McGuinness blasts board for pressing on with club games

DONEGAL boss Jim McGuinness last night condemned the decision by his county board to go ahead with club games this past weekend.

McGuinness was speaking after a weekend in which his player Leo McLoone was ruled out of Sunday week’s Ulster final against Derry with a broken eye socket sustained in a club game on Sunday.

The Naomh Conaill man suffered a double fracture after being struck during a post-match melee in their defeat to Glenswilly in the county championship.

McGuinness had pleaded with the board not to fix the games for this past weekend as he prepared his team bid to win their first Ulster title since 1992.

However, his request fell on deaf ears and he has been left counting the cost of losing McLoone, who came on as a substitute in the semi-final victory over Tyrone and is now out for a month.

And last night McGuinness claimed his suggestion to alleviate the fixtures congestion was ignored by the board’s competitions control committee.

“Without dwelling on it too much, we were very disappointed with some of the decisions that were made. We were told that their hands were tied and nothing could be done then subsequently their hands weren’t tied.

“The issue was made since that there was not enough weekends in the calendar. What wasn’t highlighted was that we offered to play games after the Antrim match on Wednesday nights and weekends, which would have freed up four weekends.

“We sent an email to the CCC in relation to that and that email was never circulated to the clubs for consultation and that process never happened.

“Now we’re in a situation where we’re squeezed for weekends and the county management came forward with a proposal so it’s hard to take when that’s being put forward as a defence.

“Hopefully we can draw a line under it now and look forward to an Ulster final because it’s 19 years since we won it. It’s a huge game for this group of players and Donegal.”

McGuinness said it’s vital his team move on from what happened to McLoone on Sunday.

“It’s disappointing not to have him but we have to move forward because we haven’t got the timeframe to dwell on it really — two weeks,” he said.

“We flagged it up that there was a potential situation and we’re just very disappointed it has transpired that way. We just have to move on.”

McGuinness said it was obviously distressing that the incident happened after the game.

“For our own players now, it’s very important to do everything in our power to win the Ulster final. It’s very, very disappointing for Leo because he worked tremendously hard and an awful lot of time was spent from a number of support systems to try and get him back on the field again but we’ve lost him again.”

Rory Kavanagh and Kevin Lafferty also picked up injuries over the weekend.