Kavanagh needed push to return

Rory Kavanagh had his doubts. He needed his arm twisting. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; it was whether he was able to.

Michael Murphy planted the seed about not wanting to sign off an inter-county career on a 16-point defeat. Jim McGuinness gave him and others a week to think about it. So he did and after some deliberation with his family the 32-year-old was back in tow, literally a signed up member of the Donegal panel again.

“I needed a little bit of a push in the off-season because I wasn’t too sure and I had to just go away to talk to family and friends and see where I was at. We got together and we made our plans for the year and the general consensus was we didn’t want to end it like what happened against Mayo. That was a big, big factor. We wanted to show a bit of character and show what we were about. That was important to us.