Local rivalry that led to greatness

By Kieran Shannon June 2008
Tony Scullion and Martin McHugh, two of the main protagonists of the Donegal Derry pre-eminence of the early 90s, reflect on those heady days ahead of the clash of their two counties


I COME from the rushes. That's what I tell people. I got this coaching job with the Ulster Council four years ago and at this convention of theirs Danny Murphy says to me, "Tony, say a few words." I nearly fell through the floor. I says to myself, 'What the hell am I going to say?'

I just went up there and I said, "You know this, and I'm going to tell you and I'm proud of it - I come from the rushes!" You know what rushes are? Long green things that aren't supposed to be growing in a field if you look after your fields. Well, I come from the rushes.

He's that guy. The one that was on telly the other week, the one Brian McEniff brought in to help Nell McCafferty and Faughanvale, and, in the words of the celebrity bainisteoir herself, "practically levitated" them with an intensity that would make that mister motivator from the lucozade sport ads look as mellow as a Rastafarian.

Nell would hardly have been the first to be mesmerised by that exuberance. A couple of years ago Mark McHugh from Kilcar was part of an Ulster under-16 development squad, and to this day, vouches his father, Mark still talks about the talk Tony Scullion gave them in Jordanstown.

Here they were, among the 45 best in the province. When he was their age, he could barely make the Ballinascreen under-16s.

He never even got a trial for the county minors. "I was told I was too small, not good enough, that I was a failure."

Three years later he was called onto the county under-21 panel. The day of their first round against Armagh, a bag with togs and socks was dropped into the middle of the dressing room and Scullion, being a "backward wee boy from Ballinascreen" and certain he'd be just a sub, let everyone else rush in before gratefully taking the last pair. He soon realised why his socks had been the last pair. There was a hole in both heels. But he gladly put them on, before Mickey Moran and Sean O'Kane named out the team, with a certain Tony Scullion at corner back.

"I could have dropped through the floor.

Oh! Talk about winning the lotto! I was the last out the door, and as I ran out, Jim McGuigan, a great county board stalwart, shouted, 'You, boy, you can't go out there with a pair of socks like them!' And he went to another wee bag and gave me a spanking new pair."

That backward wee boy Jim McGuigan watched frantically slip on those socks and tear towards that field for fear of being late for his own debut would four years later receive an All Star. Scullion was so overwhelmed, he nearly dropped it, but over the years he'd come very familiar with that statute's weight. He'd pick up another three. He played 15 years for Derry. From 1989 on, Ulster won six Railway Cups on the trot. Only Scullion and Martin McQuillan from Armagh started on all six teams. The most anybody else played on was four. In fact, only one other man in the history of the inter-provincials has collected six winners' medals in a row. A fella by the name of Christy Ring.

"Now, boys, " Scullion told McHugh and his peers, "you can achieve more than I ever did. But the law of averages tells us many of ye will fall by the wayside. I don't have to leave my own parish to find far more talented players than I was when I was 18. You can take two roads. The road which leads to high stools and bright lights, or the one in which you go for it and have no regrets later in life."

Martin McHugh could relate to that. It's hard to believe but the man Brian McEniff rightly described as the greatest Donegal football ever was never picked to play minor for the county. He was "too small" as well - and too dogged to leave it at that. On the evening of his 21st birthday, his mother Kathleen had prepared a meal and baked a cake for him after his shooting practice on the club pitch. Down there he had this routine. He'd throw five footballs down at difficult angles and imagine his side were four points down and he had to kick all five over to win the match. If he missed the fifth, he'd start all over again. By the time McHugh returned home that night, his brothers and sisters had finished his meal and cake.

Last Wednesday Martin McHugh - on crutches, unable to drive after a recent operation - made the four-hour round-trip from Kilcar with his loyal friend and neighbour Hugh Shovlin to meet Scullion at Padge Quinn's Corner near Dungannon.

Of course, they had met plenty times before. On the pitches of Ballinascreen and Ballybofey; on the hard - and one notorious day, the treacherous - ground of Clones; in Cavan, Casement, and one time, even Scotland. So intense were some of those Donegal-Derry battles, it appeared they were fuelled on mutual hatred. Not so, Scullion and McHugh claim. They were founded on ambition, desire and mutual respect. McEniff was Scullion's manager for all those Railway Cup wins. In Ulster he might have been ready to kill one of McEniff 's men but for Ulster he would have died for him.

Because what you must appreciate is this. Compared to Dublin and Meath and Cork who formed the more famed, blueblood rivalries of that era, both counties came from the rushes.

A few years ago Tony Scullion had a good chat with John Somers, the old Derry goalkeeping great, who told him how Derry teams used to prepare before Scullion's time. "They'd do a couple of laps of the field in Ballinascreen, kick about a wee bit, then head down to Timoney's for tea and sandwiches and then across the road for Regan's for a few pints. That was Derry training." And they were happy enough with it. Weren't 29 other counties exactly the same?

In the '80s, they picked it up a bit, but it was only when another boy from the rushes, a bricklayer called Eamonn Coleman, took over that they started to train and think like the sport's elite. In 1991 they pushed Down to a replay and Down went on to win that All Ireland. The following spring they won the national league. Then they dumped Down out of the championship. Heading to Clones for the Ulster final, they were ranked the best team in the country.

There, that irresistible force would meet an unmovable object. In 1982 Donegal won the under-21 All Ireland final, McHugh, aptly, kicking five of their eight points. The following year McHugh and five of his under-21 teammates won an Ulster senior title and were within two points of reaching an All Ireland final. "We thought in '84, " smiles McHugh, "it was just a matter of coming back to win something. We didn't get back to an Ulster final until 1989." And they lost that final. In 1991 they lost another to Down. "Walking down the hill in Clones that day, I thought - we all thought - we'd never walk down it again as players."

The following year, they had qualified for another final, but after their semi-final win over Fermanagh McHugh stood up on the dressing-room bench and declared that they were a shambles and that he had no interest in disgracing himself in another Ulster final. It was the cue for Anthony Harkin's famous six weeks of shock training. "Horses, " Anthony Molloy would later say, "wouldn't have done the training we did."

At half-time it looked as if it had been in vain. John Cunningham had just been wrongly sent off. Heading into the dressing room there had been some pushing and shoving, in the midst of which McEniff got a clip, and when he stormed into the dressing room he kicked a bottle of water which flew across the room and busted above Joyce McMullan and Donal Reid.

Then he pinned Joyce McMullan up against the wall. "Do you think that crowd are going to intimidate us?"

What followed was, as Matt Gallagher says, "the best half of football Donegal ever played". They started to run with the ball and at Derry. Gary Coleman didn't know what to do as the spare man. Danny Quinn didn't know what to do with Tommy Ryan.

Scullion didn't know what to do with Declan Bonner. And none of them knew what to do with McHugh, who kicked one of the greatest points Clones ever witnessed. The 14 men had beaten the 15 men by two points, and soon were All Ireland champions for the first time.

Coleman was shell-shocked leaving Clones. "I just can't believe it, " he'd tell reporters. "It will take us a long time to get over this." By the following spring though, they were gunning again for Donegal. In the national league quarter-final in Cavan, Tommy Ryan was stretchered off with a broken jaw and Kieran McKeever was sent off. McEniff got a dig from another Derry player when trying to make a switch. And Anthony Molloy and Brian McGilligan in midfield were going at it again.

The pair of them personified the rivalry.

Before the 1992 Ulster final Molloy attributed his rather subdued displays against Cavan to the fact his marker, Stephen King, was a friend. "The problem I had with Stephen, " he smiled, "is one I won't have with Brian." Thing is, they were friendly, off the field. McHugh and Scullion, like them, were Railway Cup and All Star veterans and noticed how often McGilligan and Molloy gravitated to one another.

Brian Murray noticed how before and after every game, they'd make a point of shaking hands. Between those handshakes though, it was war, and Breffni was their Flanders.

"It got so bad, " Martin Shovlin would tell Damien Dowds and Donal Campbell in Sams for the Hills: Donegal's All Ireland Odyssey, "McGilligan stood in the middle of the field, took off his gloves and said, 'Alright, Anthony, me and you.'" Whatever about Molloy, Donegal shaded that battle and went on to contest the league final. "Looking back, " says McHugh, "we should have forgotten about the league that year because we were an ageing team.

But we were just having so much fun, playing games in places like Longford and Carlow after being out 'til five in the morning, while there was no way we were going to back down to Derry that day."

Derry had resolved to never back down either. "Training leading up to that Ulster final was unreal, " says Scullion. "Two men went fisticuffs and the wee man himself [Coleman] came running on. One of them turned round, 'Were we not told to fight for our place?' Coleman did that wee snigger of his and dandered off with that wee dander of his."

Scullion had his own battle in those weeks. In a league game in Drogheda he broke his ankle, leaving him on crutches.

"The week before the Down game, the wee man said to me, 'Well, what do you think, boy?' And I said, 'I'll go for it if you go for it!' And he says, 'Well, I'm going for it! I want you in there.' I lasted 10 minutes in Newry. I went down to pick up a ball and I fell on my f****n' mouth and nose. I swung a boot at the ball, it trickled to Mickey Linden and he kicked it over the bar. I looked up and saw someone warming up along the line. Derry went on to hammer Down but afterwards I was disgusted. The wee man came over. 'Scully, you have four weeks to get right for Monaghan.'" Scullion wasn't one for the sport sciences. He didn't do weights ("Many's the day I lifted and put in them big brutes of road curbs myself; if you do that, you don't need weights"); didn't do stretching ("[Dermot] McNicholl was really into it - Jesus, he would be down on the floor in a ball before a game, like a hedgehog - but I never stretched in my life - and I'm paying for it now"); didn't believe in "them boys for the head" (I can't remember a thing Craig Mahoney ever said. Coleman might have had him going to certain players but he never came to me. I don't think I needed him, to be quite honest"). The only way he knew was to grit the teeth.

"I'll tell you this, and I'm not telling a lie, any night Derry weren't training that month I went to Dean McGlinchey Park [Ballinascreen's local pitch] and ran round it lap after lap after lap. The doctor gave me this bandage and to this day, if I play a bit of fun football, I still have to wear a strap around that ankle. And he said to me, 'Tony, you have to run the pain out - keep going.' After a while the ankle would warm up and the pain would go out of it, but the first four laps out every night was a killer!"

Nothing was going to stop him winning that Ulster and All Ireland.

He takes umbrage with any Donegal supporter who questions whether Derry would have won that 1993 Ulster final if it hadn't been played in those monsoon conditions. "Sun, snow, rain, hurricanes - we were going to win that game!"

Across the table, McHugh nods.

"Derry were the hungrier and fresher team, just as we had been the year before. But I remember John Joe Doherty winning a ball 15 yards inside the line and he slid out over the line. I was captain that day and I'd said to [referee] Tommy McDermott going up for the toss, 'This game should not be played.' It didn't affect the outcome but football lost out. You were talking about the 1992 All Ireland champions against the 1993 All Ireland champions. The following year the 1993 champions [Derry] and the 1994 [Down] produced the greatest game of the year. Maybe we could have as well. I would always liked to have seen the two teams on a good day, 15 against 15 and a good referee just letting the two of us at it."

Both teams broke up soon after that, even if they would clash in a couple of league finals in the middle of the decade. At the end of '94 McEniff stepped down. That same year Coleman was forced out. In a way neither county has fully recovered from those dark months and in some quarters, some have never forgotten. Scullion noticed how recently Joe Brolly resurrected the fact that Scullion was the first senior player to return and play for Mickey Moran.

"Joe described me as a blackleg. I laughed it off, I'd take anything Joe says with a pinch of salt, but I tell you one thing - I'm very proud that I never refused the Derry jersey. I wasn't going to say no to Mickey Moran, I wasn't going to say no to nobody!

"I was playing for my county, whoever was in charge. I've done everything I could to get my second All Ireland medal and if Joe thinks he did everything to get it and can live with it, then I can live with it."

To the end he remained that backward wee boy with those holed socks that day in Bellaghy.

Today 30 other Derry men will put on that jersey to face Donegal in the first box office face-off of the summer. It won't be open football, he reckons. "I can see a lot of bodies working hard, getting tackles in, a lot of breaking ball, bodies around the ball. A man or two might even walk."

He hopes though today's soldiers will share the same bond with their adversaries like his generation do now. The year before last he was up in Noel Hegarty's club and stayed in John Joe Doherty's house. McEniff and himself team up to coach the Ulster Railway Cup team, not just Nell's. Two years ago those Donegal and Derry players from '92 and '93 played a charity game in Fanad and there was over 5,000 at it.

For McHugh, the respect is mutual. He notices how all the Derry lads, just like their Donegal counterparts, have given back to the game. "Enda Gormley is travelling down from Belfast to train his club under-14 team. I said to him, 'Have you a brother on the team or something?' He says, 'No.

But sure they're my own club.'" For all their differences, they shared and still share a passion, be they from the Glen or from the hills.

Because in a way, they all came from the rushes.

great article - have been to a few coaching courses that Scullion was involved in and i'd say he would be a great motivator alright - talks a lot of sense but keeps it very simple - a few more better educated ex county footballers have been involved in the same courses and by god they'd put you to sleep listening to them.

RMD pure class

RMDrive wrote:By Kieran Shannon June 2008
Tony Scullion and Martin McHugh, two of the main protagonists of the Donegal Derry pre-eminence of the early 90s, reflect on those heady days ahead of the clash of their two counties


I COME from the rushes. That's what I tell people. I got this coaching job with the Ulster Council four years ago and at this convention of theirs Danny Murphy says to me, "Tony, say a few words." I nearly fell through the floor. I says to myself, 'What the hell am I going to say?'

I just went up there and I said, "You know this, and I'm going to tell you and I'm proud of it - I come from the rushes!" You know what rushes are? Long green things that aren't supposed to be growing in a field if you look after your fields. Well, I come from the rushes.

He's that guy. The one that was on telly the other week, the one Brian McEniff brought in to help Nell McCafferty and Faughanvale, and, in the words of the celebrity bainisteoir herself, "practically levitated" them with an intensity that would make that mister motivator from the lucozade sport ads look as mellow as a Rastafarian.

Nell would hardly have been the first to be mesmerised by that exuberance. A couple of years ago Mark McHugh from Kilcar was part of an Ulster under-16 development squad, and to this day, vouches his father, Mark still talks about the talk Tony Scullion gave them in Jordanstown.

Here they were, among the 45 best in the province. When he was their age, he could barely make the Ballinascreen under-16s.

He never even got a trial for the county minors. "I was told I was too small, not good enough, that I was a failure."

Three years later he was called onto the county under-21 panel. The day of their first round against Armagh, a bag with togs and socks was dropped into the middle of the dressing room and Scullion, being a "backward wee boy from Ballinascreen" and certain he'd be just a sub, let everyone else rush in before gratefully taking the last pair. He soon realised why his socks had been the last pair. There was a hole in both heels. But he gladly put them on, before Mickey Moran and Sean O'Kane named out the team, with a certain Tony Scullion at corner back.

"I could have dropped through the floor.

Oh! Talk about winning the lotto! I was the last out the door, and as I ran out, Jim McGuigan, a great county board stalwart, shouted, 'You, boy, you can't go out there with a pair of socks like them!' And he went to another wee bag and gave me a spanking new pair."

That backward wee boy Jim McGuigan watched frantically slip on those socks and tear towards that field for fear of being late for his own debut would four years later receive an All Star. Scullion was so overwhelmed, he nearly dropped it, but over the years he'd come very familiar with that statute's weight. He'd pick up another three. He played 15 years for Derry. From 1989 on, Ulster won six Railway Cups on the trot. Only Scullion and Martin McQuillan from Armagh started on all six teams. The most anybody else played on was four. In fact, only one other man in the history of the inter-provincials has collected six winners' medals in a row. A fella by the name of Christy Ring.

"Now, boys, " Scullion told McHugh and his peers, "you can achieve more than I ever did. But the law of averages tells us many of ye will fall by the wayside. I don't have to leave my own parish to find far more talented players than I was when I was 18. You can take two roads. The road which leads to high stools and bright lights, or the one in which you go for it and have no regrets later in life."

Martin McHugh could relate to that. It's hard to believe but the man Brian McEniff rightly described as the greatest Donegal football ever was never picked to play minor for the county. He was "too small" as well - and too dogged to leave it at that. On the evening of his 21st birthday, his mother Kathleen had prepared a meal and baked a cake for him after his shooting practice on the club pitch. Down there he had this routine. He'd throw five footballs down at difficult angles and imagine his side were four points down and he had to kick all five over to win the match. If he missed the fifth, he'd start all over again. By the time McHugh returned home that night, his brothers and sisters had finished his meal and cake.

Last Wednesday Martin McHugh - on crutches, unable to drive after a recent operation - made the four-hour round-trip from Kilcar with his loyal friend and neighbour Hugh Shovlin to meet Scullion at Padge Quinn's Corner near Dungannon.

Of course, they had met plenty times before. On the pitches of Ballinascreen and Ballybofey; on the hard - and one notorious day, the treacherous - ground of Clones; in Cavan, Casement, and one time, even Scotland. So intense were some of those Donegal-Derry battles, it appeared they were fuelled on mutual hatred. Not so, Scullion and McHugh claim. They were founded on ambition, desire and mutual respect. McEniff was Scullion's manager for all those Railway Cup wins. In Ulster he might have been ready to kill one of McEniff 's men but for Ulster he would have died for him.

Because what you must appreciate is this. Compared to Dublin and Meath and Cork who formed the more famed, blueblood rivalries of that era, both counties came from the rushes.

A few years ago Tony Scullion had a good chat with John Somers, the old Derry goalkeeping great, who told him how Derry teams used to prepare before Scullion's time. "They'd do a couple of laps of the field in Ballinascreen, kick about a wee bit, then head down to Timoney's for tea and sandwiches and then across the road for Regan's for a few pints. That was Derry training." And they were happy enough with it. Weren't 29 other counties exactly the same?

In the '80s, they picked it up a bit, but it was only when another boy from the rushes, a bricklayer called Eamonn Coleman, took over that they started to train and think like the sport's elite. In 1991 they pushed Down to a replay and Down went on to win that All Ireland. The following spring they won the national league. Then they dumped Down out of the championship. Heading to Clones for the Ulster final, they were ranked the best team in the country.

There, that irresistible force would meet an unmovable object. In 1982 Donegal won the under-21 All Ireland final, McHugh, aptly, kicking five of their eight points. The following year McHugh and five of his under-21 teammates won an Ulster senior title and were within two points of reaching an All Ireland final. "We thought in '84, " smiles McHugh, "it was just a matter of coming back to win something. We didn't get back to an Ulster final until 1989." And they lost that final. In 1991 they lost another to Down. "Walking down the hill in Clones that day, I thought - we all thought - we'd never walk down it again as players."

The following year, they had qualified for another final, but after their semi-final win over Fermanagh McHugh stood up on the dressing-room bench and declared that they were a shambles and that he had no interest in disgracing himself in another Ulster final. It was the cue for Anthony Harkin's famous six weeks of shock training. "Horses, " Anthony Molloy would later say, "wouldn't have done the training we did."

At half-time it looked as if it had been in vain. John Cunningham had just been wrongly sent off. Heading into the dressing room there had been some pushing and shoving, in the midst of which McEniff got a clip, and when he stormed into the dressing room he kicked a bottle of water which flew across the room and busted above Joyce McMullan and Donal Reid.

Then he pinned Joyce McMullan up against the wall. "Do you think that crowd are going to intimidate us?"

What followed was, as Matt Gallagher says, "the best half of football Donegal ever played". They started to run with the ball and at Derry. Gary Coleman didn't know what to do as the spare man. Danny Quinn didn't know what to do with Tommy Ryan.

Scullion didn't know what to do with Declan Bonner. And none of them knew what to do with McHugh, who kicked one of the greatest points Clones ever witnessed. The 14 men had beaten the 15 men by two points, and soon were All Ireland champions for the first time.

Coleman was shell-shocked leaving Clones. "I just can't believe it, " he'd tell reporters. "It will take us a long time to get over this." By the following spring though, they were gunning again for Donegal. In the national league quarter-final in Cavan, Tommy Ryan was stretchered off with a broken jaw and Kieran McKeever was sent off. McEniff got a dig from another Derry player when trying to make a switch. And Anthony Molloy and Brian McGilligan in midfield were going at it again.

The pair of them personified the rivalry.

Before the 1992 Ulster final Molloy attributed his rather subdued displays against Cavan to the fact his marker, Stephen King, was a friend. "The problem I had with Stephen, " he smiled, "is one I won't have with Brian." Thing is, they were friendly, off the field. McHugh and Scullion, like them, were Railway Cup and All Star veterans and noticed how often McGilligan and Molloy gravitated to one another.

Brian Murray noticed how before and after every game, they'd make a point of shaking hands. Between those handshakes though, it was war, and Breffni was their Flanders.

"It got so bad, " Martin Shovlin would tell Damien Dowds and Donal Campbell in Sams for the Hills: Donegal's All Ireland Odyssey, "McGilligan stood in the middle of the field, took off his gloves and said, 'Alright, Anthony, me and you.'" Whatever about Molloy, Donegal shaded that battle and went on to contest the league final. "Looking back, " says McHugh, "we should have forgotten about the league that year because we were an ageing team.

But we were just having so much fun, playing games in places like Longford and Carlow after being out 'til five in the morning, while there was no way we were going to back down to Derry that day."

Derry had resolved to never back down either. "Training leading up to that Ulster final was unreal, " says Scullion. "Two men went fisticuffs and the wee man himself [Coleman] came running on. One of them turned round, 'Were we not told to fight for our place?' Coleman did that wee snigger of his and dandered off with that wee dander of his."

Scullion had his own battle in those weeks. In a league game in Drogheda he broke his ankle, leaving him on crutches.

"The week before the Down game, the wee man said to me, 'Well, what do you think, boy?' And I said, 'I'll go for it if you go for it!' And he says, 'Well, I'm going for it! I want you in there.' I lasted 10 minutes in Newry. I went down to pick up a ball and I fell on my f****n' mouth and nose. I swung a boot at the ball, it trickled to Mickey Linden and he kicked it over the bar. I looked up and saw someone warming up along the line. Derry went on to hammer Down but afterwards I was disgusted. The wee man came over. 'Scully, you have four weeks to get right for Monaghan.'" Scullion wasn't one for the sport sciences. He didn't do weights ("Many's the day I lifted and put in them big brutes of road curbs myself; if you do that, you don't need weights"); didn't do stretching ("[Dermot] McNicholl was really into it - Jesus, he would be down on the floor in a ball before a game, like a hedgehog - but I never stretched in my life - and I'm paying for it now"); didn't believe in "them boys for the head" (I can't remember a thing Craig Mahoney ever said. Coleman might have had him going to certain players but he never came to me. I don't think I needed him, to be quite honest"). The only way he knew was to grit the teeth.

"I'll tell you this, and I'm not telling a lie, any night Derry weren't training that month I went to Dean McGlinchey Park [Ballinascreen's local pitch] and ran round it lap after lap after lap. The doctor gave me this bandage and to this day, if I play a bit of fun football, I still have to wear a strap around that ankle. And he said to me, 'Tony, you have to run the pain out - keep going.' After a while the ankle would warm up and the pain would go out of it, but the first four laps out every night was a killer!"

Nothing was going to stop him winning that Ulster and All Ireland.

He takes umbrage with any Donegal supporter who questions whether Derry would have won that 1993 Ulster final if it hadn't been played in those monsoon conditions. "Sun, snow, rain, hurricanes - we were going to win that game!"

Across the table, McHugh nods.

"Derry were the hungrier and fresher team, just as we had been the year before. But I remember John Joe Doherty winning a ball 15 yards inside the line and he slid out over the line. I was captain that day and I'd said to [referee] Tommy McDermott going up for the toss, 'This game should not be played.' It didn't affect the outcome but football lost out. You were talking about the 1992 All Ireland champions against the 1993 All Ireland champions. The following year the 1993 champions [Derry] and the 1994 [Down] produced the greatest game of the year. Maybe we could have as well. I would always liked to have seen the two teams on a good day, 15 against 15 and a good referee just letting the two of us at it."

Both teams broke up soon after that, even if they would clash in a couple of league finals in the middle of the decade. At the end of '94 McEniff stepped down. That same year Coleman was forced out. In a way neither county has fully recovered from those dark months and in some quarters, some have never forgotten. Scullion noticed how recently Joe Brolly resurrected the fact that Scullion was the first senior player to return and play for Mickey Moran.

"Joe described me as a blackleg. I laughed it off, I'd take anything Joe says with a pinch of salt, but I tell you one thing - I'm very proud that I never refused the Derry jersey. I wasn't going to say no to Mickey Moran, I wasn't going to say no to nobody!

"I was playing for my county, whoever was in charge. I've done everything I could to get my second All Ireland medal and if Joe thinks he did everything to get it and can live with it, then I can live with it."

To the end he remained that backward wee boy with those holed socks that day in Bellaghy.

Today 30 other Derry men will put on that jersey to face Donegal in the first box office face-off of the summer. It won't be open football, he reckons. "I can see a lot of bodies working hard, getting tackles in, a lot of breaking ball, bodies around the ball. A man or two might even walk."

He hopes though today's soldiers will share the same bond with their adversaries like his generation do now. The year before last he was up in Noel Hegarty's club and stayed in John Joe Doherty's house. McEniff and himself team up to coach the Ulster Railway Cup team, not just Nell's. Two years ago those Donegal and Derry players from '92 and '93 played a charity game in Fanad and there was over 5,000 at it.

For McHugh, the respect is mutual. He notices how all the Derry lads, just like their Donegal counterparts, have given back to the game. "Enda Gormley is travelling down from Belfast to train his club under-14 team. I said to him, 'Have you a brother on the team or something?' He says, 'No.

But sure they're my own club.'" For all their differences, they shared and still share a passion, be they from the Glen or from the hills.

Because in a way, they all came from the rushes.

Fantastic post RMD.

Two teams from "the rushes" in an Ulster final again - who'd have thought it?