But there’s no coffee, no Red Bull and no pit stops to stretch the legs, just a laser focus on getting down the road to Tralee to have breakfast with his daughters.
“Once I got used to driving the tiredness wasn’t getting into the eyes. I’m like a truck driver now, I don’t get tired at all. I just sit there for four and a half hours.”
If he’s being honest, and he usually is, Donaghy was surprised at the offer to come into the Armagh back-room team. He knew Kieran McGeeney from way back, the International Rules panel of 2006 to be precise when, Donaghy who oversaw the fines system in the squad, levied McGeeney daily for his long hair.
“We’ve had a funny relationship,” says Donaghy. “I was involved in a bit of an accident coming back from an International Rules trip on the M50 once. The car died and I had to roll it off the road then some fella came down … and there was a fire brigade. There was no one seriously hurt or anything, but it was a big incident on the M50 and I remember Geezer came past, put down the window down [and said], ‘Are you OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m OK’ but it was chaos. I said, ‘Go on, go on, go on’ and he went off but pulled in down the road and came back up.
“I knew from playing with him [in International Rules], I know from him being a selector with us, I played with him in ’06 and he was a selector in ’08 and ’11 and when he called me to answer a question I was kinda like going, ‘Anything that fella is involved in, I want to be involved in it’.”
When McGeeney called Donaghy to ask him into Armagh, Donaghy was a relative unknown in the coaching world. Before McGeeney’s call, he’d been with the Galway hurlers and took IT Tralee’s Sigerson Cup team when David Clifford was there. But, in the main, he was short on experience. “I had no CV. A hell of a call, I suppose you’d say, but that’s Kieran. He’s ‘how can I help my team? Where can we go with this?’
“It’s a mad one to pick up the phone. But he knew I worked in Dublin, we met after they nearly beat Mayo in Castlebar. I was working with Sky Sports and was staying there after the game and we met and had a few pints and he was asking me what I was doing. I told him I was a director in a company and he was really interested in what we were doing.
2024 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship final preview
“So I’d say in that conversation in 2019 I told him we would be in Dublin with work an awful lot, for FIFA pitches, GAA and rugby. And sure, he was cute… Sure, he said, ‘You’re in Dublin anyway, why don’t you line up your Dublin days with the days we are training, we are only an hour from Dublin?’
“He made it all sound so simple, I was agreeing, ‘No bother’. And then the first night down the road, I was going, ‘Jesus! This place isn’t close at all!’”
“But he’s brilliant at getting you buying into helping people be better. He put it to me that I played the way he wanted football to be played and just making the fella next to you look like an All-Star. And he said, ‘I want you to help with that’. And that’s how it came about.
“He sent me a few games to watch and it was obviously not an easy decision because the first night we came up we did a session then Covid hit and it was all cancelled. I was up and down and it was a bit mixed.
“But it’s been a great journey and we’ve a great bond and we’ve always had a bit of a bond. We’re different people and we gel together good because of that.”
To make it all happen he needed the buy-in from his wife Hilary and his boss Colin Teahon from PST Sport. From a work point of view, his visibility further north has helped the company win contracts. Donaghy stays in south Armagh on occasion and he brought his family up in the days after they beat Kerry.
“We have a second home up here, we stay in Tassagh with the Fagans. They have a lovely farmhouse there with pigs and goats and sheep. And we are townies from Tralee and they [his daughters] love going to ‘the farm’ as they call it now and being out with the Shetland ponies and the donkeys and the cows. It’s a lovely place to be a very calm environment.”
Armagh won’t have been calm these last couple of weeks as Donaghy and Co look to take one more quantum leap up the steps of the Hogan Stand.
“That’s probably the hardest thing in counties, I can imagine, is to get people who are big rivals to gel together. I think Kieran the way he’s got these boys to really put Armagh first in terms of their decision-making about how they’re going to go playing for the county is a huge part of that.
“They’re a great bunch of lads. People say about the drive and how are you doing it, it’s easy when you see that every one of these lads that we have, all 44 or 45 of them, are really putting everything into the cause and that’s fantastic to see.
“That makes it easier to come back up the road. If they were fellas tipping in and out and you knew these fellas weren’t at it, I’d be [gone] long ago. But it was never the issue with this group of players.”
