However Michael Murphy made his return to the Donegal team it was going to be dramatic, but not many of us watching on TG4 last Sunday evening were prepared for it to be quite as dramatic, hilarious, or, ultimately, genuinely uplifting.
He’d watched the Dublin game from the bench, the TV cameras picking him out from under a woolly Donegal hat, but he was not a member of the 26-man panel. And he wasn’t announced as part of Donegal’s panel for Armagh when the team was released via social media on Sunday morning.
Usually, this sort of deception (what changed between the team being put up on Instagram and X at midday, and the start of the game at 3.45pm?) drives me demented. But on this weekend it seemed Donegal GAA had a feel for the dramatic.
Ballybofey, like most county grounds, fills up on a first-come, first-served basis, so to get a good vantage point you have to be in a good hour before throw-in. The stand was packed by the time the changes for Donegal were announced. Number 8 Hugh McFadden would be replaced by number 17 Hugh Curran, and wearing number 22 would be ... Michael Murphy.
The whole place shook to its foundations. The day had just taken on an entirely different tenor. And in the first half, with their leader watching on, Donegal were brilliant. They hit 10 points without reply against the All-Ireland champions.
Donegal led by six at half-time, but were being pegged back in the opening minutes of the second half when Murphy was finally called upon. In reality, once he was on the bench, it was inevitable he’d see action. Armagh had momentum but his arrival changed that.
[ Michael Murphy makes impactful return for Donegal in win over ArmaghOpens in new window ]
Aidan Forker inevitably welcomed him in time-honoured fashion, with a well-delivered shoulder. Murphy shouldered Forker back in kind, and Forker of course was pushed backwards. Forker shoved him back, but it looked like he was shoving Errigal who then pushed him back; and Forker took a backwards step again.
No one’s eyes were anywhere else at this moment. The place was first in raptures, then they were fired up and then laughing. Forker put his head into Murphy’s chest, Murphy looked around quizzically, but he needn’t have worried. The TV cameras were on him, the eyes of the officials were on him, and Forker was walking.
I can’t think of many more humiliating ways to get sent off. Forker had been thoroughly schooled, physically and psychologically, and Murphy hadn’t even had to do much of anything. I’m sure he would’ve known that he wouldn’t be able to just slip on unnoticed, but this was a particularly high-octane start to his second coming.
The crowd had barely retaken their seats when two minutes later an Ethan Rafferty kick-out was arrowed directly at him. He barely had to move; it bounced up into his hand perfectly. With all the blood pumping from the return, and from the red card, it would have been easy to panic. And in truth, for a moment, he nearly did.
He looked to find a pass to force a goal, just for a moment. And then he settled himself, turned on to his left, and fired the point. Everyone watching immediately realised the result of this game was now secondary – long after the final score is forgotten, they’ll remember that moment.
The scene at the end painted the picture most vividly. Murphy is loved in Donegal, more so maybe than any other player is in any other GAA county. Joe Canning in Galway might have been able to hold a candle to him. Kerry demand so much of David Clifford that that relationship might be more complicated. The love Dublin fans have had for various footballers over the last decade or more is necessarily more diffuse, more evenly spread. But for Donegal, for all their brilliant footballers over the last 15 years, Murphy is the only man. There were 13,000 people there on Sunday – he signed an autograph for most of them.
“Probably the most influential player I have ever seen over any team in the last three decades,” Seán Cavanagh told Keith Duggan in this newspaper in January 2020 for a beautiful piece as Murphy pondered life at 30.
In it, Duggan posed the question, “what other Gaelic footballer, in any era, has been able to do as many things as well as Murphy”?
But maybe the key question now as we face into the 2025 season, is what will Murphy be asked to do? He kicked another lovely score from play last Sunday and kicked a free over as well, but maybe the standout highlight was a glorious, one-handed fetch from a Shaun Patton kick-out.
Whether he starts, or whether he has an impact role off the bench, he will be an option for kick-outs for sure, in a team not short of big men. But the idea that only now, at 35, and under rules that he played a role in formulating, will we see Murphy stationed at the edge of the square, playing a more conventional full-forward role, is bewitching. With McBrearty and Gallen floating around him, it has the look of a devastating front three.
If Sunday felt like a dream, you’d forgive any Donegal person for indulging in a bit more dreaming of what 2025 could hold.
