There was an inner circle and Eamon McGee wasn’t part of it just then.
The Gweedore man had been kicked off the panel (again) and he was about to miss the early stages of what would be a historic regime. He didn’t know it would’ve been and you couldn’t blame him.
For almost 10 years, the full back had been listening to new Donegal managers coming in and saying that this time would be different. Apart from a league title under Brian McIver, it never was different. They never got any further.
That’s why he just offered lip service to Jim McGuinness when the new boss was talking about winning Ulster titles and the like in their first meeting.
“Naw (I didn’t believe him),” McGee told SportsJOE’s GAA Hour football podcast. “I heard it all before. I heard it from Brian McIver, Brian McEniff and John Joe Doherty that we were going to be competing. I nodded the head and said ‘yeah’ but deep down I probably didn’t really believe him.
“I needed to see the way that the lads went on and the way they carried themselves in training to really start believing him.”
So, whilst he was say at home during inter-county training nights, he waited to hear the craic from Ballybofey or Dunfanaghy or wherever the group were meeting. Even when his brother Neil would return though, he got no more information.
“That’s where I knew there was something different about them, that there was no news filtering back,” McGee said.
And it was a frank exchange with one of his best mates Neil Gallagher that really let him know that Donegal were for real this time. That, finally, it was genuinely different than before.
Listen below at 1:01:02.
The GAA Hour is out every Monday and Thursday. Subscribe here on iTunes.
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