By Niall Gartland

AND another one! Dáire Ó Baoill first came to the attention of the wider GAA community when he smashed home a first-half hat-trick against Crossmaglen in the semi-finals of the Ulster Senior Club Championship in November 2018. One win later – against Scotstown – and Gaoth Dobhair were provincial kingpins for the first time in their history.

It was no smash and grab – Kevin Cassidy, Odhrán Mac Niallais, the two McGees and our subject matter Ó Baoill – are exceptional footballers who have just about done it all, but between retirements and emigration, the club has played second fiddle to St Eunan’s and Naomh Conaill in the intervening years. That’s just the reality, but boy did their surge to provincial honours leave an impression on all those accustomed to spending Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching whatever TG4 has to offer.

Ó Baoill certainly hasn’t lost his goal-scoring touch – just ask Derry. Just ask Odhrán Lynch. He lobbed the stranded Magherafelt man twice in last year’s Ulster Championship. He scored another goal against the Oakleafers in last month’s repeat meeting, albeit with a different goalkeeper feeling the strain on this occasion. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he was a gifted soccer player who at one stage captained the Republic of Ireland U-18 team.

He didn’t always look destined to become one of Donegal’s leading men, though. He had to bide his time, and there were some iffy personal performances, but he got there in the end and he’ll be one of the first men on the teamsheet to face Armagh in this Saturday’s Ulster final.

Mervyn O’Donnell has known Dáire since he was knee-height. As a young lad, Dáire would attend his son’s birthday parties and vice-versa. Roll the tape forward and Mervyn would be at the helm as Gaoth Dobhair made it to the top of the tree in Ulster football.

Luckily from their perspective, Ó Baoill opted against a potential soccer career, though he wasn’t necessarily the most skilful player in the world, especially when judged against some of his colleagues.

Mervyn said: “Dáire has great genetics, his father Brendan won the championship in 2012 with Gaoth Dobhair, his uncles Colm and Declan were very good club players as well, they’re all steeped in the Gaoth Dobhair tradition.

“He was big into his soccer and I think his father protected him at the time and kept him on the straight and narrow. He guided him without Dáire even realising it.

“In saying that, he probably wasn’t the best striker of a ball on our senior team, and even at underage level. He didn’t have that nice fluid style of an Odhrán Mac Niallais, a Cian Mulligan or a Michael Carroll.

“They had a sweet strike but he’s evolved as a footballer where he’s found his range and scores a lot, and I think it’s honestly just come down to practice, practice and more practice. I think he’s put a lot of work into making it happen, because he’s hitting the sweet spot every time.

“You don’t hear of him being injured, touch wood, and I think that’s a big help as well.

“You can see he’s got that air of arrogance on the pitch now, where he can think he’s the man as he’s got so many minutes under his belt, but off the pitch he’s got that calmness. There’s no airs or graces, no ego. He’s quite shy in a way.”

Recalling his hat-trick against Crossmaglen on a winter’s day in Omagh, Mervyn says it all very much went according to script. Odhrán Mac Niallias would set the wheels in motion and Dáire would do the rest.

“We had such trust in him, and we had a plan for Crossmaglen, that Odhrán would flick the ball on, he couldn’t be matched in the air, and Dáire would come onto it, and Crossmaglen got caught out for all of our goals.

“It was the winning of the match, and that was the thing about Dáire – you could trust him with these roles and a lot of our set-plays went through him at the time. He has a great mindset and you knew you could trust him.”

One of his goals that day was a penalty. Again, it says something about Mervyn’s faith in Dáire that he was the designated penalty taker on the team.

“I wanted Dáire to take penalties, and I remember our coach, Michael Boyle, he’s a great lad from Termon, telling me he’s going to end up missing one – that goalies are getting fingertips to them, that they’re coming off the post.

“I said to Dáire, you’re going to keep hitting them until you miss, is that fair enough? Michael just to have a go at me on the line, and I’d say ‘look he still hasn’t missed’.

“Last year I was up in the stand for the Ulster final, it went to a shoot-out obviously and Dáire stepped up, I was saying ‘please don’t miss this penalty’ but he rattled the back of the net. It was a totally different strike to what we were used to! They just scraped in back in those days.”

That sense of resilience, desire to improve, and ultimately, that desire to win, is a recurring theme in Mervyn’s comments. Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.

“His career has been up and down, he got a few knock backs before Jimmy came in again. He was getting ten minutes here and there, things were going wrong, I remember watching and thinking ‘Dáire’s having another nightmare again’ but he had that willingness to stick at it.

“He’s a sore loser – whenever Gaoth Dobhair lost a game, he wasn’t going down to the pub that night. Even after the Corofin game [Gaoth Dobhair lost to the Galway kingpins in the All-Ireland semi-final in early 2019), he took it badly. Everyone else was like, right let’s get our hair down, our season’s over, but he wasn’t like that. He’ll head off with a surfboard or go climb a mountain and find solace that way.”

Dáire is arguably playing the best football of his career. He’s thriving under the new rules – two-pointers have become a speciality – and his fitness levels are off the charts, and that helps a lot too.

“Dáire’s now at the stage where the McGees and the Cassidys were, he’s one of the older boys. I’m looking at him thinking ‘jeez I remember when lads like you were eight years old.’

“I think he saw the big picture earlier on – the importance of longevity. We had a brilliant underage team back in the day, we won all around us, won the Ulster U-21 championship, but the only other lad involved in those teams playing for Donegal now is Odhrán McFadden-Ferry. We thought five or six would’ve made it, but it didn’t happen for various reasons.

“He’s been brilliant this year, it’s a game for racehorses now, transitioning from that defensive shape to attacking at the other end, and you see Dáire is involved in nearly every attack. He’s sprinting up the field and doesn’t stop.

“I’d say his GPS stats are off the scale. He’s also trained himself up to be a kicker of long-range points and that’s a massive asset now.

“He’s got all the attributes. I heard his name mentioned along with Shane Walsh recently and there’s not a lot of difference in terms of what he brings to Donegal.”

And to top it all off, he’s a nice fella to boot. He still lives locally and is a hero to the local children, and generally takes things in his stride.

“I’m involved in coaching girls at underage and an odd time I’ll ask Dáire to come down and take a session.

“He’ll always answer the text, sometimes he can’t make it but there’s never been a no-reply, and that means a lot in itself.

“I was the pitch officer at the club for around eight years and we were struggling a bit to get guys to cut the fields. Dáire was one of our go-to guys to come down and spend three or four hours cutting grass.

“Between the main pitch and training pitch, it took a long time and poor Dáire was one of the guys we had to rope in. He was probably the only young fella who’d do it and it says a lot about his character that he’d do these things.”

Check this week’s preview show as former county stars Charlie Vernon and Rory Kavanagh look ahead to Saturday’s Ulster final showdown in Clones.