Soldiering for the Glensmen’s cause

HARD to believe that Fermanagh are still waiting! It didn’t happen for Down until 1959 and it took a further 13 years before Donegal made the breakthrough.

We’re talking about the Ulster football championship, monopolised by Cavan until they faded from the limelight a long time ago and contested with renewed passion and vigour by Derry and Donegal in Clones yesterday.

Not the pairing expected by Brian McEniff earlier in the year although he did fancy Donegal to qualify, based on his respect for new manager Jim McGuinness and the way the team has matured under his approach. His prediction was that Down would be there. So did a lot of pundits.

McEniff played a central role in building and enhancing Donegal’s profile since the early ‘70s. He has the distinction of being player-manager with the 1972 side which captured the Anglo-Celt Cup for the first time and the one who guided them to their only All-Ireland title in 1992.

And, he managed them on three further occasions, most recently two years ago.

His CV is quite impressive. Part of the Donegal executive for 40 years, a delegate to the Ulster Council for 17 and a member of Central Council for 18 years. Add in the fact that he was the Ulster coach for over two decades and Irish manager for the 2000/’01 International Rules Series.

Unusually for someone with such a serious background in GAA administration, he played League of Ireland soccer for a while with Sligo Rovers and at semi-professional level in Toronto for a short period when working in hotel management. He also had an on-off involvement with the now defunct Cork Hibernians club, when he played under an assumed name.

Nowadays, while Donegal are well able to survive in good company, it took a long time to make their mark in Ulster, with Cavan having won 38 of their 39 titles before they won their first almost 40 years ago.

“We were slow-comers to the post, no doubt about that,” he said.

“I was in boarding school in Monaghan and you wouldn’t be saying you were from Donegal.If you had a man on the Ulster team in the late ‘50s or ‘60s you’d be aiming for the moon you’d have something to crow about.”

Before the turn of the 1900s, hurling thrived in parts of the county, he pointed out.

“They didn’t play organised football here until they founded a club called the Bundoran Sinn Féiners in 1916. Donegal football was so far behind at the time that the senior football final was played in Derry city.

“Donegal has been generally fairly good going back as far as I can remember as a young boy in the ‘50s, but we just didn’t have the belief — or the know-how — to win. It was a lack of belief and confidence that stopped Donegal making a breakthrough many years before that. In the ‘60s ten or 11 players represented Ulster when the inter-provincials were very competitive, but Down had the Indian sign on them.

“It took us a long time to break that duck with Down,” he said, pointing out that they lost to them in the Ulster finals of 1963 and ‘66 and at the semi-final stage in ‘67. Down might have gone on to win a third All-Ireland title the following year, but McEniff maintains the Donegal team at the time was “only the kick of a ball away from them”. “It was originally Cavan. Antrim haunted us in the last ten years. Look back and see that they put us to the sword four or five times.”

Coming in as a sub in the 1966 Ulster final, shortly after returning from Canada, he ended up as player-manager for the 1972 championship season after the then manager failed to turn up for the final league game.

As one of the more senior players and a member of the Ulster team, he was asked to source a team manager. Former Cavan great Mick Higgins was approached and he agreed to come on board in an advisory capacity.

“With 13 of the players that got hammered by Leitrim in December 1971, we won an Ulster championship the following July against Tyrone.”

Two years later they were again champions, but he was sacked after lining out with Kerry against Donegal in the New York final later in the season. And, he would suffer the same fate on two further occasions when he was manager.

Back in charge when they made the big breakthrough with the winning of the All-Ireland in 1992, he maintains that they “should have won it a couple of years earlier” and were good enough to have retained the title.

Voted in as county chairman in 2003, he quickly had to deal with a situation where they had no team manager.

“We had a get-together on the first day of January and the players — Jim McGuiness was one of them – asked me would I go back and I said I would. To be honest, it half-killed me.

“We went to the All-Ireland semi-final where we were beaten by Armagh. We lost our full-back in the first minute of the second-half and it really hampered us.” Interestingly, while he coached the ‘92 team in the art of hand-passing – through necessity, because of a lack of size across the half-forward line – he is adamant that it should now be limited and is calling on the leadership to take action.

“Sean McCague [when President] tried to limit it to two hand-passes and then a kick. I don’t think we persevered long enough with that or with the sin-bin to see if it would work. We as an Association have to take up the cause of getting the kicking back in.

“Kerry showed how a team can succeed with it by being proficient at the kick-passing. It’s a skill you have to develop. It won’t happen just by running around in a circle and doing hand-passing training.”