IT'S God help any Donegal footballer caught sneaking out for a quiet pint while the county is involved in this year's championship. If word of his indiscretion gets around he will have the wrath of Patsy McGonagle to deal with.

McGonagle is a advocate of the "tough love" approach rather than the indulgence sometimes displayed towards miscreant inter-county stars. It's not that McGonagle is a killjoy or a disciple of Matt Talbot. He enjoys his pint as much as the next man but he knows that this is not the Continent where professional footballers and rugby players routinely have a glass of wine with their post-match meal. We just don't do things that way here.

Chances are that if a county player breaks his vow of abstinence during the championship it will send the local rumour mill into overdrive. Even if the player just has the "few pints," within a few days it will have become a full-blown bender involving half the team. The end result is the sort of disruption that undermines the thinking on which the whole notion of collective abstinence is based.

"It's just not acceptable anymore for intercounty players to be drinking when they are in training," says McGonagle, a vastly experienced athletics coach who managed the Irish team at the 2000 Olympics.

"I would be pissed off if they were drinking. I have seen what players who have been drinking are like in training. It takes a week for them to work it out of their systems. They run around like sick hens. They are psychologically weakened as well. Not drinking during the championship is as much about developing self-respect and sense of commitment as it is about physical fitness.

"What we have done is ask the players to think about it themselves. There has been the odd blow-up and what I said to them was 'in the time it takes you to drink one pint and order a second, everyone from Malin Head to Ballyshannon will know you are drinking it.' We asked the players to take ownership of the responsibility themselves."

Talk of moral responsibility might seem severe for young men who are amateur sportsmen, but Donegal has reason to be mindful of the damage a lapse in discipline can cause. Two years ago they played some great football when pushing Dublin to a draw in the All-Ireland quarter-final. They celebrated the draw in style, only six of the team returning to Donegal on the night of the game. Two Saturdays later they were wiped out in the replay.

Rightly or wrongly, the post-draw session was blamed for the drastic reversal in fortunes. The then manager Mickey Moran resigned and a crisis in Donegal football ensued. But the ill wind blew plenty of good in that it hastened the unlikely return of living legend Brian McEniff as manager.

McEniff's passion for Donegal football is obsessive. He was a 28-year-old player-manager and All-Star in 1972 when Donegal won their first Ulster title, and manager again in 1992 when they won their first All-Ireland. After a valedictory tour of Australia with the Irish Compromise Rules team in 2001, he swapped the Bainisteoir's bib for the rulebook and a new role as an administrator. But in December 2002 as county chairman it was his responsibility to recruit and appoint a manager. With no takers for the job he decided he would take it himself on "a temporary basis."

A year and a half later he's still there, having engineered one of his greatest achievements yet. After an abysmal defeat to Fermanagh in the first round in Enniskillen, Donegal somehow managed to resurrect themselves for a back door qualifier six days later against Longford. Victory in that game began an odyssey that took Donegal within minutes of the All-Ireland Final. If full-back Raymond Sweeney hadn't been harshly sent off early in the second half against Armagh in the semi-final who knows where the journey might have ended.

They were getting bolder and more confident with every game as the summer progressed. After the chaos of the spring, McEniff and his new management team began to bond with the players who had been a mostly unfamiliar group of young faces to them in January when Patsy McGonagle was appointed the team's physical trainer.

Even though he had trained Donegal footballers between 1994 and '96 when they reached two National League finals, he says "it was difficult getting up to speed with the changes that had occurred in the game since the 1990s.

"Last year was a learning experience for us (the management) and a learning experience for the young fellas on the team. It took four or five months before it balanced out for us.

"The settling in period was rough but with the backdoor system there we were getting stronger and stronger as the year went on. Armagh were lucky to get past us on the day in the semi-final. I don't want to go over the sending off again but we feel that we would have beaten them if we didn't have the man sent off. But at least we knew in our hearts and souls when the season ended that we had given it our best shot."

'When you are playing against teams from the six counties you realise it is a lot more than just football to them'

This season, with the new management bedded in, Donegal could present a potent challenge to the consensus that the destiny of the 2004 All-Ireland lies between Kerry, Tyrone, Galway and at a push Armagh and Laois. McGonagle is making no predictions. "All you can do is organise training around a structure that will hopefully bring you out in Croke Park September. You have to get out of the heats to be in the semi-finals," he says in reference to today's game against Antrim.

"Time and time again I have seen athletes that expected great things get left behind in the heats and believe me it's a lonely spot."

Underdogs Antrim may take some hope from the fact that the only teams to have beaten Donegal in the last year are Ulster teams. Apart from Armagh in August, Tyrone hammered them in the McKenna Cup in January and Down beat them by a point in the Division Two semi-final. Does McGonagle see it as just a coincidence or is there a pattern emerging?

"I still haven't figured out how we managed to lose to Down in the league semi-final but when you are playing against teams from the six counties you realise it is a lot more than just football to them. There's an intensity there that you don't get anywhere else in the country.

"We would be seen as a southern team competing in Ulster. What's happened in Ulster over the last decade would make a fascinating study for someone. The game of Gaelic football has been modernised and reinvented in the province. In Ulster, Gaelic football has become a high performance sport."

McGonagle is no stranger to the world of high performance sport. Head of the Department of Sport at Letterkenny IT, he founded Finn Valley AC in the 1970s. As it became one of the most successful athletics clubs in the country (today it has its own €8million training complex), McGonagle moved up the coaching ranks. In 2000 was appointed manager of the 36-strong Irish track and field team for the Sydney Olympics. It should have been the pinnacle of his coaching career but instead McGonagle found himself at the centre of the post mortem as the team failed to deliver on the inflated national expectations.

Looking back, he says he felt like he "was walking on a tightrope in a circus" because of the bureaucratic and political manoeuvres going on around the athletes before and after the games. McGonagle emerged from the tortuous Sydney Review Process with his reputation intact and went on to manage at the 2002 European Championships.

His involvement in the world of international athletics and the politics that goes with it has deepened his appreciation and affection for the GAA. "When Donegal were beating Galway and going close to beating Armagh, for some reason I never really got that emotional in the dressingroom or after the games. I suppose I was thinking ahead the whole time. The days I really appreciated it and related to it last season were the days after championship games when we headed to Fintra beach outside Killybegs.

"I remember the day after we drew with Galway. It was a beautiful day and there were lots of kids and families there and you had this bunch of players running around and there wasn't a bother on anyone.

"It was a lovely, lovely scene, like something you would see in an ad for the championship. The sport looked so natural and part of normal life. If you are looking at it the whole time you mightn't appreciate it, but when you have been away for a while you appreciate how special that bond is between the players and their own people."

Ronnie Bellew