When Donegal and and Kerry faced off in the first round of the 1984 Centenary Cup

“They’re only an ordinary team shouts a Donegal fan from the stand, but right now Kerry looks a little bit above the ordinary” - Fr Sean Gallagher on commentary  

It’s a tale with all the ingredients of folklore: an open draw, a young Donegal team desperate to prove their worth, a crowd of over 9,000 in Ballybofey, a collapsed fan, and a community draw with prizes of three cars and £6,000 at just £25 a ticket.  

While it was battered away by Donegal fans at the time, it really was the David vs Goliath story of senior inter-county football at that time when Kerry travelled north to MacCumhaill Park in Ballybofey for the opening round of the Centenary Cup in early April 1984.  

It’s not a game that is brought to the forefront of people’s minds nowadays, even those who played in it struggle with the details, but at the time, it was seen as Donegal’s ultimate test, a chance to prove they belonged at the top table with the best in the game.  

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Many might argue that it wasn’t even the biggest game of that week for Donegal with the County Vocational School, managed by PJ McGowan, preparing to become the first inter-county side to win an All-Ireland in Croke Park, something they did the following Saturday by defeating Longford in the final with a decisive scoreline of 3-9 to 2-3.  

In the modern day of Gaelic football’s condensed split season, the thought of cramming a competition at the midpoint season of the GAA calendar simply wouldn’t work.   

Many teams nowadays would feel that they would be better off out of this straight knockout tournament to avoid fatigue and injuries than progress and shift the focus away from championship football.   

But this was a different time! There was no resting of players or fielding an U-21 panel back in 1984. It was a way to honour 100 years of the GAA, but more so for Donegal, to prove that they could flourish in an open championship format.  

“If you look at our championship campaign at that time, every year from 1981 to 1984 we drew Armagh in the first round, and that was the days of no backdoors, so, if you lost you were gone, so we in Donegal had been shouting for a few years at that point about making the championship an open draw,” said former Donegal captain Michael Lafferty.  

“It was no different back then to the way it is now in that the Ulster championship is without question the hardest competition of the four provinces, so it was a chance for us to show that if we were in a different province then we would be well capable of holding our own.”  

It would be the first meeting between Kerry and Donegal in a competitive championship match at senior level although the sides did meet in 1956 for the opening of MacCumhaill Park and again in the league in 1965.  

But perhaps why there was so much trepidation from the Donegal supporters at the time was the recent memory of Kerry’s last visit to the county in 1981 as part of the Kingdom’s fundraising tour for their trip to Australia.  

At the start of the 1980s, Donegal's football team was a busted flush, a pedestrian side that nobody thought was good enough to win an Ulster title, let alone All-Ireland.  

That match saw Kerry ease to victory that day on a 6-10 to 1-11 scoreline, but three years on, only four Donegal players in Noel McCole, Michael, Lafferty, Brendan Dunleavy, and Michael Carr who were present for that torrid hammering in 1981 would tog onto the field when they next welcomed the Kingdom to Ballybofey.  

“From what I remember back then there was a real negativity in the air about that game, nobody was giving us any chance but you have to remember that we were the ones going into that game as provincial champions,” Lafferty pointed out.  

“We had a young side that won an All-Ireland U-21 title in 1982, and a lot of the boys were the backbone of the senior team that got to the All-Ireland semi-final the following year when we lost to Galway by a point.  

“I think what probably annoyed me at that point was that we had a group of probably the best young players Donegal had ever produced, but as a county in general I think we were happy to settle for mediocrity at the time.  

“It was frustrating because I would’ve seen and played with, first hand, a few of these Kerry All-Ireland winners that we were now facing and I always believed that the Donegal players that I was playing with were just as good.”  

However, what the majority of fans predicted was anything but with the teams level a 0-4 each at the break with Donegal dominating midfield taking Paul McGettigan out from corner-forward to join Lafferty and Martin Griffin in midfield, leaving extra space for Martin McHugh and Joyce McMullin to run into in the full-forward line.  

And while then team manager Brian McEniff expressed his disappointment in his side’s performance in the first half, it was that ploy that paid dividends with McHugh racking up three points in the first half, while McMullin hit the fourth.  

“I remember Kerry hitting an awful lot of wides that day but I can recall Matt Gallagher and Des Newton being a real handful at full-back,” Lafferty said.  

“They had to bring the Bomber Liston out to midfield to calm things for them, but Matt and Des were excellent Mickey Sheehy and Tom Spillane.  

“Then you had Martin McHugh who was causing a real bother for Páidí Ó Se inside. We were staying with them the whole way until we ran out of steam in the second half.”  

And while Donegal briefly took the lead through a Donal Reid score in the 40th minute, the withdrawal of McHugh through injury as well as the experience of Kerry saw them ease the game out for a 0-11 to 0-8 win.  

In the years that followed, Donegal would only win one championship game in the next five years until they would reach the Ulster final in 1989, their first of five in-a-row, while Kerry that season would relinquish the All-Ireland title they last held in 1981, going onto to win three on the bounce until 1986.  

“I think what showed that day against Kerry was that we could compete the best that was out there,” Lafferty said.  

“Kerry were in a league final that year while we were in Division 3 and we still asked a lot of questions of them.  

“I think what helped in the county over the next number of years was the level of football training got better. Coaching improved and standards improved. The talent was always there, it was just about getting the best out of them.”  

Nobody knew it at the time, but Kerry's dominance was to be challenged in later years - and, indeed, seized - by teams in Ulster who once thought that the dream to sit at the top of the table with teams like Kerry could never come true.  

In time, Donegal’s ascension would be realised.