McGee: Attitude right to take care of ‘unfinished business’
The whole idea behind togging out for Gweedore Celtic that day was to take his mind off the fact that Dublin and Mayo were that same afternoon going at it at Croke Park to decide which of them would strip Donegal’s title as All-Ireland champions.
Soccer had given him succour many a winter before. A talented striker who claimed many a goal for the local club, his patience was being stretched on this occasion by one opponent who kept chiding him about his absence from the Big House on Jones’ Road. McGee doesn’t divulge all the details, but the bones of the story are clear. The mouth ended up on the turf and McGee walked on a straight red card.
Justified? “Oh, fully justified,” he smiles. “It was an off-the-ball incident so fully justified.”
Seven weeks had already been scrubbed since Donegal’s 16-point All-Ireland quarter-final defeat by Mayo, but McGee’s reaction to the taunting was symbolic of the squad’s failure to wash away the stigma they felt.
“I was just that upset. I was still sick from the performance against Mayo that I couldn’t be bothered being involved in GAA or watching it. It was just self-pity, and it was a case of staying away from it.
“Self-pity is a useless emotion,” he continues. “It doesn’t serve to do anything but a lot of that was going about. Once we sat down together as a group we quickly realised we had a good bit of unfinished business.”
The details of how they rediscovered themselves is already the stuff of legend. The story goes that Michael Murphy and Neil McGee were on their way to an International Rules session in Dublin but did a U-turn at Monaghan when a text dropped suggesting Jim McGuinness was unsure as to whether he would stay on. McGuinness was looking for assurances: from the county board on club fixtures and logistics and from his players in terms of desire and intensity.
“That’s all that pretty much happened,” says Neil McGee. “Michael wanted to get things sorted out and he managed that. It was just phone calls and we managed to call a meeting on the Sunday. Everyone was there and we said, ‘Boys, what are we going to do here?’ Everyone was in agreement then that, whatever we had to do to keep Jim in place, we had to do it. Thankfully he stayed and we haven’t looked back since.”
In hindsight, their torturous year as holders was no shock. McGuinness railed against a club fixture schedule which he claimed “pulled the carpet” from underneath them and a multitude of injuries as sources of frustration in 2013. Hunger and focus were other debilitating factors. Eamon McGee admits as much, pointing out that, while Sam Maguire is a familiar face in Kerry, his appearance in Donegal demanded a procession of house calls around the county. “We have twice the amount of training sessions done this time before the quarter-finals than we had last year,” said Neil McGee. “It goes to show we probably weren’t at the level last year. That’s probably normal: it was our first All-Ireland in 20 years and we weren’t used to it.”
It wouldn’t be true to say that they were always going to re-dedicate themselves to the task. Life isn’t that black and white. Yet, there were enough memories of the bad old days to remind them that hay needed to be made while the sun shone.
“Every year we set out we always said this was going to be our year and we believed that,” says Eamon McGee. “We believed that we were going to do it. I said it before that me and (Kevin) Cassidy and Neil had spent hours and hours and hours in the car travelling up and down to training and talking about what we would do if we won the All-Ireland and all this partying we would be doing. Maybe that was part of the problem.
“We were prepared to talk about it but not prepared to put in the actual work. Just the attitude wasn’t there. We were just so far down off the pace when it came to it that it was unbelievable. Thankfully, Jim has come in and changed that and for that we are eternally grateful.”
