‘Senior’ citizen Conor O’Donnell loving the buzz as St Eunan’s prepare for Ulster clash with Erne Gaels

THE wind bites at your legs in the darkness and the pitches are heavy up there at this time of year but if you’re still out training and your rivals are stuck in the house, well, you must be doing something right.

Only the best are still standing as time marches on past Halloween into November and St Eunan’s, champions of Donegal, count their blessings as they put in the hard yards in Letterkenny.

They’ve come through a series of thrilling knockout clashes against the county’s other heavyweights and dethroned Naomh Conaill to get this far and captain Conor O’Donnell (senior) will do all he can to keep going to Christmas and beyond.

The next challenge for him and Eunan’s is Saturday’s Ulster quarter-final at Brewster Park against Fermanagh’s three in-a-row champions Erne Gaels from down the road in Belleek.

“Going training on the dark nights… I know some people don’t like but I love it,” says O’Donnell older brother of Niall and Shane.

“There’s nothing better than going out training at this time of year.

“Knowing everybody else is at home and they’re probably jealous that they’re not getting to meet up and go training... That’s what I like about it.

“I love getting out, I just love the buzz.”

He was given the unwanted suffix ‘senior’ after younger namesake Conor O’Donnell ‘junior’ joined the panel.

“I was just Conor O’Donnell and then this new fella came along,” he explains.

“I was 22 and he was 18 so I got ‘senior’ and he got ‘junior’ and it just stuck.”

Is he happy with the title?

“Nah, I’m not, no,” he adds with a touch of trademark tongue-in-cheek craic.

“Definitely not.”

‘Senior’ doesn’t bother him too much really and young ‘junior’ played his part throughout a roller-coaster ride of a campaign. An unbeaten run in the group stage saw Eunan’s progress through to the quarter-finals and they came tearing out of the blocks against Dungloe.

The ‘black and amber’ were 14 points ahead at half-time but were clinging on for dear life at the finish.

The semi-final against Gaoth Dobhair was a carbon copy. Again St Eunan’s came out blazing and Dylan Doogan’s goal sent them a dozen points ahead but there were only five in it at the break. When Ciaran Moore found the net in the second half St Eunan’s led by nine but again Gaoth Dobhair rallied and they could have won it in the frantic minutes of injury-time.

The final against Naomh Conaill was an engrossing, nip-and-tuck affair. Charlie McGuinness, nephew of county manager Jim, had the Glenties men two-up with a minute but Niall O’Donnell levelled with a brilliant to two-pointer and Moore won it at the death.

“We kept getting tough draws,” says O’Donnell.

“We won the quarter-final by three, the semi by two and the final by one. But at the start of the year we would never have expected to hammer them teams anyway so we were just happy to get past them.

“Last year we thought the new rules would suit us and then we got shocked and put out in the pre-liminary quarter-final. Maybe we got a bit complacent or carried away and maybe the new rules didn’t suit as much as we thought. So this year was just about getting back to basics and building up confidence and we did that through the group stages.

“We’ve won three championships in the last six years but there were still a few question marks about whether we could get over the line.

“So it was nice to answer those questions this year, it looked like we were gone at times so we showed a bit of resilience to come back and I think that was pleasing.”

O’DONNELL, who declined an invitation to join Jim McGuinness’s Donegal squad when the Glenties guru returned for his second stint as manager, teaches maths at Deele College in Raphoe.

Younger brother and Eunan’s team-mate Shane is also on the staff.

“Aye, he’s got no brains, he’s a PE teacher,” says O’Donnell.

He’s joking of course. His brothers Shane and Niall have plenty upstairs for thinking and plenty downstairs for playing football.

Shane top-scored in the Gaoth Dobhair nail-biter and Niall came up with vital scores in the Donegal campaign and they will need to continue that form, if not improve on it, to see St Eunan’s make the impact they are capable of at provincial level.

You have to go back eight years to 2018 for Donegal’s last Ulster champions. Gaoth Dobhair won it that year and Naomh Conaill (2019) were the last club from ‘The Hills’ to reach the final.

In the five championships since then (Covid scuppered the 2020 competition) the Donegal champions have managed just one victory which came when Naomh Conaill got past Cavan’s Gowna in 2023 and then lost to Derry’s Glen at the semi-final stage.

This will be O’Donnell’s third crack at the competition and his first appearance in the last eight. St Eunan’s fell in the preliminary quarter-finals in 2021 and 2024.

“We’ve been unlucky with the draws,” he says.

“In 2021 we got Glen-Maghera at home and got beat by a point, then we got Errigal Ciaran in 2024 and got beat by two in the end but it was one of those games where it was nip-and-tuck until about 58 minutes.

“We’ve always got tough draws and we seem to be coming out the wrong side of them so we’d like to fix that this year. I love the Ulster club. Even if I’m not playing in it, I love watching it.”

St Eunan’s last victory came against Fermanagh opposition in 2014 when they got past Roslea Shamrocks at the quarter-final stage. The Erne County champions await on Saturday in Enniskillen and, with the confidence of sealing a three in-a-row, Barry O’Hagan’s well-organised outfit will be determined to prove their worth at provincial level and O’Donnell, the lynchpin of the Eunan’s defence, is likely to come up against the pace and physicality of Gael’s cutting edge Ultan Kelm, who finished the county final against Derrygonnelly with 1-7, at some stage.

“Time will tell how we go,” says O’Donnell.

“They’re at home and that will be a big advantage for them coming into winter football and we know they’ll be a good team, they’ve won three Fermanaghs in-a-row so they’ll be well used to the Ulster club, not like us.

“By all accounts Ultan’s a top forward, I’ve heard plenty about him so I rate him highly.

“We haven’t won an Ulster game for years so there’s a big appetite to try and get over the first hurdle anyway and then take it as it comes, we might get a bit of momentum as we go along.

Both camps will view Saturday’s Brewster Park clash as a winnable game and the intensity will have returned to training this week as the quarter-final looms. Every man in either squad will want to play so there’ll be an edge to the in-house games.

Manager Kieran Donnelly will want to see that, he needs to see it.

“We’ve 30 lads pushing hard,” says O’Donnell.

“We’re all trying to make gains and everyone’s fighting for positions so it’s a nice competitive environment to be in.

“It can boil over at times, like every team, especially coming up to the big games but in the back of your mind you always know that they’re not the real enemy. They might be the enemy on the Tuesday night but they’re not the real enemy so it never gets too out of control.

“A wee bit of bite is no harm.”