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Kieran Cunningham

Donegal's first All-Ireland triumph remembered as Sam headed for the Hills in 92

There were more than four words in Anthony Molloy's speech, but only four are remembered.

It's 30 years ago today since he became the first Donegal captain to lift Sam Maguire, after a memorable victory over hot favourites, Dublin.

There have been few days as emotional in Croke Park and Molloy got the biggest roar of all with his sign-off line - "Sam's for the hills!''

Read More: Eddie McCloskey still hungry for more silverware with Loughgiel

A county that didn't win its first Ulster title until 1972 ended up becoming All-Ireland champions in 1992.

It was an incredible summer, and one that changed Donegal football - and the county's entire self-image - forever.

The two youngest men on the team were Tony Boyle and Noel Hegarty.

Five years ago, they were back at Croke Park as part of the silver jubilee team and, remarkably, it was the first time they set foot on the pitch on a Championship Sunday since that glorious day in '92.

These days, Hegarty runs the thriving Sliabh Liag bar in Carrick while Boyle has been a regional sales manager with Keypoint Abrasives for nearly two decade

And Hegarty, one of the best players never to win an All Star, was still lining out for Naomh Columba at 47.

"I went back with the third team. Did well for a game and a half and then pulled my calf muscle,'' he said.

Boyle has taken to cycling. Easier on those dodgy knees.

The two first met when they were called up by the Donegal Under-16s for a tournament in Dublin.

"Tony arrived with a pair of soccer togs on him! He was a soccer dog back then,'' said Hegarty.

"He's a far bigger GAA man now than I am.

Donegal's Anthony Molloy in action against Paul Bealin of Dublin in the 1992 All-Ireland Football Final. (©INPHO/Billy Stickland)

"He's managed about 10 different teams in Dungloe. All the women's teams, and the senior team and the minor team."

It was no surprise that soccer was a passion of Boyle's, given his homeplace in Keadue.

"You know fine, coming from Keadue with Keadue Rovers (Packie Bonner's club), it was a big deal,'' he said.

Boyle had a baptism of fire with Donegal, making his first Championship start on Mick Lyons of Meath in the 1990 All-Ireland semi-final.

"There were lots of players and ex-players ringing me that week with advice,'' he said.

"One man even said to me 'don't look him in the eye, he'll turn you into stone'.

"He didn't shake my hand, never said a word to me the whole game, and didn't hit me a dirty shot, but he hit me hard.

"The first ball I got, I put it over the bar but I didn't see much of it after that."

Hegarty made his Championship debut the following year against Fermanagh.

Donegal reached the Ulster final again and were hot favourites against Down.

Instead, they went down by eight. Down went on to become the first Ulster team to win the All-Ireland in 23 years and the talk was of senior players in Donegal like Anthony Molloy and Martin McHugh hanging up their boots.

"I was corner-back against Fermanagh in the semi-final and got man of the match and was dropped for the Ulster final,'' said Hegarty.

"We needed a break that we didn't get. They got a goal that had a huge impact.

"Was it too early for us to be going to Croke Park? You couldn't say it was too early when you look at the age profile of our team."

Manager Brian McEniff tried different things. Padraig Brogan arrived from Mayo and played through the League as Donegal reached the quarter-finals.

Up against them in Breffni Park were Paddy Cullen's Dublin team.

"We were five points up in injury time and they got two goals. It was sickening,'' said Boyle.

One moment from that game stuck in Hegarty's mind and he had cause to call on it five months later.

Donegal manager Brian McEniff celebrates at the end of the 1992 All-Ireland final (©INPHO/Billy Stickland)

"I'll never forget Charlie Redmond coming up to me and going 'it's never over until the fat lady sings','' he said.

"The two goals had just gone in and you were dragging yourself out like a dog. It was terrible."

For Boyle and Hegarty, that April was one of the main reasons why Donegal eventually got to the summit.

"The week after that Dublin game, we went to Ballybay in the McKenna Cup,'' said Boyle.

"It was lashing with hailstones and Monaghan absolutely hammered us.

"We were about six weeks out from the Championship and I thought we were in trouble."

Someone had to make a stand, and it was Martin McHugh who did so.

"I remember he stood up on a chair in the dressing-room and said 'this whole thing is a fucking joke','' said Hegarty.

"He told us that, unless we pushed a lot harder in training, we could forget about it."

Donegal still weren't right against Cavan in their Championship opener.

It would be their tightest game of the year. They scraped a draw in Breffni Park, but won the replay comfortably and saw off Fermanagh with ease in the semi-final to book an Ulster final date with Eamonn Coleman's rising Derry team, the League champions.

At half-time, Donegal looked to be in trouble. John Cunningham had been sent off and Boyle had to be substituted after taking a kick on the knee from Anthony Tohill.

"In the dressing-room, there was wile bad humour. Everybody thought we were in bother,'' said Hegarty.

"We were annoyed over John Cunningham. He didn't even touch your man. It was a crazy decision."

McEniff moved Tommy Ryan to full-forward in place of Boyle, and Ryan had a huge second half.

And McEniff made the bold move of switching James McHugh from wing-forward to corner-back to mark Declan Bateson.

"James came back and said to me 'knock the fuck out of them, we're getting it at the other end of the field','' said Hegarty.

Noel Hegarty in action for Donegal in 1999. (©INPHO/Billy Stickland)

Hegarty feels that day changed the face of Donegal football forever.

"We were down to 14 men and playing into the wind and Martin McHugh kept saying not to kick the ball,'' he said.

"If you go back to 1990 against Meath, we kicked everything away. We went short against Derry and that became our style."

Donegal came through and got ready to take on Mayo in the All-Ireland semi-final, with the knowledge that they'd never won a game there - in League or Championship - in their history.

"There was that monkey on our backs. We'd never won any kind of game there,'' said Boyle.

"At the final whistle against Mayo, there was more relief at doing that, than in reaching the final. It took all the pressure off us.

"It was a terrible game but it helped us as a lot of the Dublin players were there and they read too much into it."

Dublin had been rampant through Leinster and blew Clare away in the semi-final.

They were unbackable favourites, and some of their players embraced their celebrity status, appearing in fashion shows and on radio phone-ins in the run-up to the final.

"There was no wile hype in Glencolmcille. Maybe, in a big town with plenty of shops, there's hype, but there was none of that in Glen,'' said Hegarty.

Boyle has another theory as to why Hegarty enjoyed a low-key build-up.

"You have to remember that Red Bernard McHugh was a bigger star in Glen after being on Blind Date than Noel!''

With Dublin on the horizon, the intensity in training went to another level.

"We were playing backs and forwards one evening and Declan Bonner had the ball,'' recalled Boyle.

"John-Joe Doherty came out from the corner, met him with the shoulder and knocked him out cold.

"John-Joe just turned, went back to the corner, and stood, staring back out the pitch.

"It was left to McEniff to throw off the hat and come scurrying in to look after Bonner."

It didn't surprise Hegarty that his clubmate, Doherty, was so pumped up.

"He was a man on a mission. He'd been working on the building of Eurodisney in Paris and was dogged by injury when he came back,'' he said.

"He worked wile hard to get back but didn't get a minute on the field all year.

"Then poor Martin Shovlin hurt his shoulder in the week of the final and McEniff told John-Joe on the Sunday morning he was in."

In another twist, Hegarty was to mark Dessie Farrell, who he'd been friendly with since childhood as his mother hails from Glencolmcille.

"Dessie used to train with us in Glen. McEniff actually talked to me about it, to see if I was OK with marking him,'' he said.

"It made no difference to me. They started well and then they got a penalty. It would have put them five up.

"I was supposed to have fouled Dessie. Was it a penalty? Charlie Redmond missed it anyway.

"John-Joe was clearing dirt out from his studs and he fired it at Dessie's head. John-Joe threw a few fucks into me and that sorted me out."

Donegal put in a storming second quarter and, with Martin McHugh and Manus Boyle outstanding, came through to win their first All-Ireland final by 0-18 to 0-14.

"They panicked, started going for goals too early. If they'd popped over a few points, it would have been interesting,'' said Boyle.

For Hegarty, with time almost up, there was one thing he had to do.

Jogging past Redmond, he twisted the blade: "Can you hear the fat lady singing, Charlie?''

The Donegal dressing-room after winning their first All-Ireland wasn't how you'd have expected it to be.

Instead of happy chaos, the mood was bleak.

Wing-forward Joyce McMullan's brother, Gerard, had been battling cancer and Brian McEniff got a message before the game to tell him that Gerard had passed away.

It was an agonising dilemma for McEniff. Should he tell McMullan and the players or not?

He decided to wait until after the final whistle.

"Everybody was jumping around celebrating and then we got word about this,'' said Boyle.

"The mood was very, very sombre. We came out of the dressing-room and everyone was going mad.

"I met my own mother and father and none of them realised what had gone on.

"Then Joyce met his sister and she said she'd been talking to Gerard on the phone. It wasn't true at all.

"Joyce gave a roar, and the thing went mental again. We'd been way up high, down low, and then up high again. That high lasted for about four months!''

The celebrations when they got back to Donegal were a hazy blur.

"We were going all week and by the Saturday morning, I'd had enough,'' said Boyle.

"I stayed in Ballybofey that Friday night and got up for a bite to eat.

"Keadue was an hour's drive away and I just wanted to get home, hadn't been home all week.

"I walked out the road with my gear-bag and started thumbing.

"This buck from Glenfin picked me up and I could see, out of the corner of my eye, him looking at me and looking at the bag.

"I don't think he was a football man, and he said 'are you on that Donegal team?'

"I said I was and, in fairness to him, he dropped me into Dungloe."

Donegal didn't win an Ulster title after 1992 until Jim McGuinness took over in 2011.

And the final defeats of 1993 and 1998 - both to Derry - were particularly hard to take.

Boyle was injured for the '93 decider and Hegarty was suspended.

Many who were there think that a Championship match was never played in worse conditions.

"A young fella broke his leg in the minor game before it and it should never have been played,'' said Hegarty.

"Not in a million years would it be played if it happened now."

Boyle agrees with Hegarty that the game, won by Derry by 0-8 to 0-6, should have been postponed.

"We were coming down the old steel steps that used to be there and Noel was chewing the ref, saying 'this has to be called off','' he said.

"You could see on the referee's face that he didn't want it to go ahead.

"The hill in Clones then was just grass so it was treacherous. It became a mudslide."

Hegarty feels that day could have had catastrophic consequences.

"We had a goal chance and it just went past the post,'' he said.

"I was talking to a priest who was on the hill and he said all would have slid down the hill if the ball had gone to the net.

"They'd have been pushed up on to the wall. It would have been bedlam. People would have been killed."

Why did Donegal not kick on from '92, though?

"We were very, very unlucky. I found '98 very hard to take,'' said Hegarty.

"Geoffrey McGonigle pushed Noel McGinley in the back and Derry got a goal from it to win it."

Boyle points to 1995 as a regret too. Donegal dethroned reigning All-Ireland champions Down but were then shocked by Monaghan by nine points in Ballybofey.

"We were caught on the hop, just got complacent,'' he said.

"We thought Monaghan was a nice handy one. They were nothing special, lost to Cavan in their next game. It was sickening."

Both Hegarty and Boyle played for Donegal for the last time in a qualifier defeat to Kildare in 2001.

"Noel had made it clear he'd be retiring and John McConnell was County Board chairman and made this big speech thanking him,'' said Boyle.

"Noel just put the gear-bag on his shoulder and went 'Halle-fucking-lulah!'

"I never retired, though. Mickey Moran just stopped picking me!"

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