls Donaghy.
“But he’d actually gone down to the barber and he’d cut all the hair off because he said it was annoying him. But I say I was probably annoying him.”
When they came back from that trip, something else happened that Donaghy wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
He was making his way from the airport when he got tangled up in an accident on the M50. Nobody was hurt, but it was a mess of a situation.
McGeeney came by and asked if everything was ok. Donaghy told him to drive on, all would be sorted. McGeeney drove on, but only until he could berth his own car. He came back to help.
So from then on, they would keep regular contact. Occasionally McGeeney would be wondering about something or other and would call up Donaghy to get his take.
“I was kinda like going, ‘Anything that fella is involved in, I want to be involved in it,’ because how he goes about everything is unique and he’s brilliant at getting you buying into helping people be better,” says Donaghy.
“He put it on me that I played like the way he wanted football to be played and just making the fella next to you look like an All-Star and he said, ‘I want you to help with that.’”
Then McGeeney pulled the trump card. Sure you work in Dublin, we are only an hour up the road . . .
“He made it all sound so simple, I was agreeing. No bother,” says Donaghy, his speech breaking into that warm laugh of his.
“And then the first night down the road, I was going, ‘Jesus! This place isn’t close at all!’”
And that’s how it came about. Donaghy was sent a few games to watch and linked up with the squad. Then Covid came and kept him marooned in Tralee.
His coaching CV was a little bare. He finished up with Kerry after 2018 and helped out with the Galway hurlers in 2019. He had worked a little with Tralee IT before he got the call from McGeeney.
On matchdays, he’s a Catherine wheel of activity, a joy to watch. During lockdown when there were no fans in the stadium, he would race up the steps of The Athletic Grounds to get onto the higher ground and study team shapes and positioning.
And then he would skip down to the sideline again for consultations. He would have made up his 10,000 daily steps in the course of a game.
He doesn’t oversell his abilities as a coach. Though from playing basketball, where the game has a huge amount of on-court coaching, it’s clear that he is in tune with it all.
“I would have ideas,” he says.
“I wouldn’t be the coach that McKeever is, or Conleith Gilligan, I wouldn’t be that level . . . where I look at it.
“They’ve more experience, they’ve done more. I feel like I’m early on the journey in it. I very much try to be authentic and be myself as much as I can.”
He cites the work of Denis Hollywood in particular. Hollywood, not well known outside Armagh, has been with the senior team for several years and is a seriously-regarded coach.
In order to make it all happen, a huge commitment was needed from Donaghy’s wife, Hilary. It’s a 530-mile round trip, after all.
“She’s had huge buy in,” acknowledges Donaghy.
“I go home after every training session and drive to Tralee, it gives me time to link in with a few players, time to settle my head, what went well in training? What didn’t? How I need to be better next week, ya know, listen to podcasts, there’s four and a half hours there!
“I might leave at 9.30pm and I might be home at 2am but I do that because I want to be home for breakfast with the girls and take them to school and be in the office in the morning because I have a lot to do on that side of things too.
“I’m like a truck driver now. I don’t get tired at all. I just sit there for four and half hours, make sure I’m full with fuel before I leave, don’t need coffee or Red Bull or Coke, I just need a bottle of water and off I go.
“And the brain and momentum and buzz off training will get me down past Kill where I have a family member that’s close by there. And once I pass that, I’m gone over half way and the head settles into it.”
He is grateful for the Armagh county board. For a time, he was being billeted in the Armagh City Hotel, but hotel living drags the spirit down eventually.
They soon fixed him up with a home from home, living in an apartment attached to the home of McGeeney’s friend Mark Fagan, who runs the quirky and charming bar and restaurant Basil Shiels, in Tassagh.
It’s deep, deep Armagh country where the apple trees sag with the weight in mid-summer and every blooming living thing is in full flourish. The house has a number of young children and Donaghy has them recording their basketball shooting numbers on charts, supping tea, munching toast and shooting the breeze, surrounded by Shetland ponies, donkeys and cattle.
“We are townies from Tralee and they love going to ‘The Farm’ as they call it now and being out with animals. It’s a lovely place to be. A very calm environment, and I have enjoyed the last few days,” says Donaghy.
“People say to me in Kerry how to do it or why are you still doing it?
“It’s because of that group of players. The likes of (Rory) Grugan, Soupy (Stefan Campbell) and Aidan (Forker) and Andrew Murnin. They are incredibly resilient and what I love about them is they do everything the right way. We might not always get the result we want but you can never look at them and say they are not doing it right.”
His boss at PST Sport, Colin Teahon, was initially reluctant to have his business development manager up north so much. But now they have projects springing up all over Ulster, such as Kinawley in Fermanagh and Camlough in Armagh.
The company are enjoying a high profile and sales have come in.
And the thing is this: for a man who didn’t have it simple growing up, Donaghy is a beacon of positivity who manages to lift the mood of everyone around him.
Another member of the Armagh management says that going for a bite with ‘Star’ is an experience. Everyone, it seems, wants to speak to him, get something signed by him, get a selfie, or just chat.
Donaghy wears it exceptionally well. “No hassle, no hassle,” he will say, before giving everybody his full attention for as long as they want.
The Laws of Attraction would hold that All Irelands came his way as a player, and one could very much happen on Sunday when they face Galway.
But you know that Donaghy is utterly genuine when he says it is as much about the journey – and what a journey it has been – than the destination.
“They’re a great bunch of lads. People say about the drive and how are you doing it, it’s easy when you see that every one of these lads that we have, all 44 or 45 of them, are really putting everything into the cause and that’s fantastic to see,” he says.
“That makes it easier to come back up the road. If they were fellas who tip in and out and you knew these fellas weren’t at it, I’d be long ago but it was never the issue with this group of players. It was always easy to sign up and do that mileage for them because they’re such a great bunch of lads.”
