Donnelly hails passion and desire of magic man Laverty 

CHARISMATIC: Down manager Conor Laverty during the Tailteann Cup Semi-Final match between Down and Laois. Pic: Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile

Mickey Donnelly can't say for certain when he first met Down manager Conor Laverty.

"Look, that man knows everybody anyway," smiled the Down assistant manager. "I don't know if he has a notebook of names or what, he must have a mobile phone with infinite memory on it. We just bounced off eachother and he was involved in schools football with St Michael's. 

"My own school had won the Hogan Cup, St Ronan's, and he was with Michael's the following year and you were bouncing things off eachother about certain players. He has a great inventory of knowledge in terms of the footballers that are out there and I suppose that was maybe common ground we both shared. But I'm only one of all the people Conor would be bouncing a thousand things off."

Donnelly is well travelled throughout Ulster as a former underage coach with Derry and Tyrone county teams, as well as various club sides, but hasn't come across a figure quite like Kilcoo man Laverty.

Put simply, he believes the man who has guided Down to Saturday's Tailteann Cup final against Meath, in their first season together on the line, has a touch of sorcery about him.

"There's a wee bit of magic with him, there's no point in saying anything different, he's a very impressive man," said Donnelly of the father-of-five. "It's no secret that he's very busy, he is a busy man. Jesus, he has his fingers in a lot of pies.

"He's playing club football, he's a successful farmer, he has a house full of cubs, he has a couple of coffee trucks on the road. So he's a busy guy but his passion and his desire for football, I have never seen anything like it.

"You can call it game smarts, you can call it game IQ, whatever you want to call it, it's just relentless. I don't know where he gets the time but he gets it and his ability to even simplify the message is amazing.

"I've worked with good coaches and saw good coaches in operation over the years. But they've maybe complicated things, Conor makes it crystal clear for everybody and given the amount of people and the range of individuals that you're working with in a county set-up, the message has to be clear.

"He's a wonderful communicator and the simplicity of the messages that he gets across is probably the net result of that. I just think there's a wee bit of magic with him. He's a special wee person and that's emphasised when you're looking around and going, 'How does this man sleep? Where does he get the time?' Football is front and centre all the time."

Donnelly reckons the fact that Laverty, an All-Ireland club title winner early last year, is still playing for Kilcoo is a big plus.

"He's able to say, 'Listen, that guy was marking me a couple of weeks ago and he is tight' or 'he won't let you make that wee run in behind' or 'he will take you away up the field'," explained Donnelly.

"That's an insight you won't get from anyone else. And listen, in another world he probably still could be playing with Down. If some of the rest of us were managing the team, he could probably still put a jersey on for you. I think he could. I've gone to see Kilcoo a couple of times this year and listen, he's nobody's fool."

Down fired 17 wides when they last played Meath, losing by two in their final group game at Parnell Park early last month. More recently, they secured their final place with an eight-goal mauling of Laois.

"We'd take somewhere in the middle on Saturday - if we could score four goals and shoot eight wides, that would be alright," smiled Donnelly.

"Credit to Meath that day, they were really well set up. They defended in numbers and made it really, really difficult for us to penetrate. Parnell Park plays quite narrow as well. Down also lost an U-20 semi-final at Parnell Park. There's maybe a correlation there in terms of the way we want to play football and maybe Parnell Park doesn't make it that easy."