Donegal's clandestine Croke Park visit – and 'a bad case of Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses'

A small queue of cars turned off the North Circular Road and, plainly aware of their arrival, the Croke Park gateman nodded them in.

Donegal manager Brian McEniff hatched a plan in the lead-up to the 1983 All-Ireland semi-final with Galway.

At one training session at Sean MacCumhaill Park, McEniff got his players together.

“We're all going to Croke Park.”

They were under strict orders not to tell a soul: “Not a word boys.”

Eleven days before the game, five cars carrying the Donegal squad and management pulled up at GAA headquarters.

Naomh Columba's Padraig Carr, as he did to all their training, travelled to the capital in the company of Michael Carr, Martin McHugh, Sean Gavigan and selector Jimmy Cunningham.

“We were last as usual,” Carr recalls of the covert mission, which soon came to an abrupt end.

Even now, 41 years on, Carr can still hear the shout to this day.

“Who the fuck organised this? Who is in charge?”

The sight of Liam Mulvihill, the GAA's Director General, marching towards them, clearly indignant, swiftly put an end to the ploy.

“We had maybe 10 minutes at the most,” Carr says. “We were on the field kicking around and we were going to go into a backs versus forwards game.

“Everything had been organised no problem and we all got into the dressing room. Liam Mulvihill - it was the first time I saw him - asked Jimmy who was in charge and he pointed him towards McEniff. A few minutes later McEniff was telling us to get togged again to go home. A four-hour drive home. Another disaster for Donegal at Croke Park!”

McEniff's instruction was the same as it had been in Ballybofey: “Not a word boys.”

As they made for home, the Donegal contingent were unaware that there would be repercussions for their undercover manoeuvre.

On the journey back to south-west Donegal, Michael Carr posed a question.

“Who do you think has gained the most out of this?”

The Kilcar man recounted the moment when team trainer Austin Coughlan (an uncle of the current Donegal GAA Chairperson Mary Coughlan) took a pass from Martin McHugh and fired a shot over the bar.

Coughlan celebrated with gusto, delightfully proclaiming himself as “the first St Naul's man to score a point in Croke Park!”

The Donegal team before the 1983 All-Ireland semi-final against Galway

While Donegal won the All-Ireland U21 title – the county's first All-Ireland success at any grade – against Roscommon in 1982, things didn't exactly go to plan in the National League that winter.

Donegal ended up battling to stay 'up' in Division 3, doing so with a win over Fermanagh. Three wins, three defeats and one draw in Division 3 hardly set the pulses racing.

In the Donegal Democrat, Colm Murray, who wrote under the pseudonym Tine Si, decried the style of football Donegal were employing.

The short passing game was, Murray wrote, “a bad case of Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses”. Earlier in the year, Murray wrote of Donegal having “several blatantly unfit players aboard”.

Money was tight, too. At the end of 1982, the then county chairman, Michael Gillespie, estimated that it would take £40,000 to run county teams “properly” in '83.

And yet, Armagh – the reigning Ulster champions – were beaten 1-10 to 0-7 in front of 8,000 at Sean MacCumhaill Park (the biggest crowd at the venue in over a decade) and Monaghan were dispatched 1-14 to 1-9 in a semi-final played at Irvinestown.

Seamus Bonner scored from two penalties, the second of which he stroked over the bar with two minutes to go, as Donegal landed the Anglo Celt Cup via a 1-14 to 1-11 win over Cavan in the final.

Galway lay in wait and Donegal's tails were up.

Joyce McMullin was one of the U21s now on the senior squad. Matt Gallagher, Eunan MacIntyre, Tommy McDermott, Anthony Molloy, Donal Reid, Martin McHugh and Charlie Mulgrew were all in.

“We came into a squad that was fairly experienced,” McMullin says. “It was a nice combination. It was a very experienced group overall and it worked well.”

In the RTÉ studio the day before the game, on the Gaelic Stadium programme, Pauric McShea, a part of McEniff's backroom team, told presenter Mick Dunne of the buzz in Donegal.

“I have never seen interest like it in Donegal before,” McShea said while lamenting the “somewhat unfortunate” staging of the Captain's Prize at Bundoran Golf Club the day of the game.

The week before the Galway game, midfielder Molloy played in an inter-firms match for the ESB and hurt his knee.

“I struggled against Galway and, if truth be told, probably shouldn't have played” he later recalled.

The Donegal squad stayed in Virginia on the Saturday night and stopped in a Mulhuddart pub owned by Inver man Colm Mohan on their way to the game.

It was the afternoon Irish athlete Eamonn Coghlan won the 5000m gold at the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki. The 28,507 at Croke Park roared in unison as the news flashed on the Nally Stand scoreboard.

Down in the Donegal dressing room, there was confusion.

At the end of his speech, McEniff instructed that only the first 15 could kick ball on the pitch and the others would have to go straight to the dug-out.

Fearful of defying the manager – and perhaps being put down the pecking order - Padraig Carr opted to heed the instruction.

Seamus Reilly from Bundoran thought otherwise. “I'm going to kick a ball in Croke Park today, whether he plays me or not,” he told his team-mates.

When the Donegal subs took their perches in the dugout at the Hogan Stand, the entire Galway squad were going through their pre-match routine.

McEniff insisted that the instruction came from Croke Park. To this day, Carr remains convinced it was a punishment ordered by Mulvihill for their clandestine training session at headquarters.

Brian McEniff after the 1983 All-Ireland semi-final

Galway lost by a point, 1-12 to 1-11, to Offaly in a semi-final the year before. Offaly, thanks to a late Séamus Darby goal, ended Kerry's hopes of five-in-a-row in the final.

McEniff had some selection dilemmas and eventually made just one change. Charlie Mulgrew, who got his jaw broken in an off-the-ball clash against Monaghan, was restored at the expense of Carr.

“I was in an awkward situation,” the Glen man says. “I had played in the Ulster final at corner-forward with Martin McHugh at centre-forward.

“I didn't know until the Thursday before the Galway game that I was dropped. McEniff never told me and I had a confrontation with him in the dressing room.

“He told me that I would be the first man on in Croke Park and I snapped back at him: 'If (Noel) McCole gets injured, you'll not be putting me in goals'.”

In the 62^nd minute, the world caved in on Donegal, who were leading by a point thanks to a Kieran Keeney goal.

Stephen Joyce miscued from a '45 and Val Daly fetched, unopposed. Daly's catch wasn't clean, but the Mountbellew man hooked past the despairing dive of 'keeper McCole.

“It just dipped past my fingers,” McCole recalls. “From our point of view, it was a very soft goal to let in.

“It was mishit by Val Daly, but by the time I saw it – I was pretty late seeing it – it just went past me. It set us back and we didn't really recover from it.

“Small things turn matches and a fluky goal beat us that day.”

McCole made his senior championship debut in the 1974 Ulster final replay win over Down after Alan Kane picked up an injury in the drawn game.

When Weeshie Fogarty, the referee who later became a popular voice on Radio Kerry, called full-time, Galway were 1-12 to 1-11 in front.

McCole also faced Galway in an All-Ireland semi-final in 1974, losing 3-13 to 1-14.

“Johnny Tobin created havoc – that's my memory of my first time playing in Croke Park,” McCole says. “Galway were an established team and we were a youngish team. I didn't miss a championship game for ten years after that.”

The '83 defeat stung harder than any other.

The night of the game, McEniff walked to a little park in Belgrave Square, where he lived during his days studying hotel management at Cathal Brugha Street College. He sat, alone, on a park bench until 6am.

“The whole place came down on top of us,” Donal Reid remembered in Sam's For The Hills, the 2003 tome by Damian Dowds and Donal Campbell. “I said to myself: 'That's it. End of story. Lights out.'”

Twenty years after the defeat, when interviewed for the same book, McMullin, describing the Donegal performance as “cat” said: “The performance was one of the worst Donegal performances I was ever involved in.”

The day still gnaws at the Donegal Town man.

“The whole occasion and Croke Park just kind of got to us,” he says.

“It was a very flat performance. We had been in Croke Park the week beforehand, but it was empty; Croke Park is a very different place when there's a crowd.

“Galway were an ordinary team to be honest. We had the stuff to beat them.

“We had played so well right up to the Ulster final. That was the biggest shock: That the semi-final against Galway was such a flop, performance-wise.”

In between the semi-final and the final against Dublin – a game Galway lost 1-10 to 1-8 against a Dublin side that was down to 12 men after three red cards – the Galway manager, Mattie McDonagh, sounded out Donegal for a challenge game.

An understrength Donegal went to Tuam and a Michael Carr goal gave Donegal a 1-12 to 0-8 win. Galway were booed off, such was Donegal's dominance. It heightened the sense of frustration as Donegal's summer turned to autumn.

“We trounced them,” Padraig Carr recalls. “It just showed us again that the semi-final was one we threw away. It was an awful disaster. It really was a disaster.”

McCole, a bank official who played for St Eunan's in '83 having began at his native Dungloe, still wonders why Donegal didn't use Frank Rushe, his Galway-born St Eunan's team-mate, in that semi-final.

“He had trained all year to mark Johnny Hughes, who was a club-mate of his (at Mountbellew–Moylough),” McCole says. “He trained diligently all year with that thought, but he never got the chance.”

McCole believes Donegal vastly underachieved in the 1980s. The Galway defeat hung in their minds for a long time.

“That defeat to Galway had a big affect on us,” he says. “We really should have dominated the 1980s.

“We were buoyed up by the confidence from the lads who came in from the U21s. Those lads were winners and we felt that we were the real deal.

“When the boys won the All-Ireland in '92, a lot of them were at the end of their carers. They were in their prime in the 1980s and we just didn't deliver.”