Professor McMenamin

Jimmy McGuinness, a man renowned for leaving no stone unturned, has reportedly spent the last fortnight hanging around Clady, Strabane and Castlederg in order to pick up some Tyrone mannerisms to pass on to his players at training.

Donegal, who take on Kerry tomorrow in the All-Ireland Football Final, will aim to mirror Tyrone’s achievement of defeating The Kingdom in the national final. As well as making his players run very hard around the pitch doing laps and practising high jumps and long kicks, McGuinness put on compulsory Tyrone speech and elocution lessons at night. Anyone missing a session was made to do 500 press ups with Jimmy sitting on their back.

A squad member told us:

“It was very hard learning them Tyrone words. He wants us to psychologically mess with their heads by calling them ‘clifts’ and using ‘duhhul’. Duhhul (a mucky field) is a hard one. The only context we could find was ‘we’re going to bate ye in this duhhul ye clifts til the clabber is running off ye’. The other bits were easy enough. Recreating the Tyrone body odour was dead easy. We just sponged oil, diesel, turf, Lucozade and soda farls all over each other.”

Our source also confirmed that Ryan ‘Ricey’ McMenamin was called in to do a workshop on ‘The Dark Arts’ which provided tips on general chitchat and fondling during the game:

“Yes, Professor Ricey’s lecture was brilliant. Before he started he stood up at the front and rhymed off all the phone numbers of our girlfriends or wives. That’s real preparation and he opened our eyes as to what needs to be done to defeat Kerry. His quick session on gentle eye-gouging and testicle-tapping was genius stuff. We’ve never felt in better condition.”

Rumours that Jimmy McGuinness was going to shave his head and grow a semi-beard to put the spooks up the Kerry management have failed to materialise after it emerged Mickey Harte has copyrighted the image.