Declan Bogue

HOW EASY, HOW tempting, would it have been for Trillick to use Matthew Donnelly’s injury last summer – a ruptured posterior cruciate Ligament and broken tibia – as an excuse to clock off for the year.

Instead of doing it the hard way. Without him. And getting all the way to an Ulster club semi-final this Sunday against Scotstown, mad hungry to build a bridge back to the team of 1974 that reached a final, but lost to Clan na nGael. 

When the rest of the world ‘scrubbed a line through Trillick’ as he puts it, Donnelly, along with Mickey Gallagher, was busy telling his team mates that yes, he was injured and, yes, it was serious. But by God, they were still going to win a Tyrone senior championship.

And so they did. With captain Rory Brennan and brother Lee playing out of their skins. With Richard Donnelly putting in the performance of his career to beat hot favourites Errigal Ciaran in the final.

On an emotional evening, Brennan’s winning speech focused in on the recently-passed Gerard ‘Shep’ Donnelly, uncle of Matthew and Richard, indefatigable club volunteer and coach of multiple underage sides.  

“Rest in Peace, Gerry,” he finished.  

A win over Crossmaglen in their Ulster opener followed. But hanging around the fringes of things in a full-length leg brace was Donnelly.

He suffered the injury when playing for Trillick in the Kilmacud Sevens. He broke his tibia in line with his knee and tore his Posterior Cruciate Ligament.

He can’t affect the outcome on the pitch this Sunday. But he’s immersed in it all the same. On the nights that training is called, players arrive to see him already in the gym, with that cumbersome brace on, going through his rehabilitation work. When they are freshly showered and walking out, he’s only finishing up himself.

The recommendation is that he does not require surgery, so that means a lot of work to build up the area around the knee. He knows it’s not fool proof and is tracking the progress of basketball centre Steve Adams of the Memphis Grizzlies who had a similar  setback.

But he will do what he is told. Or in that precise way of his, employed as he is by PwC, he will maintain, ‘Brace compliance.’

99% of people will believe that devotion is manic and obsessive. But his perspective has shifted. In recent months, he and partner Megan Kerr have become parents to Senan Gerard. The middle name is for his uncle.

It won’t lessen their commitment. Megan is already scheduling the baby-sitting rota as she will return to Owenbeg for her Derry camogie duties. But still.

“It’s a perspective-changer for anyone,” he says.  

“It’s hard to find a word for it, but it has been incredible so far. Between everything this year it has given me good perspective on most things. I usually would have lingered over defeats. They would have lasted longer. (The) Travesty of getting injured might have cut a bit deeper. But having a child to look after changes all that too.

“Don’t get me wrong; football is still unbelievably important.

“But it’s not the most important thing any more.”

*****

At times, it’s sometimes felt too much.

Like the dank November night in 2020 when he sat in a car outside the Garvaghey complex, the Tyrone captain alongside his manager Mickey Harte. Inside, club delegates brought an end to Harte’s 18-season reign of the senior football team.

Captain and manager: With Mickey Harte. James Crombie / INPHO James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO

Only nobody told either man. They just left the building and drove on. The decision was conveyed on the phone, later.

“It was an eye-opener in terms of how those things unfold. But I have to say Mickey handled himself well out the back of it. He can have no regrets in terms of how he served Tyrone. Particularly through that period,” he recalls.  

“It was always going to be a tricky process for those involved and I don’t envy those in that situation either. But I think everyone made the call they felt was right for Tyrone. Everyone’s intentions were in the right place.”

If Donnelly can make it back to play for Tyrone, and it is his intention to do so, then there is a chance he might face Harte as the Derry manager.  

“I was surprised when he went to Louth. But not shocked.

“Because I knew his passion was still there. His energy was still there. I knew he had a lot to give any team he worked with.

“The same with Derry. That wasn’t on the radar at all as he was with Louth. But again, not shocked.

“Mickey would still have ambitions of succeeding and winning All-Irelands. And he sees as good a chance as any with Derry and I have no doubt at all that is why he has gone there.”

Without Harte, Tyrone won the All-Ireland title under the new management of Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher.  

Since then, they have lost a staggering number of players, along with any form. They have won three championship games since and exited the All-Ireland race to Kerry with an 11-point margin this year.

“I think there are 100 reasons you could point to,” says Donnelly in trying to make sense of it.

“The fall-out from ’21 was a big one. We lost half our squad. You are not just losing experience and quality; you are losing the connection that was built up too.

“So we are still in a rebuilding process. The last two years have hurt a lot of us. 

“Priority number one for Tyrone – to get the consistency and reliability back into our performances and giving the county following something to be proud of again.”

While the likes of Tiernan McCann, Mark Bradley, Paul Donaghy and Rory Brennan all stepped away, the timing wasn’t great to ask them to reconsider.

“That club season went on to 17 December,” he explains.

“We had to park all our thoughts towards the county team. You haven’t invested much time in thinking where lads’ heads are at.

“Soon as the club season was over, you were asked to be up in Garvaghey. There was no period of time to sound boys like that out.

“Perspectives were changed after Covid, winning an All-Ireland. It probably wasn’t as appealing for some and we didn’t get that chance to sit down in a room as a group and plan towards the next season.”

One thing that has been levelled at Tyrone over the winter is the fact that Logan and Dooher have not taken a knife to the backroom team.

Instead, they retain Joe McMahon and Collie Holmes as coaches. 

“This thing about ‘freshening up,’ – you can find contradictions in every sport. The players themselves, what we get exposed to in Garvaghey are men who have been there and done it.   

“We are getting as good a coaching as possible in that environment. We are also in a fortunate position where they are all genuine Tyrone men too.

“It’s been a testing couple of years, but anyone up there is pure Tyrone. And that’s the main thing.”

Does that matter? The Tyrone ‘purity’ of the people involved?

“I think intentions are all that matters to me, really. If the intentions are pure and good for the teams I am involved in, with Trillick and Tyrone, then that’s all you can ask for.

***** 

As storied as they once were, Trillick for most of Donnelly’s youth, were just another middling outfit.

You can trace the transformation back to 7 October 2014.

It being a Tuesday night, those inside were carrying hurt from losing the intermediate final a few days earlier to Dungannon Clarkes, 4-11 to 0-14.

Manager Nigel Seaney felt a different approach was required. He locked the door of the dressing-room and said nobody would be leaving until the truth had been spoken.

“We had a robust enough conversation then! And once we left that room, we have been hard enough to beat ever since,” says Donnelly, sitting in the sun room of his house a couple of miles outside Trillick village.  

In the weeks after that intermediate final, they clawed their way back up to senior football through the torturous league play-off series.

The following October, they were county senior football champions.

Rewind to last year. Jody Gormley was selector as they folded against Dungannon. Nigel Seaney, revered in the club, soon after brought his long managerial reign to an end.

Gormley took over as manager. His first duty was to recruit the Zen-like Peter McGinnity as coach. Before he could get his teeth into the team though, they had to endure their own winter purgatory. While they were waiting for floodlights to be erected around their training pitch, they did their hard running on the pitch wearing head lamps.

Donnelly might have been in Tyrone mode at that stage, doing his own hard yards surrounded by foundered heather in Garvaghey. But Trillick St Macartan’s is in his marrow. So he was there watching. And admiring.

Trillick are a team that bristle with character and personality.

Such as 38-year-old Niall ‘Jib’ Donnelly. Centre-forward.  Doing tidy and neat and clever things and defying the accepted norms of sports science. At a local wake last week, his father, the former Tyrone captain, Sean Donnelly explained to eager gossip-hounds that ‘Jib’ would eat nothing but chicken soup and sausages until he was 20, but the palate has since broadened. He will eat chips with his sausages now.

Then you have flying wing-back Seanie O’Donnell, a surefire Tyrone regular very soon and nephew of Peter Canavan.

Donnelly with Niall Gormley. Tommy Dickson / INPHO Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO

Along with the host of veterans such as Damian Kelly, Niall Gormley, Prionsius O’Kane, the former Armagh player Paul Courtney, all of whom have featured little in the championship – some even don’t make the bench – but still turn up for training to maintain the standards and expectations of what being a Trillick player is about.

***** 

Back to Trillick.

For the county final, Donnelly was listed on the programme as number 31, but he was togged out as a waterboy.

He’s not showing off the brace by wearing a pair of shorts. He has to wear it. For the first twelve weeks, he never had it off. In bed, in the gym, everywhere. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for twelve weeks.

When he suffered the injury, a physio did a knee-stabilty test and that was fine. He began thinking it might be just a bad bang to the shin. 

He went out in Dublin for something to eat with some family but the knee started to balloon and stiffen up. He chose to go back to the hotel to ice it.

“The next morning it was in bad enough shape. The foot was still planting on the ground. There was no real twist in the knee.

“One of the physios thought it might have been the PCL and as it unfolded, that’s what it was.”

There are many within the county that feel Donnelly has been one of the great leaders for Tyrone. Others are sore than when Harte was forced to step down, the captaincy was taken off him.

Either way, he shows signs of possessing the sort of qualities that makes for a managerial career. The media and reading he consumes, the relationships he forms, and who with, hints at that.

Like any ageing footballer, he bats it straight away in case he is smited by the threat of retirement.  

“I am still very much focussed on being a player! But also, I have always been extremely curious about performance and high-performing teams.

“I want my team to be of a similar ilk. Coming up, I was extremely curious about how we could build an environment in Trillick that could succeed and wasn’t necessarily there when I was coming up.”

After Tyrone won the All-Ireland in 2021, the interviews the players conducted revealed several deep thinkers, not in character with how most had pigeon-holed the typical footballer from the county.

“Most of us read the same books, on a variety of topics,” Donnelly says.

“We pass it around. We listen to the same podcasts. So it’s really anything around the sporting environments. Autobiographies of boys I might follow and different philosophy books.

“Some of it is heavy enough. You can get too consumed and caught up in all that stuff. You take bits from it. I still try to keep myself level as well and that’s how I operate best.”

Trillick players are comfortable in leaning into their history.

Nine county titles is a remarkable haul for a what even manager Jody Gormley calls, ‘a one-horse town.’

And yet, even the present generation will talk of Trillick players and teams they never seen playing in the flesh as if it were recent history. Matthew’s own father, Liam, was a county and club captain. His mother, Clare, is the secretary. The Donnellys are soaked in it like creosote.

“We are definitely very proud of that history and eager to build on it. The sense of pride it gives to us before we won anything; that we are from Trillick.  That is a powerful thing in a small community and we can already see it in the younger generation of Trillick, how blessed they are.”

Evan Logan / INPHO Evan Logan / INPHO / INPHO

More so than most villages in the north. Trillick have a dedicated cross-community support. The local mechanic on the Main Street, Drew Mills, flies the colours on the week of big games.

When they won the Tyrone championship in 2019, Mills was out on the street cheering them home. He also doubles up as the leader of the Trillick Pipe Band.

In 2019, he told The Belfast Telegraph; “Trillick is a lovely place to live.

“Religion doesn’t come into day-to-day life here at all. Everything is mixed. People come in here of different classes and creeds and they all get on well.

“I was really delighted to see the GAA club win the Tyrone senior title. I was over the moon. I’ve never seen a crowd as big in Trillick in my life and I’m here over 70 years.”

The same year, the club made an application to the Fermanagh and Omagh Council to create a new pitch, complete with dugouts, floodlights, ball stops and a walking path. The plans were proposed, seconded and supported by councillors from the Ulster Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party.

Within Tyrone, Trillick feels somewhat a place apart; nudged tight into a corner of the county, sharing the Kilskeery Parish with Coa O’Dwyers and just five miles from Tempo, both in Fermanagh.

Even now, the majority of the decorated Trillick footballers have gone to school in Enniskillen and have won honours with St Michael’s. When the school won the Hogan Cup a few years back, Richard Donnelly was in the backroom.  

“We would have engaged and interacted with a lot of people in Fermanagh. We are like any other border town, we might keep ourselves to ourselves a lot,” Donnelly adds.  

“We are from Tyrone and proud to be from Tyrone. It’s something I push a lot to people; the pride of place concept. We are from Trillick, first and foremost, but also proud to be from Tyrone.”

Trillick. First and foremost.