Managers make all the difference
Last year Donegal were the first team to exit the championship but that wasn’t the cause of their shame; it was the manner of that exit.
They were humiliated by Armagh, trailing by 13 points with 10 minutes to go, and it wasn’t an isolated case either; just two months earlier, in a league game that was effectively a promotion decider, they were tanked by 16 points by the same opposition in Letterkenny.
After that qualifier defeat in Crossmaglen, Kevin Cassidy told teammates in the dressing room he was finished with inter-county football. His wife was expecting twins and he was worn down by the frustration of a decade of defeats and unfilled potential. Days later manager John Joe Doherty let it be known he wouldn’t be staying on either.
Donegal had a decent enough first year under John Joe, recovering from a first-round defeat to Antrim to reach the All-Ireland quarter-final but in that game their and John Joe’s limitations were fully and cruelly exposed. John Joe didn’t believe in match-ups; you marked whoever came over to your corner and that was it. He didn’t believe in signalling kickouts or short kickouts; Paul Durcan was to just lump the ball right down the middle and let Cassidy fight it out against the likes of Alan O’Connor, Pearse O’Neill and Nicholas Murphy towering above him.
The price of going with 1992 football was 1-27, the score Cork ran up that day, the highest number of points any team has kicked in championship football in Croke Park.
No one will score 1-27 against a Jim McGuinness side; the most anyone has scored against Donegal in this year’s championship is nine scores, and Donegal have played four games to win this Ulster championship.
But Donegal’s transformation is down to a lot more than tactics.
The perceived value of tactics in the discourse of this year’s championship has been a curious, even amusing one at times.
If you were to believe some experts, there’s nothing tactical about Tipperary’s spellbinding hurling of the past 12 months; they just let in long and early; simple, direct, traditional hurling. Those experts have got it wrong. Of course there’s a wonderful spontaneity to Tipp’s hurling but you could call it a structured spontaneity.
It was by design, not chance, that Lar Corbett found himself one-on-one against Noel Hickey last September, John O’Brien clearing out to create the isolation. In last Sunday week’s Munster final, O’Brien again created the space inside for Corbett to run into, at pace. In traditional, no-tactics hurling you lump the ball towards where the inside forward already is. The secret of Tipp’s brilliance — and tactics — is to play the ball to where an inside- forward like Corbett is going to be.
But just as too little has been made of Tipp’s tactics, too much has been made of Donegal’s.
The perception they’re robotic drones obscured the real achievement of McGuinness. He didn’t turn them into robots but rather he appealed to their spirit and hearts that lay beneath, convincing them he would improve them as a group and as individuals, physically, mentally and technically, not just tactically.
Nine months ago Cassidy was happily retired until McGuinness phoned him and over two hours outlined his dream and vision for the team and where Cassidy fitted in. He also promised Cassidy he’d finally find football fun again, yet it would also involve serious hard work. Cassidy always suspected that Donegal didn’t train as hard as other teams, notably their oppressors Armagh and Tyrone, and this year he learned it for sure and more besides, namely no one in Ulster trained as hard as Donegal in 2011.
They’ve often trained five times a week collectively, some sessions going on for three hours. Players that used to be renowned for their drinking exploits are often lifting weights at 7.30am after a tough training session the night before. When Cassidy was on a family winter holiday in Lanzarote, he was up at 7am every morning, doing at least a 7k run. By the spring, he was up to 12k. Ryan Bradley lost a stone and a half. Every player had targets to reach, internal demons to conquer, and now they’ve conquered Ulster.
It took something and someone special to break the old Armagh and Tyrone duopoly of the past 12 years. Looking back Donegal, Derry and Down hadn’t the drive to do so. Banty’s Monaghan and Fermanagh in 2008 did but just lacked that bit of class.
The Donegal of 2011 had both the class and the sense of mission and that’s because they had McGuinness. When you boil it all down, so much of new school coaching is really about the most simple and traditional of values.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
