A year delving deeper into the ways of Ulster

BEYOND the sound and fury surrounding Kevin Cassidy’s expulsion from the Donegal senior football panel, the calls for mediation, managers forbidding players to attend social events and all the rest of it, there’s a book.

Declan Bogue of the Gaelic Life newspaper wrote This Is Our Year with the aid of several Gaelic footballers from Ulster. He’s only too happy to take a break from the civil war raging in the northern province about the revelations in the book — specifically about Donegal manager Jim McGuinness’s approach — to offer a stunning revelation: he’s talking about what exactly the book contains.

“It’s not a million miles away from Last Man Standing, Christy O’Connor’s book about hurling goalkeepers over the course of one season. The first 15 chapters deal with the backstory of players, mini-biographies really, and there’s one from each county in Ulster. I wanted to cover all the positions on the field and I also wanted to include a management team, so I got Val Andrews from Cavan involved, and it worked well. From then on, it deals with the perspectives of players on the games up to and including the Ulster final and beyond.”