THIS time last year, Christy Toye stood with his friends outside the Big Tree pub on Dublin’s Dorset Street and watched a Garda escort guide the Donegal team bus towards Croke Park.
It hurt but not as much as the preceding 10 months when Toye battled trigeminal neuralgia, an illness nicknamed the “suicide virus” because the intense pain pushes sufferers so far.
“We were worried that we would never see Christy play for the club again, let alone the county,” said Liam McElhinney, father of Donegal player, Martin McElhinney and a stalwart of Toye’s club, St Michael’s.
“I would have been in visiting him and it was just like a constant toothache all the time, the kind of thing that would drive you to distraction. And Christy, being the type of lad he is, didn’t look for too much sympathy for it either. He spent most of that time in his room.”
It wasn’t just McElhinney who thought Toye’s days as a Donegal player were over.
At 31, he wasn’t young. But he forced himself back onto the panel, performed well and against Dublin made a key intervention that is considered the game’s turning point.
While Bernard Brogan’s and Diarmuid Connolly’s missed goal chances were highlighted as the moment when the semi-final started to go away from the defending All-Ireland champions, another incident proved as decisive even if it wasn’t as eye-catching.
And Toye was at the heart of it. Thirty minutes were on the clock. Ahead, Dublin fed the ball to Michael Darragh Macauley — the man dubbed the “rampaging rhino” by Denis Bastick. Off he charged. And after him chased Toye, the 31-year-old, the grey-haired substitute, the recoverer from the suicide virus. He had five yards to catch up on Macauley and it seemed a lost cause. But Toye nailed him.
Under Jim McGuinness, Donegal don’t do lost causes.
This week they return to Johnstown House, the hotel in Meath where they masterminded their victory over Dublin, where McGuinness explained a game-plan that convinced his players they had the tools to defeat the seemingly unbeatable.
For five days that week they discussed Dublin’s weaknesses and McGuinness brought up a story Brian McEniff had told him from long ago. It was 1992. Again Donegal were meeting Dublin, this time in an All-Ireland final, when McEniff bumped into Sean O’Neill, a veteran of Down’s glory years in the 1960s. “Stare down the barrel of a gun, Brian,” O’Neill advised the then Donegal manager. “Target their strong men.”
McEniff heeded the advice. Martin McHugh went after Keith Barr, Dublin’s talisman. The shock of the century followed.
Twenty-two years later came the shock of the 21st century. Donegal, the supposedly washed-up former champs, were meeting the supposedly unstoppable kingpins. Yet Dublin were stopped, stopped by a team who made 106 contact tackles, who converted 68 per cent of their chances, who had only 31 per cent of possession in the first 20 minutes but who finished the game with 52 per cent of the play.
“It was the rope-a-dope victory, our Rumble in the Jungle,” said Eamon McGee afterwards. And, tactical strategy aside, the parallels rang true. One team was considered too old, the other too good.
But the 7/1 underdogs have men like Toye whose life story is an inspiration and men like Neil Gallagher, another 30-year-old, another man whose inter-county career seemed over, and a player who now, believe it or not, may end up as footballer of the year.
On the Donegal panel since 2003, his Indian summer is one to cherish. Off the pitch Gallagher and his Glenswilly clubmate, Michael Murphy — the Chuckle Brothers, as Eamon McGee has dubbed them — have just opened a sports shop in Letterkenny. Business is booming, helped by Murphy’s high profile and by the two men sharing a competitive instinct.
Glenswilly is a “blink and you miss it” village just outside Letterkenny yet it has produced the two men that have captained Donegal to their last two national titles — Murphy, who led Donegal to the All-Ireland in 2012 and Gallagher, who cut a distinctive figure as he lifted the League trophy in 2007, his head bandaged and bloodied, his pride swollen.
After the early morning gym sessions that Jim McGuinness put Donegal through, Ryan Bradley described Gallagher as the most competitive person he knows because he pushed himself harder than anyone else.
Against the Dubs, he pushed harder than most, relocating to unfamiliar territory in the full-forward line as part of McGuinness’s master-plan before he dropped deep to re-establish his telepathic understanding with goalkeeper Paul Durcan for Donegal’s kick-outs.
Yet there is more to Gallagher than a safe pair of hands.
Dropped off the panel briefly for a breach of discipline under previous manager John-Joe Doherty, his personal comeback fits in with the collective coming-of-age backdrop to this Donegal story.
“So much of our success is down to Jim McGuinness,” said Gallagher.
“He has just been unreal. He lays out what we have to do, and we try and do it as best we can.
“In fairness to him and the management team, they have everything thought out.
“It’s because of him that we have three Ulster titles and an All-Ireland.
“He nearly plays the game for you. The work he puts in and the commitment he gives to the job is unreal.”
Yet Gallagher only started two Championship games in 2011, McGuinness’s first season.
He knuckled down and made sure that wouldn’t happen again.
He never gave up. Neither for that matter did Toye. By the time it came to playing Dublin in a football match, the impossible seemed possible. After all, they’d both overcome bigger personal battles.
Now all that separates them from local immortality is Kerry, the 36-times champions, standard-bearers of the sport.
Compared to “trigeminal neuralgia”, that contest might not be as hard as you’d imagine.
