AT each end stood a set of hand-crafted goalposts. A steel frame with extended plastic posts attached to the top by their father, Liam.
This was The Haggard, a well-kept patch of green measuring 40x20m just out behind the house in Trillick. The young Donnellys, Mattie the elder and Richie the younger, were seldom inside.
It could be an unforgiving arena. They’d have been at Tyrone minor training with their father and when they’d get home just after half 9 at night, they’d make him re-enact the sessions in full.
“It would have been physical in the way that he [Mattie] had to keep the ball off me for a minute, and then vice-versa,” smiles Richie.
“It was very, very tough. It would have been a lot of one-v-one tackling because there were only two of us. There was fist-passing, kicking, shooting.”
It was either there or team-mate Damian Kelly’s house down the hill that provided the arena for four-hour marathon games of football. Could’ve been soccer one night and Gaelic the next.
“That was our pitch and all the boys would have come up to the house and played. The whole neighbourhood would have come up. When it was Gaelic, it was usually up to our place because we had the posts.”
The dew was near ready for lifting again before the Donnelly boys went the way of bed most nights.
Ever since he was able to understand the concept of football at the age of 3 or 4, running about the garden with the Champions Cup ball that every child of that generation will remember, Richie Donnelly has had an obsession with the game.
From Richie was nine until he was creeping towards his final years at St Michael’s College in Enniskillen, the one-on-one training sessions on The Haggard continued.
The skills they took from it were almost as irreplaceable as the family bond they helped create.
The bearing of those fruits - following Mattie’s footsteps through the Tyrone development squads – and other teenage and sporting interests eventually drew the curtain on those kickabouts.
They both played a bit of soccer with Irvinestown Wanderers, though rugby was the one he would have pursued in a different life, winning an U14 All-Ireland ‘A’ league playing at out-half with Enniskillen RFC.
“We had a few sprinters in that team, Stuart Connor and Ciaran Nolan, who would have been pushing for Irish athletics teams. We basically threw them the ball and they got you tries. They were unmarkable at that age.”
But there was never any decision really. Once schedules began to overlap, the winner would always be Trillick first and then whatever came off the back of that.
Virtues, sporting and otherwise, are important to the smartly turned out, affable 25-year-old, who orders the Healthy Joe wrap in Maud’s Café on the first middling day Enniskillen has seen in weeks.
There’s something in the blood red of Trillick that stirs him. A Liverpool supporter and a loose follower of Munster rugby, it’s the way those two clubs have carried themselves in tragedy and adversity that attracted him.
“I loved the way Munster carried themselves as a club – their values and tradition. They just seem to do everything right as a club and the people involved with them have that allegiance.
“Liverpool have similar values to Munster, and it’s something I’d like to think applies to my own club in Trillick, the way the people are, how they’re attached to the club and how they behave.
“It’s a culture where people know how to conduct themselves on and off the pitch, and it’s driven by senior members of the club. How they carry themselves and show their love for the club. It’s something you learn from an early age when you spend time around those people.”
Steeped is not the word. Their mother Claire is now the club secretary, but it didn’t take her to meet Liam or move to Kilskeery parish on the Fermanagh border for her to become immersed herself.
The Canavans would have been in and out of the McNelis house, as Claire was to her own name, when they were youngsters themselves running around Glencull.
“She grew up that way and she’s heavily engrossed now herself. She’s never done in and out of meetings or on the phone. It makes you appreciate that side of the club, what they do to keep the show on the road.”
Liam ended up managing the two boys as they stepped into senior club football during his six-year stint from 2008 to 2013, but there was, to steal a Hollywood phrase, a conscious uncoupling.
“We were getting to that age where he stepped away, probably conscious that we needed a new voice and a different outlook on things.
“You’re going home to your manager and you’re nearly seeing him more as a manager than a father at that time. He was probably aware we needed something different, but he was still very influential when he did step away.
“It comes with maturity too, you get to an age where you can accept both points of view – when he does come across as a manager and when he comes across as a father.
“At that time, we probably weren’t as mature and we maybe didn’t want to listen to it. You do mature and start to open up and listen to advice, because he obviously just wanted the best for us.”
*****
THE hive of activity has moved inside now from The Haggard to the kitchen table, where 90 per cent of the conversation revolves around how to make the best out of the next generation of wee reds.
For a good few years, Richie made his services available every Friday night at the club for whatever underage activity was going on. His own playing commitments have dictated a back step but it’s only temporary.
The playing years are to be maximised but they’re short too. And when he togs in for the last time maybe 10, 12 years from now, it will only facilitate his next move into coaching.
“I don’t get in every Friday now, but every opportunity I have to get to underage games or training sessions, I’d be there. I always make a point of making sure I am there to show my face and encourage the young boys.
“When I’m finished up, it’ll be them that I’m watching and they’ll bring me the most joy when I can’t contribute myself.
“I see that as a very important side of it, to get the best out of the youth coming through. The standard of coaching and the avocation and enthusiasm of the coaches in Trillick means thankfully I don’t always have to be there. I trust everyone there, that they’re there for the right reasons, and it’s just a case of being there when I can.”
A lot of his Friday nights now are spent driving the fringes of Lough Erne for a dip in the water at Rossnowlagh beach, or else in Malahide, where the eldest in the house Elaine lives with husband Paul Courtney – of Armagh rush goalkeeping fame – and their son Jack.
“Because of the intensity of the schedule now, you look forward to your nights off. The likes of a Friday night there where you don’t want to go near a football pitch or a gym, you just want to chill out.
“I try to get down to Malahide every few weeks because the wee nephew, wee Jack, is knocking about the place. I try and get down to him good and often.”
The family values are well ingrained by now.
*****
JUST shy of throw-in, he spies a couple of spare seats high up in the Canal End, at the front of the upper tier, slap bang behind the goal.
It’s the All-Ireland semi-final of 2012, a day that Mayo may come to recall as their golden generation’s one championship win over Dublin.
The spectator in him could easily sit pitchside but the analyst in Donnelly wants the bird’s eye view.
“It’s a great insight from behind the goals of how teams progress up the pitch and where players position themselves.
“I watched Bernard Brogan and Andy Moran, a half each, and it was fascinating how they moved. They’re the benchmark for inside forwards.”
And that’s where he found himself on his return to Tyrone duty against Meath last Saturday. Even when he was named at number 14, few expected him to play in there, but he proved a powerful foil in the first half, playing a bigger hand in Connor McAliskey’s 1-8 than the naked eye would give credit.
“It’s a position I played a few years for Trillick seniors when I was 16, 17, 18.”
He’d take playing anywhere, especially now.
His last championship start came in June 2016 against Cavan, a lashing wet day when David Givney squeezed home an injury-time goal to put a temporary block on Tyrone’s march to the provincial title.
The previous day out, he’d played one of the passes of the season, an inch-perfect ball over the top for Ronan O’Neill to score an early goal in Celtic Park.
Working in the Performance Lab gym in Cookstown, he was in the best shape of his life and his football was reflecting that.
But two days before the Cavan game, a random punter on the street threw a red flag his way.
“On the Friday I was in Omagh collecting something and I didn’t realise I was limping. Someone stopped me in the street and asked: ‘Are you injured for Sunday?’ I was a bit taken aback, I went ‘no!’
“I tried to play but it just wasn’t right. I thought it was just a bit of tightness in the calf. That was the last hurrah for that season.”
He’d torn his Achilles, but while it healed and he rejoined the early pre-season for 2017, Donnelly began to struggle with other niggles, most notably in his hamstring.
Noel Napier, a Musculoskeletal Radiologist at a private clinic in Belfast, put him through an MRI and discovered that he’d suffered a fracture to the lower left side of his spine.
“It was something that could have been there to cause the Achilles injury. There was no way of telling when it was there or when it came on.”
That was in December 2016 and he spent the next two months wearing a back brace. The prognosis at the time was two months out but the reality was a whole lot more uncertain.
He was only able to return to training a week before the championship opener against Derry and there were just 12 minutes in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Armagh to show for an entire year with Tyrone.
“The spine’s very complex in that almost everything connects to it. If there’s something not right there with the structure of your spine, it can cause a lot of trouble above or below that.
“Last year when I got back and finished out the end of the year fine, but the start of McKenna Cup time I started to get more trouble with it, it was all nerve trouble this time.
“It was stop and start through the National League there. I’d two or three recurrences through the McKenna Cup and National League, which meant I was in for one game and out for the next.”
Most Monday and Wednesday nights were with physio Louis O’Connor, though there were times when he was instructed and just went about the work on his own.
“There was a time when you’re on your own for a few months. A lot of people probably don’t realise until you’re in that position how mentally tough it is.
“It’s a very, very frustrating place. Depending on your outlook of things, some people can go very low in that position. You just have to be mentally tough.
“At times, it was very hard. It hit you hard. Other times, when you see a wee inkling of progress and you’re on top of the world nearly. There are other times it was very, very challenging mentally.
“It’s nearly like a ‘you and them’ thing, instead of ‘us’. You know just you can’t really contribute much and that’s the hard part.”
Another return against Dublin in February was a short-lived one. He managed to make it through the game but had pulled his hamstring in the first half.
“I’d enough strength built into my hamstrings to go on. It wasn’t a huge pull but I had more bother with them at training, and as a result I had to go and get it sorted.”
That finished his National League but an injection in his back has helped ease things and he got all seven club games for Trillick in April, giving him a run into the summer.
Turning 26 in August, his potential is unfulfilled. Those first 25 minutes against Meath, that pass against Derry, the havoc he wreaked in midfield earlier that year in Owenbeg, they were glimpses of what is in the tank.
Those nights on The Haggard deserve their dividend.
