Doherty’s Donegal ‘more focused’

AS his life in football has been full of them, John Joe Doherty knows the value of taking a second chance.

It was only on the morning of the 1992 All-Ireland final that Doherty discovered he’d be playing at wing-back for his first championship start that season, an unfamiliar position for a man whose natural habitat was in the corner.

Martin Shovlin undertook a fitness test with Dr Austin Kennedy on a rugby pitch near to the Finnstown House Hotel in Lucan. All appeared to be going well on a troublesome neck cramp until he stooped for a ball and pain shot through his body.