CON O’Callaghan, Shane Walsh, Conor Glass, David Clifford, Niall Morgan. Throw them all into a star studded XV, with whoever else you fancy, line them up against Donegal and Donegal would still win.
Mark McHugh doesn’t necessarily believe that but, crucially, he reckons the Donegal players do.
It is a level of bullet proof confidence they possess that, truth be told, would have seemed laughable this time last year.
McHugh’s younger brother, Ryan, missed the 2023 Championship, opting out partly to indulge his wanderlust and to travel to the US and partly to give injuries an opportunity to recover. Michael Murphy wasn’t long retired either and results on the pitch – Donegal were relegated from Division One and lost to Down in Ulster – all contributed to the feeling of a group stuck in quicksand.
As the rejuvenated Ryan McHugh said after being named Footballer of the Month this April, it seemed like ‘just bad news after bad news’ in 2023.
The difference now? Jim McGuinness, of course.
“It’s the thing he brings to it – that sense of invincibility,” said Mark McHugh, an All-Star and All-Ireland winner under McGuinness in 2012.
“Any time you go out on the field, you feel that you’re invincible. If you had the best 15 players over the last 20 years in one team, and they were playing a Donegal team managed by Jim McGuinness, and this is something I can say from my own experience, you would think you’re going to beat them. And not even that you’re going to beat them, like, you’re going to beat them pretty easily.
“It’s a strange feeling, it’s a great feeling. And when you go and shake hands with the man that you’re marking, and you know that you’re already one up on him, it’s just a huge air of confidence.
“It’s not arrogance, it’s pure and utter confidence. And you know that if you carry out what he and his management team has said to do, you’re thinking, ‘We can’t lose this game’.
“And listen, I’ve lost games with Donegal under Jim McGuinness, but it’s just before the game I’m talking about, every single game I ever went into under him, you’re like, ‘There’s absolutely no way we can lose this match, if we do what he said to be done’.”
And yet McHugh himself wasn’t necessarily a believer at the start of the year. He took a look at the Ulster draw – beat Derry, probably Tyrone and Armagh then – and crumpled his nose up.
“I was like, ‘Jesus, this is a tough draw’,” acknowledged McHugh, speaking at a promotion organised by football Championship sponsors AIB. “But no, they proved me and a lot of other people wrong.”
Now with just two steps left to heaven, Dublin out of the picture and McGuinness seemingly delivering on everything he promised, the Donegal players may feel sympathy for the bookmakers who have installed them as 4/1 third favourites for the All-Ireland.
Follow the western coast down as far as Galway and they radiate similar confidence. McHugh went to college down there and is currently part of the Moycullen backroom team.
“They were always my second favourite team,” he said of Galway. He wants to stress he has no inside info on whether Sean Kelly, the Galway captain and a Moycullen club man, is going to start after being taken off injured in the quarter-final.
“I texted Sean after they beat Dublin, congratulating him, that was before Donegal was even fixed to play them and that is the last time I spoke to Sean,” he said.
Despite the Kelly conundrum, similar issues with Shane Walsh and Damien Comer not looking 100 percent – all three have been named in the official line-up – McHugh can see reasons why Galway would be optimistic. Specifically, he can understand why Galway might be questioning Donegal’s credentials.
“Are Donegal good enough to win an All-Ireland? Sunday will tell a lot because, where exactly are Donegal?” asked McHugh.
“I suppose they got one of the easier quarter-finals in Louth. They had Clare before that and then Cork had beaten them. So from the last few games we just don’t know where they’re at until they’ve played one of the bigger teams. That’s why this game will tell a lot.”
