THEY DON’T CALL him Star in Tralee for nothing, you know.
On the biggest stage the GAA can offer, Kieran Donaghy hit his cues as usual yesterday.
The veteran Kingdom forward struck what proved the decisive goal in the 52th minute against Donegal on the way to his fourth Celtic Cross.
The Ulster side’s keeper Paul Durcan was the man who gifted Donaghy the opportunity to etch his name into the history books once more. And he didn’t let it pass.
“I was trying to hedge between Leo McLoone and Eamon McGee,” Donaghy said afterwards of his goal chance.
“I saw that Leo was behind me and so I was trying to play with the goalkeeper a small bit. I don’t know did he stub the ground or whatever but it ended up in my hands. And you just have to finish those. They’re golden chances to get, especially against them and thankfully it finished in the back of the net.
The way I was looking at it was that we were three points up (it was actually four). It felt like it was seven-seven for about three hours. I thought it was never going to get off seven-seven. Getting off that scoreline was the big thing and certainly for us to have the momentum was big.
“I said to the umpire about three or four minutes before that whoever gets the goal will win it. Thankfully it was us.”
It’s been a winding road to glory this summer and Donaghy admits he’d have been ‘a fool’ to foresee yesterday’s events earlier this year.
“It was hard, especially after the Galway game, I was disappointed,” he said of his personal journey. “I always said I’d finish playing when I felt I couldn’t offer the team anything and I suppose that was the day when I was coming down saying ‘can I offer the team anything?’ That’s where I was after the Galway game but look, with a bit of luck against Mayo, we were able to pull it out of the fire and I got the confidence back.
“In fairness to management they instilled the belief in us, even after that 11-point loss (to Cork in the league). That was a bad loss but we didn’t show up that day, we promised ourselves after that, and the management made us promise, that that would never happen again and the team showed great courage and togetherness and a great bond, to stick out the games against Mayo, we were five points down in a Gaelic football game with three minutes to go.
“That doesn’t happen that often that you come back from it but we showed great fortitude that day and everything was thrown at us again by a great Mayo team down in Limerick and we’d all the answers again and we came up against the toughest of them all today in Donegal and to get across the line again.”
