The first Donegal man to lift the Anglo Celt Cup - 50 years ago this year

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Donegal's first ever Ulster senior football championship win. The breakthrough came on Sunday, July 30, 1972 when Donegal overcame Tyrone in St Tiernach's Park, Clones by 2-13 to 1-11.

The first Donegal man to lift the Anglo Celt Cup was MacCumhaill's midfielder Frankie McFeely, who had been part of the Donegal senior panel for 10 years at that time.

McFeely is not someone who has been a public figure in the GAA world, tending to do his work in a quiet but commanding fashion. Yet despite not seeking any public adulation, McFeely is held in very high regard, not just by his playing comrades, but by the Donegal GAA public who remember his playing days.
 Frankie McFeely

One man who is well placed to run the rule over the Donegal captain's contribution is former teammate and friend, Anton Carroll, who is still in regular contact with McFeely in Dublin, where both have lived for almost all of their lives.

"We played minor together for Donegal. Then we came to Dublin, he went to UCD. I went to St Pat's first and subsequently went to UCD. We stayed in a flat together.

"We were very good friends. I was very friendly with his brother Brendan and his brother Patrick as well. There was nothing contrived about it. Back then when we were travelling to matches. The journeys were long and we used to have these quizzes in the car.

"We were all interested in that type of thing, general knowledge quizzes and sports quizzes. So that what was a common shared interest," said Carroll.
One of the quirky stories about Frankie McFeely is his great sporting interest outside the GAA, which is more than unusual. Carroll takes up the story.

"Frank had a fantastic interest in cricket, of all things. He loves cricket and has loved cricket for as long as I know him. The interesting thing is where he learned about cricket was when he was young his mother was from Derryloughan, down near Glenties, between Doochary and Glenties, right there in the middle of the mountains.

"He and his brother Patrick went down there to his uncles and aunts and they spent about a year down there. The only pastime they had was listening to the radio. They used to listen to the BBC and they got interested in cricket and to this day, the two of them are passionately interested in cricket.

"You could say the Ian Botham of Ballybofey is still going strong," says Carroll, who adds that Frank didn't get to play the game because the only place you could play cricket at that time was if you were at Trinity.
As for his football ability, Carroll said he was a talented player from a very early age.

"He was a very impressive minor and he graduated very quickly to the senior team. He had the physique. He was a strong lad, very well built. He also nice balance and he could ping it over either foot. He was very good at delivering a foot pass. He was good in the air, for a fella that was about 5'10'' or thereabouts.

"I remember the two of us were in Croke Park about 20 years ago and he says to me, 'Do you know something, if you and I were around now I don't think we would make the county team.' I said 'do you reckon not.' 'No, we wouldn't be big enough.' I think it was a Down team and there was only one fella under 6'.

"Frankie had a great leap, a great spring in the feet. Very square, broad shoulders and strong build," said Carroll, who said his strength came from chopping wood. That was the gym of our era. It was a sort of occupational coincidence."

"He played Railway Cup when he was 19. The U-21s started in 1963. We won Ulster in '63 and we won again in '64. We were beaten in the All-Ireland semi-final that year. There was no All-Ireland semi-final in '63, it just stopped at Ulster.

"We lost due to a very controversial refereeing decision against Laois down in Portlaoise. Laois got home venue for semi-final which nowadays wouldn't be countenanced. I presume it was the toss of a coin. The late Conal McCauley was our manager. He had a great inside to what made people tick and he was very good at developing your self-belief," said Carroll, who said that McCauley was well ahead of many other managers he played under.

Among those managers at the time included Big Frank O'Donnell and Johnny Wilson. "Johnny was an interesting character, he had won an All-Ireland with Cavan and he was a teacher in St Eunan's. He became the Minister for Education and I remember one time I got invited to play football in America and I asked Johnny what's the story about getting off work.
"And he says, don't go off work at all. You know what you do, you go and visit a few institutions in America and write a report on it and we'll say you were there on a study tour. It was actually a very enriching experience.

"Johnny had a lot of passion but he was a very astute person," said Carroll, who added that Wilson just didn't have the time to devote to the job as manager. "He was just there for the match but wasn't there for training.

"Gerry Griffin was probably the longest there in my time. Gerry's tactics would be 'I want you boys out in the sawdust.' I used to have to mark Sean O'Neill the odd time and Gerry would say 'I don't give two f----s if you kick the ball or not as long as O'Neill doesn't score'."

Carroll also recalls a funny incident in Ballybofey when O'Neill got past him and Paul Kelly pulled him down and the referee was Patsy Devlin. Carroll conversed in Irish with Kelly saying "never mind that b------s" when Devlin turned around and admonished him in the best of Irish.
"We had great times and there were some great characters like Barney Brady, stories that cannot be printed."

SUCCESS IN DONEGAL
"There was always lot of talent in the county in every decade but most of them had to go off to Scotland and England to work. By the time we came around in the mid-'60s we were getting a fair amount of success. Galway beat us in a league semi-final with the controversial decision by Eamon Moules when Neilly Gallagher was taking the penalty and the ball moved.

"The big difference at that time, nearly every one of the Donegal team, there was no question of emigration. We were all at home involved in education or in the professions. That was the difference. And that to this day has been a significant factor," says Carroll, who feels there was as much talent available in other decades.

"Winning is a habit and winning is very, very difficult. We played Down in the Ulster final in 1966, the day after the World Cup final. I remember we watched the World Cup final in Letterkenny. We headed to Belfast. Danny McGlinchey was the chairman of the Co Board. Danny very magnanimously gave us all out of Co Board funds £2 each, pocket money for the evening.

"So we went out and had a few pints but didn't break any great harness. The background was that we had beaten the same Down team in the Lagan Cup and in the McKenna Cup comprehensively earlier that year. And we go into the Ulster final and there's huge tension in the dressing room, anxiety more than tension. There were four or five masseurs in before giving rubs, the Bishop was in. It wasn't a normal dressing room.

"When you're not used to be there. And the fear of failure, you're afraid to do the things that you wouldn't hesitate to do at home and under no pressure. Everybody was anxious and we didn't assert ourselves at all that day.

"We were actually terribly afraid in those years when it came to the serious day out," said Carroll, who told the story of players staying in hotels in Dublin before big games and not being able to get a minute's sleep.
"We got lucky in 1972. Once you do it once, it's easier after that. It was done again in '74 and Donegal has quite a number of championships at this stage.

"We all learn from standing on the shoulders of giants. It is one of the things that I find interesting. When we were in UCD, Kerry were a very dominant force. Eamon O'Donoghue, God be good to him, was a star forward with Kerry. Eamon never made the UCD senior team. It wasn't for the want of trying.

"This is where we began to realise, these Donegal boys are as good as the very best in the country. I remember being down playing in Kerry and discovering they are ordinary players like everybody else. But they had this terrible self-belief whenever they went out to play in the green and gold of Kerry in an All-Ireland semi-final. And again they learned this from their predecessors. They were standing on the shoulders of giants. They learned that it was the Kerry thing, you win; you have that strut about you and that self-belief," said Carroll, pointing to Dublin of the recent past and he sees it now with Mayo.
Carroll reflects on what he calls 'the vision' of Jim McGuinness. "He envisaged how it could be done and that gave him a great status among the players.

"Kevin Heffernan did that with Dublin as well, bringing Jimmy Keaveney back."
Carroll remembers the famous loss in the league to Leitrim in Ballyshannon in 1971 and agrees that it was a watershed moment.

"I remember making a speech. I was embarrassed that Leitrim had beaten us. I remember after the match we had this meeting. It was an animated meeting. Anyhow it was agreed that a few of us would put forward a vision for the future. I think Declan O'Carroll was one of those involved; Frankie McFeely was involved but Frankie would always be reticient about shouting out too loudly.

"Funny enough, it was a sort of carthartic moment for the team, things either change or we may as well go. We are all washed up unless we make changes. One of the things we decided was the team should be rebranded. And that was when we went for the green shorts and the yellow or orange jerseys. This team is not the old team of perpetual failure, we are going to change things. And funny enough, it did actually work.

"At that time fellas would retire around 30. Time was running out for us. We took a bounce about being beaten by Leitrim. It was probably unfair to say that about Leitrim. We had a talent pool that was five or six times greater than Leitrim," said Carroll, who ironically played for Leitrim in New York and also played for Bundoran when he was a minor, transferring to the seaside town for summer work.

STEADY PERFORMER
Carroll returns to outline the character that was 1972 captain Frankie McFeely.
"McFeely was always a very steady performer. McFeely had played for UCD and the Combined Universities and had a lot of self-assurance. He had got that self-afformation from playing with the best and being able to mix with them.

"McFeely was not an excitable guy. He was always very calm and quiet, stayed quite a bit in himself. He brought a quiet authority to a situation. When he spoke he never bellowed or shouted.

"He was a leader without being a flambuoyant leader. He was impressive in his own way. And it was that quiet confidence and self-assurance; he led by example and he wasn't intimiated by any threat or mouthing by other people. A lot of sledging went on, even back then. Sledging would have put off a lot of younger players. McFeely would never have been put off by sledging. And he probably wouldn't never retort to the person giving out the abuse, because he would give a good tough dig, as much as to say 'I'll let my actions do the talking'.

"He's that type of guy; he's warm, he's good company; he's generous and has a good sense of humour. But he's reserved," said Carroll, who says that of all his contemporaries, he is probably closest to him.

"I would always have regarded him highly for his integrity and his absolutely unimpeachable honesty, a very honourable guy in every way; would never take advantage, extremely upright but wouldn't do it in any self-righteous way."

That private, reserved nature of McFeely is best related by what happened after that famous July Sunday in 1972.
"As far as I remember he headed back to work for Oliver Freaney the next day. The rest of us celebrated wildly for at least a week. Everybody got the cup for the night and you toured the local pubs," said Carroll, who remembers being with the touring party in Bundoran in the Holyrood Hotel and taking the cup to the Brady household.

"Barney's mother was always very good to me. And after the '72 final we took the cup to Bundoran and the Holyrood. I snuck it out to go over to Brady's to his mother, who was sick in bed.

"Barney was a character and we had such fun travelling throughout the country. Barney would recite Dangerous Dan McGrew and the Green Eye of the Little Yellow God. And he had another great party piece, 'Are you the Francis Farrelly I met so long ago, below Belmullet in the Co of Mayo'. The laughs we had with that. Barney was just a mighty, mighty character. God be good to him, he died young."

Carroll was involved again in 1973 and also in 1974 but an injury curtailed his playing. "I was on the periphery of the team in '74. Brian (McEniff) was playing and I was doing the mentoring.

"I played on with Gaoth Dobhair until 1982. I put my foot in hole in Glencolmcille and broke the knee backwards.
"It was good while it was going, a good conversation piece," says Carroll of his years with the Donegal senior team.