Ryan McHugh calls. Or rather, he calls back. "Sorry, hi. Just on another call there." Which he was, to The Irish Times in fact. He's replying to a message that he's already replied to whilst trying to reply to another one. So he'll have to hang up and reply anew.
If this sounds confusing, it is understandable. Half the country's GAA media has been ringing him today since we all got an email from the Donegal PRO with his mobile number in it and instructions that he'd be available to chat before 5pm.
Quite what he did to Rory Gallagher to deserve such a fate is unclear. God be with the days you were sent out to do 20 laps. Now, not only has he spent the day answering the same questions from a dozen different voices, everybody has his phone number for future reference.
“Ach, if I don’t want to talk, I’ll just not answer the phone,” he chuckles.
Young shoulders, old head. With Donegal playing the late game on Saturday, it's likely that Croke Park will be bathed in floodlights by the time they and Galway are finished with each other. Last time that happened in a championship game, Kevin Cassidy swung a left boot to bring the house down against Kildare with the clock running dead.
McHugh was a 17-year-old, sitting high up in the Cusack Stand and roaring himself hoarse.
Arm-wrestles
His voice will be more eloquently expressed on the pitch tomorrow, as Donegal turn their eyes to a Galway side that has actually had quite a similar road to Croker.
Both of them put Armagh away handily enough, both of them came out the other side of arm-wrestles with Derry.
And both of them ultimately found their respective provincial champions too much to handle. For McHugh, the challenge of coming in off the back of the defeat to Monaghan has mainly been about changing focus.
“It’s not easy, there’s no point lying. We planned at the start of the year that we’d be going to Croke Park as Ulster champions. That hasn’t happened but the mindset hasn’t changed all that much.
“We did a bit of analysis last weekend on both the Ulster final and on Galway. My own opinion is that I don’t think Donegal played that badly in the Ulster final, especially in the second half.
“There were just a few mistakes that we have to try to get right for the next day. If we can look in the mirror and get those things right, we know that we have generally played pretty well all year.”
The last time Donegal lost an Ulster final, they limped through their subsequent qualifier against Laois. This was 2013 and the hangover from the 2012 All-Ireland still hadn’t cleared. McHugh was in his first year as a regular back then and he sees this time around as being a major departure from that summer.
“Back then, we were just getting over the line to make it into an Ulster final and we were well beaten when we got there. Whereas this year, we have produced performances when we needed to produce them.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t get the result against Monaghan but we did play well in the second half. The wides killed us and to be fair, over the years, we haven’t been kicking those wides. That’s never really happened to that extent to us before. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.”
