Former Donegal players Tony Boyle and Raymond Sweeney have given plenty back to Dungloe. They’ve help build a winning culture in ladies’ football and shaped many of the men running out against St Eunan’s on Sunday. They spoke to Michael McMullan ….

A TOURIST walking down the street would be forgiven for thinking the locals forgot to press pause on the Mary of Dungloe festival.

Hysteria and red and white has gripped the west Donegal town. Look deeper and football talk dominates.

A county final has been and gone. Another beckons. In a place like Dungloe, a GAA community, this is a double dose of Christmas.

A conveyor belt of underage ladies’ success has produced a group that backed up a first junior title with intermediate glory.

The men’s team has raised the eyebrows of those outside the team bubble by qualifying for a first senior final in 60 years.

That’s not all. Their premises have been given a facelift. Once their hilly pitch was a fortress the rest of Donegal cringed at. Now, after their fundraising efforts across Ulster, there is a new pitch pending, manicured to meet standards the players are nurturing themselves to.

Dessie Gallagher took over the team at intermediate level, won the title and has them within a puncher’s chance of landing the Dr Maguire Cup.

An hour in the virtual company of Raymond Sweeney and Tony Boyle is enough to give a peek inside.

The ladies’ teams roll of honour digs deeper. A Division Three league in 2010 was a start.

At that point, there were no girls’ teams. They’d muck in with the boys.

Boyle had spent two terms managing the senior men’s team. He was player manager. There was a stint with the minors before he took a break. Sweeney was involved with him in those gigs.

Boyle felt the players needed a different voice and he had lost his mojo. A recharge was needed.

He lasted a year away from it. His daughters pulled at his heartstrings. They wanted his expertise and he threw his lot in with the underage girls’ teams.

“Myself and Raymond got involved with an u-13 team, probably in 2018,” Boyle said of the early days.

It was the start of something fruitful. They were gorged on underage success. The recent half of the club’s history is bulging. The u-13, u-15 and u-16 Division One was each won three times in succession.

Add in a couple each of minor and u-14 titles and it’s one almighty set of foundations.

“You had other ex-players like Joe Boyle, Sean Sharkey, Mark Clerkin, that have daughters in the house as well, managing underage boys’ teams,” Boyle continues, “but then seeing that the underage girls are starting to get popular, they started taking teams then.”

For Boyle, there is no magic bullet. Their ingredients were fitness and basic skills. Everything else would fall in behind. Clerkin’s winter indoor skills programme was priceless.

“Normally when the season finishes up, we’ll go indoor for six weeks prior to Christmas and six weeks after Christmas,” Boyle said of the u-6 to u-12 programmes.

“It’s basically what it’s called – skills – practicing the skills and we’d have found that a big benefit.

“My older girls got no real coaching at underage level because the people that are involved now were playing senior men’s football.

“It’s only when we retired that we got more time to concentrate on the girls’ side of things, so the winter skills have definitely helped. It’s something that goes from strength to strength.”

It fed into the underage success. Boyle and Sweeney then stepped forward to put some structure on the senior ladies’ team. As the years passed, the young players were drip-fed in.

The last few steps towards the intermediate title were tougher. Two junior final defeats tested the resolve before they bounced back to land the title. Momentum took them to an Ulster final against Lavey they feel was left behind.

Up in Division One of the leagues, they held their own outside of champions Termon. It helped fuel the belief that an intermediate championship wasn’t beyond them.

“We didn’t expect it maybe to happen as quick as what it did,” Sweeney said of their intermediate success last month.

“I think maybe it did us no harm to lose the two (junior) finals. Throughout those three years, they’ve definitely improved.

“We had players coming through, Tony’s girls Ulitah, Zaria – girls started coming from our underage structure, adding to the senior team.”

There was gradual improvement. Another factor is having players at home and able to train together. The fitness and skill levels began to rise.

Losing the first junior final, Boyle feels they weren’t ready. Losing to rivals Gaoth Dobhair the following year was a tougher pill to swallow. But they didn’t play well enough.

By the third tilt at it, there was a deeper squad. More young players had made the step up. Girls previously based away were home and everyone was able to train together.

“I think, no matter who would have played in last year’s final, there was no way we were going to lose three in a row,” Boyle said.

It opened the door to Ulster and the Dungloe fans embraced it. After beating Coalisland at home, they took a big following to Monaghan for their game with Tyholland and to the final in Healy Park.

It was like the previous year with the men’s team being on the road against Dunloy up in Ahoghill. Dungloe on tour.

There was nearly a sense of anticlimax after the county final win over Ardara to hear the first Ulster game is at home.

For now, it’s about Sunday in MacCumhaill Park. The ladies’ journey is on hold.

When Raymond Sweeney and Tony Boyle sat next to each other in Páirc Taobhoige for the opening game of the men’s championship earlier this year, a county final wasn’t on their radar.

Glenfin on their home soil are a tough proposition. Worse still, Donegal senior player Mark Curran and county u-20 Karl Magee were unavailable.

It wasn’t until Darren Curran’s goal that Dungloe pulled towards the winning line. It was a start. Since then, a one-point defeat away to St Michael’s has been the only negative blot of Dessie Gallagher’s side’s season. They hit two goals to knock out previously unbeaten Glenswilly.

“We were hoping maybe just to get a victory to avoid having to go into any sort of relegation,” Sweeney admits of that day in Glenfin.

When Dungloe turned the tables to beat St Michael’s in the semi-final, it signalled an outburst of emotional celebrations.

Sweeney and Boyle are reading from the same page. The current senior team deserve every ounce of success they get. As men who’ve walked the walk, they recognise the level of sacrifice being made.

Even from early in the season, with so many players away from home, up to 15 players based back home would leave for Sligo, enabling the entire squad could train collectively.

“They’re the standard bearers of the club,” Sweeney adds. “What you’ll see every evening, somebody’s in the gym or somebody’s out practising. Somebody’s kicking or somebody’s doing running.

“If you’re looking at an example, they’re a great bunch of fellas to have. I can’t say that enough about them.”

He channels the example into the advice given to the girls. Skills and talent are great, but hard work bonds them into something more powerful.

As men who have lost semi-finals, they can relate to coming out on the wrong side of a defeat. The one still sticking in the throat is 1996. After winning all 14 league games, Dungloe went into the championship with confidence.

They led Naomh Columba by two points only before a late penalty changed the game. The decision is still disputed yet. They still lament the final attack when Dungloe failed to muster an equaliser.

Boyle was player manager in 2007 when they led Glenswilly by four without closing the game out. Two missed goal chances gave Glenswilly the oxygen for a comeback and they closed the game out. Another hard luck story.

That’s why there were so many tears after the semi-final win last month. The monkey was off the back.

“It’s 60 years,” Boyle said, “thankfully we’re not that old but we’ve never seen it (a county final) so we were walking around and obviously you’re looking to see all the players and give them a hug.”

In the days after the semi-final, Boyle recalls players like Mark Curran, Oisin Bonner and Aaron Neely up at the pitch for a leisurely kickaround. The ladies were working out in the gym. The u-10s were having a coaching session on the main pitch. One of the youngsters made a beeline for Curran asking after his gloves from Sunday’s county final.

“I was saying to Raymond, even to for us to be standing watching our boys training for a county final and the buzz is unreal,” Boyle said with pride.

Dungloe people who never went to games are out. For over half an hour, the fans congregated on MacCumhaill Park after the semi-final. For fanatical people, this was the bliss they needed to bottle.

For Sweeney and Boyle, would they like to be playing on Sunday?

“If I was 20 or 30 years younger maybe,” Sweeney jokes. “It’s something that I would have missed out on but thankfully I’ve experienced it in my managerial career.

“It’s something, as a player, that you can only dream of doing. Sunday in MacCumhaill Park is massive and there’s not a player in Dungloe that wouldn’t want to be togging out on Sunday.”

Boyle’s response is quick. Sweeney would definitely still hold his own but his days of leading the line are gone. For those who will be pulling on the red and white on Sunday, he thinks the big day won’t consume them.

The excitement is for the fans. Boyle is impressed by the players’ mindset.

In an interview after the semi-final, Daire Gallagher referred to it as game seven of eight.

“Even to be hearing them talking like that,” Boyle adds of a player suggesting they’d a full focus on getting to the final despite others not.

“All the pressure was on last Sunday (semi-final) because we haven’t got over that hurdle in 60 years, the semi-final. The pressure is gone because it’s always been thrown back at us that we weren’t good enough to get over the line.

“Whether it was a case of bad luck for us in our semi-finals or we just weren’t good enough or we didn’t believe, the bottom line was we didn’t get over the line.

“They’ve (current players) done that. To me, they have the hard work done everything now is a bonus so I don’t think there’ll be any pressure on the Dungloe boys

“St Eunan’s are a high-profile team and one of the biggest clubs, not alone in Donegal, but also in Ulster.”

For Raymond Sweeney and Tony Boyle, they can slip up into the stand. It’s Dessie Gallagher’s time to hatch a plan to see if there can be red and white ribbons on the cup.

Imagine what a tourist would think if the Dr Maguire Cup makes it out to Dungloe on Sunday night. Every weekend would be a festival for the foreseeable future.

Check out this week’s Gaelic Lives podcast for the full interview with Raymond and Tony. Drops on Spotify at noon on Thursday.