'At 18 years of age I would have done anything for football, at 21 I wanted an excuse to stop'

The 42

3 days ago

ON A SOAKING wet day in Ballybofey, May 2011, Donegal backroom member Marc 'Maxi' Curran was sent to the minor team dressing room to fetch Paddy McBreaty.
He was just after scoring 1-3 for the minors, but they were beaten in the Ulster championship by Antrim.
Curran got him fresh kit and a bowl of pasta. In the next short while, McBrearty would soon join an exclusive band of players who played minor and senior county championship on the same day.
It began a pattern that Jim McGuinness would embed in his Donegal teams. He has said before that the most talented minor footballer in the county would play senior football, so the best thing for them was to bring them in and nourish them early.
Since then, he brought in Ryan McHugh in 2013 and even was a little hasty in trying to fast-track Finbarr Roarty last year, who nonetheless is a front runner now for Young Player of the Year.
In 2014, he brought in Darrach 'Jigger' O'Connor.
He started the first Ulster championship game against Derry. He scored a goal in the semi-final against Antrim. He started the Ulster and All-Ireland finals that year, claiming a place ahead of none other than McBrearty.
He had an early sight of goal in the 2014 All-Ireland final against Kerry that fizzed across and went wide.
Donegal's Darach O'Connor and goalkeeper Brian Kelly of Kerry. Cathal Noonan / INPHO Cathal Noonan / INPHO / INPHO
He came from good stock in that regard. His father John 'Jigger' O'Connor had the ball in the net for Roscommon after just 35 seconds of the 1980 All-Ireland final, past Charlie Nelligan in the Kerry goals.
Since then, he has played little football for Donegal. A sad litany of cruciate ligament and knee injuries has been his fate for the past decade, his latest occurring for Buncrana only nine weeks ago.
Regrets? Not really.
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He had an inkling it might happen.
When he was playing for the county U21s in 2013, they lost the Ulster final to Cavan. After the game, assistant manager Rory Gallagher came over for a chat. Marking his card.
'I'll never forget the phone call,' says O'Connor now.
After Buncrana clubmate Paul McGonigle was added to the Donegal backroom team in late 2013, he made a call to O'Connor.
He was sitting in geography class at Scoil Mhuire. His phone was lying on his pencil case and McGonigle's name flashed up. He went sheepishly to the teacher and told her he had to take the call. She just laughed.
Playing against Armagh in the Dr McKenna Cup. Lorcan Doherty / INPHO Lorcan Doherty / INPHO / INPHO
'I was still 17 at that time,' he says.
'You're just delighted, like, you know, like I remember just being so excited for it.'
His mind flashed back to the Ulster meeting of Donegal and Armagh in the Ulster championship of 2007. He played at half-time in the mini-games on a day the seniors scored a rare win over that generation of Armagh players.
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'Karl Lacey, like I remember just watching Lacey that day and just thinking 'Jesus Christ.' From that moment on Karl Lacey was just a complete hero of mine.
'You had Michel Murphy obviously came on the scene and Christy Toye. I remember in a school final we got beat by St Eunan's at a good game and Rory Kavanagh came up to me after, he was managing St Eunan's, and he shook my hand and I remember just thinking, 'Jesus, there's Rory Kavanagh. He plays for Donegal.'
On his first training session, reality bit.
'Gruelling. I mean you weren't long realising, this is a completely different ballgame. But I just loved it. I loved every minute of it.'
'I had a lot of work to do. It was just the body adapting to be honest, really, because I didn't play county under 16, I didn't play county when I was my first year of minors, and I then was involved with the 21s and the minors at the same time.
'It was kbeing juggled at the start, playing a game with the minors, playing a game with the 21s, so you weren't doing a lot of the conditioning side.
'My first couple of months with the seniors, my hamstring was constantly pinging. Jim was always just gauging how I felt on the day.
'I was doing rehab runs, doing bike sessions, all that. There was never that pressure like you need to get you in there.'
He was named to start for a league game but injured himself in the Thursday night session.
McGuinness took him aside and outlined his plans. He was to concentrate on his mock exams for a while, but he was to be ready for a trip to Galway.
After the game, he was put in a group with others coming back from injury, including Mark McHugh and Frank McGlynn. A small training pitch, a massive running session.
He was also doubling up with Maxi Curran's U21 team.
'We'd finished what I thought was a session, and I was completely gassed, I remember so clearly it was in Castlefin,' he says.
Playing a league game against his father's county of Roscommon. Tommy Dickson / INPHO Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO
'The seniors had just trained before us, and I remember even just listening to Jim shouting at the boys that day got me excited.
'The hairs were standing up on the back of the neck because we were in the changing room and we could hear Jim driving the boys on.
'We'd done the training and a lot of ball work and we'd done a set of runs, and I thought that was, I was completely out of my feet.
'Then, they said there's two more sets of that.'
He looked at team trainer Francie Friel as if to say, 'You can't be serious?' Friel looked back at him as if to say he was crazy for questioning their methods.
'And that was the day that I realised I need to get myself in shape here. This is a big step up.'
With McGuinness, the tactical side of it was also something he had to catch up on.
'It's that you've so much clarity in what you're doing.
'I can guarantee you, the boys are still as fit, just now there's that much clarity of the game plan.'
The championship rolled round and he was handed a start at wing-forward against Derry in Celtic Park. He had never played there before, but had clear instructions to get after their creative defender, Sean Leo McGoldrick.
'I knew what I was doing. Just to be around him. Anytime he went to go, I would go with him.
'Like there was no second thought.'
He kept his place for the semi-final against Antrim and notched a brilliant goal, cutting back onto his right foot to shoot from distance, ending up with 1-2.
He started the Ulster final and was taken off for McBrearty. Despite that, he again started the All-Ireland final but was replaced in the first half by Toye.
'Marc O'Sé had caused a wild bit of bother against Mayo (in the semi-final),' O'Connor outlines.
'My role was that when he's bombing forward, I have to mark him. And when he didn't run, I remember saying to myself, 'I need to do something here, I'm going to be pulled because Paddy McBrearty and Christy Toye are sitting on the bench and Jim's not going to leave me on here.
'But was on about them not really knowing you and you might get a good chance, but if Marc Ó Sé's going forward the way he was, you're marking him.'
It was a game which Donegal never controlled. They had their plans, honed during multiple training camps and the weekend before they took up residence in the Lough Erne Golf Resort in Fermanagh, training at the nearby Brewster Park, home of Enniskillen Gaels.
'That's kind the disappointing aspect of the '14 final, that we didn't do what we should have done. I've never watched it. I never will,' he says.
'There was a flatness to us. It's going to haunt me to the day I die if we don't win on Sunday.'
Even now, it's referenced. Eamonn McGee is now coaching Buncrana and he mentioned to O'Connor recently that he spends far more time thinking about the Kerry final of 2014, than the All-Ireland he won in 2012.
At the end of the year, O'Connor had flunked school. He messed up his CAO applications form for college. He put down NUIG but he had no intention of going there.
'But again when I look back, I wasn't worried about my Leaving Cert.
'I don't know why I had Galway down number one, but I found out around August time that you have to take your number one, and if you don't, you can take a year out.'
He took the year out. He wanted to go and do teaching in DCU but never quite got there.
He entered education through a circuitous route and now works with children who struggle to finish school through the Department of Education.
'That was always my interest, I would have worked a lot with special needs as well, so I thought I wanted to do teaching,' he says.
'And if I had done teaching, I would have just been looking after the bad ones in classes as they say.'
School for him was tricky. He had undiagnosed ADHD in school. In primary school it was disastrous. He was continually getting into trouble, but his teacher, Maria Doherty, was also the school football coach. She recognised when the issues with his behaviour arose.
'She was the first one to realise when I was grand – after lunchtime,' he says.
Maria spoke to O'Connor's mother, Catherine, who was a nurse.
'And she said that he's not getting in trouble after exercise. It's only when he's sitting for a long time and he starts acting up.
'And then all of a sudden it turns out that I have ADHD and secondary school is grand then because you're moving class every 40 minutes anyway.
'I think from that point on, I always have a look at the troublemakers. You just want to help them. If I wasn't at Gaelic, would my experience have been different?'
He volunteered for a long time with iCARE, a disability services and support organisation in Buncrana. Everything started making sense.
Even now, certain things get to him. Sitting for long periods. Inactivity. On days when they have to facilitate internal suspensions, he takes the children outside for breaks. They need it. He needs it.
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'I'm very forgetful,' he admits.
'For a long time, I thought it was just being forgetful, but I went to a few people since, and there's certain things about that.
'Doing paperwork is hard because you have to sit and concentrate. Wouldn't be the worst anxiety, but the thought of doing it then would just really trigger me. Not being able to exercise isn't great, for example, at the minute I've been in a cast for eight weeks.'
Which brings us to injuries. In 2015 he tore his MCL playing against Galway in a challenge match. He played through it with the U21s, all the way to the Ulster final against Tyrone.
Celebrating the 2018 Ulster final win with Stephen McBrearty. James Crombie / INPHO James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
He was taking six weeks out but then tore it properly in a club game. Even at that, he still managed to get back to come on as a sub in the 2015 Ulster final loss to Monaghan.
The following Tuesday they were training in Convoy. He did his cruciate on his other (left) knee then.
It was left undiagnosed. He kept trying to come back. One night he was down at the club and they were short players. He played and this time ruined the knee altogether.
'Just dealing with injuries, people don't see the mental side of it,' he says.
'I just went from 18 years of age, would have done anything for football, to 21 nearly looking for an excuse to stop playing football.'
By 2018 he was still floating around the panel under Declan Bonner, playing a few games here and there. He even made it onto the pitch for the dying moments of the Ulster final win over Fermanagh, scoring a point after coming on for Jamie Brennan.
And then, another knee injury.
'The good thing that came out of Covic for me was I realised 'Jesus, I need to play football for as long as I can.'
'Important things in my life, they've been taken away from me.'
A couple of months back, he injured his patella. He's in a leg brace since. The pain is severe. He believes he would take two cruciate injuries over what he has now.
He doesn't look back as he doesn't have too far to look for people who suffered real tragedy.
O'Connor was born in San Francisco in 1995 and three years later, he and his mother were on a plane after after his cousin, eight-year-old Oran Doherty, was killed in the Omagh Bombing.
That gives him all the perspective he needs.
He has his tickets secured for Sunday, though they are on the top tier. He's on the lookout for a swap for a lower perch, what with the hassle of the leg brace.
Who could begrudge him that?
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