He has tried to get out before. Plenty of people will tell you with varying degrees of confidence that this is to be Kieran Donaghy’s last year with Armagh. But all that means is that this summer is like last summer, which was like the summer before. His life is in Kerry. The slice of his life dedicated to football cannot continue to be in Armagh indefinitely. Someone will be right eventually.
Yet for now here he is, in his fourth year as part of Kieran McGeeney’s backroom team. Still blackening the road up and down the country trying to win them an All-Ireland. Still chasing something deeper and wider than himself, in himself.
Still doing everything else too. In Tralee this week, Donaghy’s Crossover Academy Camp is in full swing, football and basketball for boys and girls. Maurice Fitzgerald is coaching one of the days, his old basketball coach Russ Bradburd is there too. But it wouldn’t be the same without Donaghy. And so, even with an All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry looming, he is about the place. Wouldn’t be anywhere else.
A few years back, when the camps got up and running after Covid, McGeeney was in Kerry with his family on holiday. Long after the Armagh manager spent his football career battling Kerry, he married into the county – his wife Maura is from Ballymacelligott and is a team physio with Armagh. Once there, they sent their kids to Donaghy’s camp for the week. Ties binding, roots deepening.
Armagh could so easily have been a passing fancy for Donaghy. He did a year with the Galway hurlers in 2019, straight after retirement. It was fine and grand and the 2½ drive was perfectly manageable. But it was what it was. A stepping stone, a paddle in the pool of his post-football life. He got his ankles wet but that was about it.
There was no obvious reason that Armagh would be much different. If anything, the starting conditions were far less promising. When Donaghy joined Galway, they had been in two All-Ireland finals in a row, winning the first one and just getting pipped by Limerick in the second. They began the 2019 championship as joint favourites for Liam MacCarthy. Primed and ready.
Armagh were light years removed from that company when McGeeney popped the question. They had been walloped by Donegal in 2020 and hadn’t won a championship game in Croke Park since 2014. Whatever the reason Donaghy was going to be putting in all those miles, nobody pretended he was the last piece in the jigsaw for an All-Ireland push. Armagh had barely separated out the corners yet.
On a brass tacks level, he has been their forwards coach. For well over a decade, the Armagh attack had far too often been a one-horse town. The identity of the horse had chopped and changed – Jamie Clarke groaned under the weight of stardust duty for long enough before Rian O’Neill came in and did the same. If Donaghy could spread it around a bit and make the scoring threat a bit more multifaceted, they’d be getting places.
Judged on that basis alone, his stint has been a success. It’s 16 years since an Armagh forward has won an All Star, in which time 12 other counties have picked up at least one. In the 12 seasons between Ronan Clarke’s award in 2008 and Donaghy’s arrival on the scene, Armagh only picked up five forward nominations altogether – two for Clarke, one for O’Neill and one each for Tony Kernan and Rory Grugan.
In Donaghy’s three seasons with them, they’ve equalled that tally through O’Neill (2), Grugan, Campbell and Andrew Murnin. Conor Turbitt, Oisin Conaty and Murnin will presumably all go close to at least a nomination this year. A decent showing from any of them against Kerry and you’d imagine the Armagh attacker All-Star famine will end.
Awards are in the eye of the beholder, obviously. But the broader point is the extent to which Donaghy has changed their approach to what remains the most difficult part of the game. The days of Armagh’s fortunes rising and falling on the shoulders of one gifted forward are gone. Turbitt, Murnin, Conaty, Grugan and Campbell are all trusted to go and win them games now. O’Neill is too, of course, but it’s not all on him any more.
There are layers upon layers, too. Just as Donaghy was more than a big lump of a full-forward in his playing days, he’s more than a forwards coach now. McGeeney could have found a forwards coach anywhere at all in the 428km between Tralee and Armagh. But there’s only one Kieran Donaghy.
Although it feels a bit dismissive to call him a kind of a vibes man, it wouldn’t be in Donaghy’s nature to take offence at the term. In fact, judging the mood of a dressingroom and reacting accordingly might be his greatest skill. Go to any Armagh game and you will see him and Conleith Gilligan as the upbeat yin to the altogether more dour yang of McGeeney and Ciarán McKeever. That balance has been crucial to their evolution.
Losing four penalty shoot-outs in three seasons could have killed their spirit. In the Ulster final this year, a couple of the players were visibly gun-shy at the end of normal time, turning down kickable marks and recycling possession. But it was notable that when Barry McCambridge was asked about his goal in the quarter-final, he immediately referenced a message from Donaghy in the build-up telling him Croke Park was made for him. Scoring 1-2 from wing back vindicated the view.
Anyone who has shared a dressingroom with Donaghy will point to this side of his make-up as the special sauce. In 2021, when his Austin Stacks team was setting out on the road that would ultimately lead to a county title, Donaghy got McGeeney in to speak to the panel. They were facing East Kerry in the first round, the back-to-back county champions with the two Cliffords, Paul Murphy and a host of Kerry panellists in their ranks.
Asking McGeeney to come and talk to them was one thing. But Donaghy knew enough about everyone involved to know that he needed a fallback plan too. So just in case everything was in danger of getting too grave, he came dressed as a traffic warden.
It gave everyone a laugh and made sure everyone was in the right frame of mind going into the biggest game of the season. This is serious. This is fun. Let’s go and do it. They beat East Kerry 1-7 to 1-5 and didn’t lose a game until the Munster final three months later.
Across their four years together, Donaghy and Armagh have woven themselves through each other ever tighter. A few weeks after their first championship together ended in an epic defeat to Monaghan, the rest of the management team came to Tralee for the end-of-season debrief. Kieran Shannon painted the picture in an Examiner interview: “As McGeeney saw it, after Donaghy making the road so often up to them, it was only fair they reciprocated at least once.”
The following year, after Galway knocked them out on penalties, Donaghy had his first stirrings of maybe wanting to call time. A small convoy of Armagh players took a skite down to Kerry to make sure he stayed on board. It could have been a phone call but they weren’t taking any chances.
Early the next year, in February 2023, Armagh played Kerry in the league. The game was fixed for five o’clock on a Saturday in Austin Stack Park – after it was over, the Armagh squad skedaddled the four minutes around the corner to the Regional Sports Centre where Donaghy was suiting up for Tralee Warriors in the basketball Super League. They could have headed back up the road. They could have taken a team-bonding night on the town. They preferred to do this instead.
Somewhere amid all that, you start to get the idea of what the whole adventure has meant to him and to them. The fact that it’s an Ulster county probably scratches some sort of psychological itch with him. On Tommy Tiernan’s TV show back in April, he talked movingly about visiting his father’s grave in Tyrone during a recent trip north. That openness and vulnerability goes a long way in a dressingroom of young men trying to find their way.
Donaghy will be an intercounty manager some day. He has rejected advances from counties with vacancies at various points since 2021, a stance that will presumably only last so long. He is an inveterate note-taker and far more cerebral than anyone – himself included – gives him credit for. He brings a competitive edge to everything, from an All-Ireland in Croke Park to a back-nine fiver-a-man in Ballybunion. That he flashes a canyon-wide smile while doing it doesn’t fool anyone into thinking he takes it lightly.
This weekend, Donaghy will be doing everything he can to mastermind the end of Kerry’s summer. He will feel no great prick of conscience about it either. His basketball background has given him an ability to compartmentalise sport and take each team, each game, each campaign for what it is. You dance with the one that brung you, you dance like it’s your last.
Maybe he goes in the off-season, maybe he hangs about for Year Five. One way or the other, his time with Armagh is bound to have a long comet’s tail. Donaghy will be in dressingrooms long into the future, in Kerry and elsewhere. Competing. Learning. Teaching. Whatever he becomes, Armagh will have counted as much as anything in making him.
That goes vice versa.
