Coleman was in town to do some scouting for Paddy Crozier, and Michael Hegarty was the Donegal player opposing management teams feared most.

Down had identified him as Donegal's main threat; towards the end of the league they had recorded stats of Donegal's games and were struck by just how much ball Hegarty played and how little he turned over. Paddy O'Rourke's fears were justified. Two weeks ago Hegarty kicked over three long-range points from play, one with his 'weaker' left foot, and set up a string of others. Even the move that ended with Rory Kavanagh's wonder goal started with Hegarty. In the stand, a fellow clubman from Kilcar watched on, another theory of his reinforced.

"Michael Hegarty is one of the top 15 footballers in the country, " claims Martin McHugh. "It's the one reason I'd love to have played club football for a bit longer, to have played with Michael Hegarty. I watch a lot of county football and to be honest, some of it these days is hard to watch, but I take my two young lads to Kilcar matches just so we can see Michael Hegarty play football. He uses the ball very intelligently, he's accurate with his foot-passing, he can take his scoref I'd say he's the nearest thing the game now has to Trevor Giles. People go on about [Brian] McGuigan and [Ciaran] McDonald and rightly so, but I'd have Hegarty in that bracket. The only difference is they've been playing in All Irelands."

McHugh might be biased but the stats back him up.

While Hegarty is seen as primarily a playmaker, he's one of the best point-scoring centre-forwards in football. Ever since he came on as a sub for Adrian Sweeney in the closing minutes of a 1999 Ulster first-round game against Armagh in Ballybofey and with his first touch of the ball, bombed over a terrific point out by the sideline to force a replay, Hegarty has scored another 1-35 from play in 30 championship games. McGuigan has "only" managed 2-24 in 34 games.

He's a player alright, Michael Hegarty, probably the most valuable Donegal have. He's not indispensable though. If Brian McIvor has made one thing clear, it's that no one is.

Even Hegarty.

He probably shouldn't have played for Donegal last year.

As he puts it himself, his back gave him "wild bother" for the entire year and the one before it too. At the start of that 2005 season he had wanted to get the injury sorted out once and for all. Brian McEniff though first wanted relief from another kind of pain. By then in Donegal, winning Ulster would be tantamount to winning an All Ireland.

"I remember, " says Hegarty, "when I asked Brian [McEniff] about it, he said 'If we win Ulster, I'll give you all the time in the world to sort it out.' At the start of this year I went to Brian McIvor and he told me to go and get it sorted out and at least I could say then that I had tried. So he was more or less saying, 'If you don't get that sorted out, well you're no use to me.' I said to myself, 'Jesus, with this man, you're either fit to play or you're not.' I had to take note of where I was at that stage because I wasn't even 27 and I felt I was still good enough to be playing county football, but if this back wasn't sorted, this man wasn't going to have me about the place."

Hegarty started going three times a week to Donal Reid, one of the heroes of '92 and, as far as Hegarty is concerned, one of the heroes of '06 for his physio work. And patience. See, McIvor hadn't just given Hegarty time. He had given him a set time.

"I'd be feeling okay for a few days and then, getting out of the car, I might feel it twitching again. I'd then go into Donal and be getting wild thick with him because I knew the pressure I was under. I'd be telling him, 'I need to get this sorted out.' It was frustrating because for about three weeks there I couldn't train at all; I was just resting it and constantly stretching. Eventually it started to get better and one Thursday evening I went for a run up and down the field in Kilcar and I was laughing to myself. I couldn't feel it [the back pain] at all. Then Brian called me the week before our deadline to ask how I was coming along. I said I was getting better but needed a bit longer and fair play, he gave it to me." By late March Hegarty was back playing. A testament to Reid's hands, Hegarty's heart, McIvor's brain.

He respects McIvor. It's the second word he uses to describe his new manager . . .

respect. As for the firstf "The players would fear him. You could be Peter Canavan and if you didn't play well the last day then you're not going to be on the next one. But he makes players perform. Because ultimately players respect him.

For the work he's putting into this, for the way he's put the message across that unless football is the number one thing in your life, then you're not going to have success."

Hegarty will never forget the first time McIvor delivered that message. It was in the Silver Tassie in Letterkenny at the squad's first meeting. "I wasn't well at all coming home in the car that night, I can tell you. I was saying to myself, 'Christ almighty, we're in for a wild time altogether this year. We're not going to have a life.' It was 100 per cent commitment he was looking for and he asked players to walk away if they weren't going to give it."

Brendan Devenney hadn't even made it through the door but McIvor's words had hardly convinced him to re-enter.

As it turns out, neither did Hegarty's. The pair of them are friends; Hegarty works as a rep for Celtic Hygiene and Devenney is a rep himself.

"Myself and Sweeney were on the phone to him a few times. He was probably the most professional player we had this past three or four years; you'd be having a carvery, he'd be having a salad. But some of the big matches we lost hit him hard and the way Devenney played, being fairly vocal and getting onto refs, made him that bit more open to stick. But we'd all love to have him back, even now, if we were to get over Derry. But who's that he signed with again? Portadown? Aye, the fact we're not sure says a bit, but I think he almost welcomes that, that not everyone's watching him and he can just play."

Kevin Cassidy also knows about the prying eye of the Donegal public. A few visible drinks and he was off the county panel and off to America. Hegarty can sympathise and empathise with Cassidy ("Having people going onto radio stations saying 'These players must have done something wild bad' must be very hurtful for someone putting in a huge effort the rest of the time; he needed to get away") and with McIvor but the person he most related to and admired in the whole sorry episode was Shane Carr. Carr kicked up when players who had been disciplined were walking back into the team ahead of him. "I'd like to think I'd have done the exact same myself. Because the notion of Donegal footballers being wild men, it's just not true. It's a stereotype. That's the most frustrating part about it. Even in the past, you might have had one or two subs who were a bit wild but the other 90 per cent would be the most dedicated bunch of boys.

Shane was saying that they had to be rewarded. Because that whole episode, even in my line of work, everywhere you were going people were asking you about it. You have to have a frame of mind that doesn't want to be thinking about things like that."

They're now in the right frame of mind. Early in the year they had all agreed they wouldn't drink until Donegal's summer was over. When management suggested after the Down game that the pledge could be relaxed for one night, the players declined. Their next gathering would be in the pool, not the pub; the natural high of winning was high enough.

Now the 18 evenings together in January, the drafting in of Hegarty's 20-year-old brother Noel and starting Colm Kelly the last day even though neither played in the league ("Would another manager in the country have done it?") makes sense. He even brings the weather with him. Last month they had a brilliant weekend building and racing in rafts in the outdoor activities centre out in Garton; last year, when poor McEniff had brought them down to Wesport, "boys were lifting buckets of water over planks in the pissing rain; it was just a pure disaster".

They also have one of the country's least experienced teams though. Only six of the team that started against Down started against Armagh and Cavan last year.

Hegarty himself is their longest-serving starter, and he's only 27. Time may yet prove McIvor's changes were too drastic, too radical.

"We're still finding our feet, " admits Hegarty. "It's interesting; we were actually saying at the start of the year that maybe Brian is looking two or three years down the road, or maybe he's just going with the team he thinks will do the best for Donegal in 2006. Because young players, they often play with no fear, whether they be playing Tyrone or Armagh. It worked for us the last day. Derry is another step down the road for us. We still don't know how good we are."

True. But by now we should all know how good he is.