DONEGAL beat Monaghan to win the 2014 Ulster title and a couple of days later Pat Shovelin got a call from the manager Jim McGuinness.
There was nothing unusual about that because the pair of them spoke constantly. Pat was the Donegal goalkeeping coach and a trusted sounding-board and confidant for his cousin and close friend who had news that couldn’t wait.
McGuinness: ‘Are you near Glenties?’
Pat: ‘I’m about an hour away, but I’ll come over’.
He arrived at the house about 2pm to find McGuinness red-eyed and excited in the giddy aftermath of a ‘eureka’ moment.
“He says: ‘we’ll speak outside’ even though there was only Yvonne (his wife) and the dog in the house.
“The eyes were standing in his head. I asked him ‘What are you at?’ He says: ‘I’ve just watched seven hours of DVD there… I’ve cracked it’.
Cracked what?
“I know how we’ll beat Dublin,” he says.
“If we get over Armagh (in the quarter-final) I know how we’re going to do it.”
Armagh gave Donegal a serious scare but they won by a point to book that semi-final showdown with the reigning All-Ireland champions who went into the game raging hot favourites.
“The morning we left the hotel to play them Jim had a flipchart and on the last page he had written what the score was going to be,” Pat recalls.
“He had ‘Donegal 3-16’ on it and we scored 3-14. He did stuff like that throughout his time.”
Even McGuinness’s uncanny sixth sense wasn’t enough to land the Tir Chonaill men the second All-Ireland title of his reign. They lost the final to Kerry and afterwards McGuinness moved on to concentrate on Celtic where he continues to enhance his reputation as an innovative coach.
Shovelin stepped down too and, looking back, he says it felt like the carnival had moved on leaving him standing alone in the carpark.
Since then he turned down the opportunity to become Fermanagh’s goalkeeping coach because he didn’t want to be seen as “a mercenary”. But he missed the cut and thrust of the football until Declan Bonner recruited him to work with the county’s U21s.
“For five years I had lived and breathed football,” he recalls.
“You were out on the training field a few nights in the week and at weekends.
“If I wasn’t on the field Jim was on the phone and he could have been on the phone for three hours talking about kick-outs and how we were going to train.
“In the last year he would have been flying in from Glasgow to Belfast and his father-in-law would have picked him up and driven him down to Castlequin. On the way down he would have rung me about what he wanted to do in the session.
Thank you Andy for allowing me to share my story and i never got to share lunch with you either as to busy talking for a change! #battle https://t.co/t412FaoQqY
— Pat Shovelin (@patshovelin1) April 24, 2017
“We would have done the session (7.30pm to maybe 9.45pm), then his father-in-law would have driven him back to Belfast and he would have spent a night in a hotel and then flown out first thing the following morning.
“He might have been on the phone to me until 1am talking about the session and what we were going to do in the next one. It was full-on.”
Shovelin was diagnosed with liver cancer in February. The 40-year-old has two young sons with his wife Chrissy and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. He faces an uncertain future ahead of a crucial scan next month but is determined to beat the disease and McGuinness has been a constant source of support.
Their relationship was cemented back in 2006 after Pat had broken his shoulder in a charity soccer match and Jim broke his leg playing for his club Glenties.
McGuinness was hoping to make a return for Donegal and the pair of them began weights sessions at his house. The comeback never materialised so McGuinness threw his energy into coaching.
He unsuccessfully applied for the county senior position in 2010 but was appointed manager of a talented U21 side that included Michael Murphy, Leo McLoone, Eamon Doherty and Paddy McGrath.
Shovelin was drafted in as goalkeeping coach and the side responded by winning the county’s first provincial title since 1995 and went on to clinch a place in the All-Ireland final against Dublin.
In the build-up to the game an outbreak of swine flu laid low 10 of the players and Shovelin but Donegal would have won the game had Murphy’s penalty hit the net instead of the Dublin crossbar.
But their success meant that when John Joe Doherty’s single season with the senior side ended with a shambolic loss to Armagh in the Qualifiers, McGuinness was asked to step up a level. Shovelin went with him and he recalls an early teamtalk in Ballyshannon.
“Jim had a saying ‘nice guys come last’ and we had to have a bit of steel about ourselves,” he said.
“That’s what we instilled in them, a bit of discipline and we got away from that party boy image.
“Jim would have been a leader at that himself in his early days, he was a party boy himself to a certain extent. After the death of his brother Mark he had gone off the rails a good bit, it was a tough time in his life but he had gone full circle.
“He was well able to speak on the subject – he had seen it all and done it all.
“The guys bought into his thinking and his ideology very quickly and that set the tone for what was ahead.”
Shovelin’s brief was to work with the goalkeepers Paul Durcan and Michael Boyle. As well as the bread and butter issues of shot-stopping and ball-handling they were part of the think-tank that devised a ground-breaking ‘Da Vinci code’ kick-out strategy that allowed Donegal to dominate possession from their own restarts.
“We put a big emphasis on kick-outs and Paul and Michael took ownership of them,” he said.
“Away from training Paul would have gone to Phoenix Park in Dublin with cones and worked on them and we were lucky we had clever players out the field who were very switched on like Neil Gallagher, Rory Kavanagh, Ryan Bradley, Karl Lacey…
“A lot of our training sessions would have been focussed solely on kick-outs. The boys would have kicked out 70-80 balls at a time and the boys out the field were very switched on to be in the right position for him.”
Full-back Eamonn McGee dictated one from the position he took on the pitch and other calls included ‘Derry’, ‘1A’ and ‘1B’. Opponents were never able to crack the code.
Durcan, like many other Donegal players, has been in touch with Shovelin to offer support after his diagnosis. Pat says that working with man mountain ‘Papa’ was always a pleasure although they did exchange words once in the heat of Championship battle.
“The first night I went out to do a training session with the seniors I was a bit apprehensive,” he says.
“I didn’t know if Paul would know me or not. I went out to meet him and he was standing a 6’5” (I’m 5’5”) and towering above me but we built up a great friendship from day one and had it through the four years.
“There was one cross word in Breffni Park against Cavan back in 2012. Jim summoned me from the bench to have a word with him about the kick-outs. I was going down to speak to him and just at that point Eamonn McGee was after taking the head off him about something so his humour wasn’t that great.
“Then he saw me and he knew I was coming to ate the head off him so he gave me a few choice words about where to go. The umpire even said to me ‘It’s time you left now too’.
“But we won the match and the first place Paul went when he came into the changing room was over to me to shake hands and that was it.
Durcan was a key part of the side that won three Ulster titles and the 2012 All-Ireland crown. But despite their success Donegal’s counterattacking style wasn’t well received by some sections of the media.
“Boys are paid on RTE and in the media to be controversial,” said Pat.
“People in Dublin didn’t know what was going on in Donegal. I remember someone in the national press in Dublin had written a big article about life under Jim McGuinness being like a concentration camp.
“That paper came out on the Thursday but we had trained in Convoy on the Wednesday night. It was a tough session and every break in play Jim brought the team in and somebody was picked at random to tell a joke in the group.
“At the end of the training session we voted on who had told the best joke on the night. Marty O’Reilly’s joke won it – it wasn’t great but the way he told it won it for him.
“The next day we saw that piece that it was like a concentration camp but it was more like The Benny Hill Show. The more negative stuff drove us on if anything.”
Success has dried up for Donegal since McGuinness’s exit and new manager Rory Gallagher is rebuilding the all-conquering side. But the emergence of a richly-talented U21 team has given the Tir Chonaill faithful belief that the glory days will return soon.
Shovelin was goalkeeping coach to the squad and was in the dugout for their recent Ulster final win against Derry, a victory that extended his medal collection to two Ulster U21s, three Ulster seniors and an All-Ireland).
Alongside those six medals he has a million memories.
“I remember warming up Paul in front of Hill 16 before the game and we couldn’t hear each other with the noise coming off the Hill from the Donegal fans,” he says.
“Stuff like that will stay with me forever.
“There were so many great ideas and disappointments certainly like 2014 but the good days always made up for them and we had such laughs along the way.”
Part one: Donegal All-Ireland winning coach Pat Shovelin opens up on his battle with cancer
